Comment on the DOJ ANPRM - Web Accessibility for the ADA Updated 1/16/2011

I will submit this comment in response to the US Justice Department request for comments on the details of the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to the web.

The Department has long held that the ADA applied to the web but there were no technical specifications of what that meant. Just as there are details about curb-cut slopes, door widths and switch heights, so the DOJ plans specifications of what it means for web sites to be accessible.

Comment on the DOJ ANPRM - Web Accessibility for the ADA (1/11/11)

I will submit this comment in response to the US Justice Department request for comments on the details of the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to the web.

The Department has long held that the ADA applied to the web but there were no technical specifications of what that meant. Just as there are details about curb-cut slopes, door widths and switch heights, so the DOJ plans specifications of what it means for web sites to be accessible.

Skip link information updated (Posted June 19, 2009)

Web developers can do a lot to facilitate the process of navigating a web page with the keyboard - without a mouse. That is the subject of this article - which is updated from the 2004 version. You should read here to understand what "skip navigation" is all about, what are the alternatives and how are federal sites doing relative to the related provision of of the Section 508 Web Accessibility Standards 1194.22(o), "A method shall be provided that permits users to skip repetitive navigation links."

Update on Whitehouse.Gov (Posted June 11, 2009)

I have updated the report on the Accessibility of Whitehouse.gov because there have been significant improvements there. It is gratifying and encouraging. Specifically, I think it is fair to say that the major issues reported in that news item have been fixed. Furthermore, in the arena of machine detectable errors detected in a depth one scan, the White House site has gone from an average of three errors per page to an average on one per page in less than two months. Congratulations!

This is especially important because, as I have said several times, I think the administration web sites should be models of accessibility. The White House web team has been responsive and engaged. The bad news is that none of the other contacts have been responsive. The contact I had for MakingHomeAffordable.gov responded telling me that my email had been forwarded to the 508 specialist. No response on my reports about Recovery.gov or Data.gov.

Accessibility of Data.gov (Posted May 24, 2009)

This is the fourth in a series of reports on the accessibility of Obama Administration web sites. I believe that, during the campaign, when then candidate Obama said he wanted a campaign accessible to all, he meant it. Had he known how difficult it was for some people with disabilities to access his campaign web site, he would have insisted it be fixed. Now I think the same for the new administration web sites. They must be, in my opinion, models of accessibility.

Perhaps the biggest problem is this: web developers say sure they know about web accessibility and when told to get it right - they say "yes sir!" There are tens of thousands of web developers and very few experts in accessibility. Perhaps these reports can help developers of other government websites to make their products more accessible to people with disabilities. In other words these reports can supplement the Course here on Section 508 Web Accessibility with real life examples of government websites.

This report is different than the other three on Whitehouse.gov, Recovery.gov, and MakingHomeAffordable.gov. Here I am using the same format for the report that I use when I do accessibility evaluations for clients in my consulting business. Well not exactly because there I use Word, here I"m using HTML.

Please read more about the Accessibility of Data.gov.

Accessibility of MakingHomeAffordable.gov (Posted May 21, 2009)

MakingHomeAffordable.com is a fairly simple site. It should be easy to use for people with disabilities, to access information and interact with the site. The suggestions provided here will make that happen. Without following these suggestions, people with disabilities will have serious difficulty interacting with the site. The following are the areas that need atention.

• Text alternatives. There are a couple of minor errors
• In page navigation. The site is seriously deficient in prividing headinsg navigation and skip links.
• keyboard. Keyboard users can not use the video player (the video well captioned though).
• Reading order. There is one instance of confusing reading order and the lightbox panels for the video player and exiting the site - are not accessible.
• Contrast. The color contrast between foreground text and background is generally good with the exception of the footer text.
• Form labels. The forms are not adequately labeled.

A Postscript on Recovery.gov (Posted May 2, 2009)

Having signed up for Google Alerts for "recovery.gov accessibility," today I found what seems to be a blog about government blogs, "To be in America." And there I found this:

Q: Is Recovery.gov accessible for people for with disabilities?
A: Recovery.gov complies with all of the automatic checkpoints of the Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines, and has been manually verified for nearly all of the manual checkpoints.

This compliance has been tested using Watchfire WebXACT program. Because Recovery.gov uses dynamically generated Web pages, it is not possible to test literally every page. However, each dynamically generated output style can be tested. We plan to continue to upgrade Recovery.gov"s accessibility for individuals with disabilities in forthcoming updates.

This is worse than disappointing. It is something like a bluff. What is especially distressing is that neither Watchfire nor WebXACT exist any more - and they have been off the air since soon after IBM"s purchase of Watchfire around June of 2007; it seems that WebXACT was discontinued February 1, 2008. So how then could Recovery.gov have been tested with WebXACT? In my report on Recovery.gov, the home page has two machine detectable errors but many other very serious accessibility road blocks.. Those two errors are technically not violations of the "Section 508 Accssibity Guidelines", but the depth 1 scan of Recovery.gov turned up 69 errors that are unequivocal violations of the the Section 508 Accessibility Standards, 1194.22(a) and 1194.22(n).

In another article I applauded the Web Accessibility Toolbar - I believe it and other tools like it are critically important to help people understand the essence of accessibility. I have written some favelets based on the the Toolbar functions which make it easier to go through the process of checking accessibility on web pages. In fact these favelets were written precisely to provide tools for very rapid human review for accessibility. Check out Jim’s Favelets for more details.

Today NFB and Target announced a settlement in the class action lawsuit brought by NFB in February 2006. In that agreement Target has committed to making their web site accessible and usable by blind customers. In addition Target has provided $6 million to settle claims for damages to be allocated to blind shoppers in California who were not able to use the Target site. Target agrees to (and will pay for) annual monitoring of the site for accessibility by NFB and by Jim Thatcher

Back in October, 2007, I wrote here about Law and Accessibility and the importance of Judge Patel's ruling that the case could move forward to trial. The importance is now evident. In my non-legal opinion, the Judge said that the ADA applied to Target.com (to the extent that the web site related to Target's bricks and mortar stores) and, most importantly, that the California anti-discrimination law (referred to as the Unruh Act) applied to Target. Whereas the ADA does not provide for damages, the Unruh Act does. Note that it does not make any difference where a U.S. company is located in applying the California law; the issue is whether or not there is discrimination against a California resident. The fact that Judge Patel said that the case would move forward meant that the issue of whether or not the web site discriminated against people who are blind would have to be settled in court and I think that is not where Target wanted to be.