- This is just a quick question, but do you think that with
the Section 508 revision, that the government agencies
are going to be, agree more on what they mean,
because I felt that different agencies have different
requirements.
I know like HHS had their own requirements, Ax tool
even has an HHS, or I don't know if it's Ax tool,
but somebody even has an HHS, you know, these are
their requirements.
Do you think this is going to be, they're going to
agree more?
- Can I answer that for one, absolutely.
See, the problem was is that people made their own,
because the initial standard, as well as everyone tried,
lessons learned over time, right.
Do we include email or do we not?
Some agencies said yeah, others said no,
there was no clarity, and the access for it this time
tried to go to great lengths to provide the clarity
in all the areas, and it ended up being gray.
Because we had to jump through hoops as time went by,
and new technologies came online.
To be able to justify, I remember I worked for a US CIS
creative time, and the Section 508 coordinator there
was using one of the telecommunications requirements
to say that products, or systems, needed to be accessible
from end to end.
Which was, it's a piece of the 255, and to use that
is the primary rationale.
And we just had to stretch it and do all kinds of crazy
things to it to make it fit today's technologies,
or even technologies ten years ago.
I don't think that's going to be the case this time,
in my opinion, as an implementer.
But what do others think?
- Well I think that's a great point, the fact that both
Cat 2.0 is technology agnostic.
The fact that it is thinking about the future,
because technologies, when I was first getting into the
web hotdog, was the editor of choice, or some weird
such name, and we were in early days of HTML,
java script was used for mostly client side validation,
but now java script rules the web, right?
And we did not expect that with the 508 standard.
I think with the revised 508 standard,
hopefully all agencies will have that objective
test criteria, right?
- I think the other thing they want to take into account,
is what I talked about when I first talk about the refresh,
is how awesome it is.
Because a refresh is WCAG on steroids, right?
Section 508 is not websites, it's the IT infrastructure
of the federal government.
It's so much more, and so it takes, if you're gonna build
software that is an authoring tool, well it needs to
meet the WCAG requirements, except for some four.
And then it needs to meet the authoring tool pieces
as well.
The same thing for web, except for the Meolival keg,
and then you meet the four authoring tools,
if the tool that you're building for the web has an
authoring component, so, you know,
the access board did a bang up job, maybe it took a while,
but dammit, they did a great job.
And I think that, I know that people were impatient
and so on, but again, a small group of people did
a really great job.
And the feedback that people gave made the difference.
And that's true of the standard.
The standard is and continues to be so valuable
and considered by the W3 seat, it's strongest standard,
period.
So it's got HTML, CSS, all these others.
WCAG's it's strongest standard because it's lasted the
test of time and it had so much feedback built in
and consensus around the items that were chosen.
- Can I just, when you were using HHS, as an example,
what in particular?
- I mean, just one small thing with contrast, and even
large text has to meet the four point, four whatever.
- [Woman] 3.1 for large text.
- Right, but with HHS, the requirements were all text
had to meet that.
- Yeah, and the HHS requirements are getting revised now,
with respect to internal publications and whatever's
published on our website.
Many agencies do it this way.
It's the communications organization within HHS
that's in charge of the website.
And they were,
using operational requirements
that included Section 508 and some of their communications
style requirements,
and it's caused a lot of confusion,
and so they're now separating those two,
so at least people know what's a 508 requirement
and then what's something that they require because
they can require whatever they want for a website.
That isn't just about accessibility, but it's about
how the information is presented.
- Actually, such a great point, because if you take a style
guide and mix conformance requirements of 508 and then
put your best practices, right, in there,
that can be very confusing to the community
but I think even if you want to combine the two
in a style guide, Debbie, can you just diviniate
the two?
- Well sure, so long as you don't use color by itself.
- Right?
(laughs)
- And I think, you know,
we see this a lot, where government does this a lot,
they issue things that make sense from their perspective
but it doesn't make sense from the perspective of the
people who are going to be interacting with it or using it
in terms of the categories that are used, the acronyms
that are used, the ways of
explaining what it's all about,
because if your inside government,
and most of us are,
it's difficult enough to get people from one unit
to understand what people form another unit are doing,
and so we spend our time explaining things to ourselves,
and have a difficult time putting ourselves in the shoes
of an audience that has no idea what we're talking about.
- Can we stay on this topic just two more minutes,
unless your question is still on the,
No, okay, so before we switch topics then,
here's an example with the HHS, 508 requirements
for PDFs.
First off, part of the problem was in 2000, we didn't
have requirements for what made it an accessible PDF.
The access board and GSA were very clear that PDFs,
on your website at least, were covered by the original
508 standards, but then you go and try and apply
the 508 standards, because they came out of WCAG 1,
they were so HTML specific,
they really did not work at all well.
And we've been in that gap for 15 years, you know,
so that's a long time,
and we had very progressive agencies like HHS
that says, okay we're tired of waiting for the access board,
we're gonna tell the world what we expect when we get PDFs,
so it was great, they really provided a lot of leadership
there.
But, to Debbie's point about mixing styles with other
requirements, one example is the HHA PDF requirements,
which they call 508 requirements, says that your file
name shall not have spaces in them.
You know, that's a good rule for a document that's
gonna be posted on the web, but it's not a 508 requirement,
it's not in WCAG 2.0,
but they had reasons to call it 508 requirements,
because people were paying attention to 508 requirements
and they weren't paying attention to style guide
requirements,
so that does happen, and even with the revised 508 standards
that's still a minimal floor, and agencies are absolutely
empowered to go above and beyond that,
so with the original standards and I imagine with the
revised standards, some agencies will have specific
requirements for compatibility with the assisted
technology that they have deployed by users.
So that's a very reasonable thing to have in your work
statement.
Sometimes they'll call that a 508 requirement,
they can call it a 508 requirement if they want.
But that's compatibility with particular version
of Jaws is not in the 508, it's not in WCAG.
So I just want to draw that clarity out a little.