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GovernERP Project Accessibility

Accessibility Requirements

Section 508

The Rehabilitation Act was ammended in 1998 to include, among other things, Section 508 which requires agencies of the US Federal government to "...give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others" (from www.section508.gov. The specific requirements for web sites are in section § 1194.22.

WCAG 1.0

Section 508 standards are a subset of and are derived from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, WCAG 1.0, Priority 1 checkpoints. The State of California requires that its agencies comply with Section 508 of Federal law and other states may also require this, but since our development targets the State of California's requirements, we start here.

Section 508 and the WCAG 1.0 basically cover HTML only and not the more dynamic elements of web application development. Over the last 10 or so years programmers have been critical of the lack of specific guidance provided by the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints specially in regards to Javascript usage. WCAG has been working on a more comprehensive standard with much more specific advise on how to achieve the goal of accessibility. The result is the recently published WCAG 2.0 guideline.

WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 has been in development since the ink dried on WCAG 1.0. During that time it received criticism for being very long winded and short on technical specifics. As a result the recommendation has a couple of supporting documents, the important one from our perspective is Techniques for WCAG 2.0 which describes how to achieve the various levels of compliance. A customizable Quick Reference Guide is also available describing how to achieve the 3 levels of compliance: A, AA and AAA. The Levels are roughly equivalent of the Priority 1, Priority 2 and Priority 3 of WCAG 1.0, but are more specifically described.

Our goal is for the GovernERP Project to be WCAG 2.0, Level AAA compliant. This requires that where we use AJAX, for instance, that we follow the guidelines such that screen readers are aware of the dynamic behaviors, like focus changes. We recognize that government needs to lead the way on many fronts including accessibility and like a lot of the features we intend, it has to be built in from the beginning.

 
Last Modified Feb 22, 2009 - 09:26 PM