Accessibility in Government
Section 508. Section 504. ADA. IDEA. CVAA. WCAG 2.0. W3C.
Compliance lawyers, attorneys general, and disabled constituents are certainly familiar with this alphabet soup. These legislative acts, and accompanying guidelines, govern the accessibility requirements for graphics, documents, forms, and websites provided by federal agencies and the programs they fund.
One drawback of accessibility laws is that they tend to focus on conforming to a strict set of standards, resulting in agencies simply doing only what is necessary to check a box on a list, rather than considering whether their efforts will be of any actual use. Far too often, accessibility accommodations in websites, media, and technologies are deemed compliant according to legal standards, but are ultimately useless to the very people they are intended to assist. For example:
- A video with poorly rendered captions meets legal requirements, but is of no use to a visually impaired person.
- An image of a periodic table with a one-sentence alt-text description is technically “accessible” but has no pedagogical value.
- A fully described and captioned lesson on how to use a calculator could be considered accessible, but a blind person has no use for a lesson on how to use an inaccessible device, no matter how well described that lesson may be.
Your mandate is clear and SeeWriteHear has the technology and experts to provide truly accessible content for your documents, websites, static and dynamic forms, and all content. We provide both consulting (to lay the groundwork for sensible, feasible accessibility projects) as well as the services needed to execute those projects.
Organizations with large daily throughput of standard or semi-standard forms will benefit from SeeWriteHear’s High Volume Alternative Format Production solution.
We have extensive experience at federal, state, and local levels, and we have the infrastructure and protocols in place to manage all budgetary, oversight/audit, and timeline requirements.