Relaunched Recovery.gov Fails Accessibility Standards 197
Posted
by
timothy
from the look-that-way dept.
from the look-that-way dept.
SethGrimes writes with this excerpt from Information Week's Intelligent Enterprise: "Recovery.gov, a showcase government-transparency Web site that relaunched on Monday, fails to meet US federal government Section 508 accessibility standards and accessibility best practices. The non-compliance issues relate to display of data tables — an essential point given the site's promise of 'Data, Data & More Data' — despite on-site compliance claims. Other elements including navigation maps, while compliant, are poorly designed. Sharron Rush, co-founder and executive director of accessibility-advocacy organization Knowbility, goes so far as to state, 'The recovery.gov Web site is a good example of what NOT to do for accessibility in my opinion.' Louise Radnofsky explains in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog, 'Expectations are high for the site, not least because of its hefty price tag: Smartronix, a Maryland contractor, is being paid $9.5 million for its initial overhaul and is likely to get another $8.5 million to keep the site running through 2014.' Compliance with Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act — a baseline expectation — is a long-standing federal-government requirement for information-systems accessibility to persons with disabilities. The site's accessibility failures — which are shared by another showcase government-transparency site, USAspending.gov — are nonetheless easily seen."
Okay (Score:1, Informative)
Does this really surprise anybody?
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Informative)
Which part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol are you having trouble with? Just because you spend most of your time online watching youtube videos and browsing the latest AJAX powered dynamic rollercoaster does not mean that the rest of the web, and especially the parts where real work is done, are "inherently visual". Far from it.
I'd like to take you to task on this, but Steve Krug [webreference.com] has put this far more succinctly that I ever could. Read that link to become educated about
1) Why accessibility is important
2) Why most (able bodied) developers don't care about it, and
3) Why this problem persists (We haven't automated accessibility.)
The most important point Krug makes is the real reason you should care about and implement accessibility in your websites. "It's the right thing to do."
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash does have accessibility capabilities in its API, it's just that people don't use it.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:4, Informative)
On a typical reader, a 508 compliant table would sound something like this, with pauses indicated by commas, and long pauses by semicolons:
Table, Contributions by State; ;
State, New York;
Dollars, 56 million;
Contributors, 120; ;
State, Vermont;
Dollars, 32 million;
Contributors, 140; ;
State, Texas;
(etc.)
Is it usable by a blind person? Yes. Someday, if your eyesight fails you, you may need to get tabular information in exactly this way.
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:2, Informative)
A conversion that worked well for me when implementing an interface to a game that had many tables:
Visual representation:
item price
car $25,000
bike $500
Audible representation:
item car price 25 thousand dollars
item bike price 5 hundred dollars
In the particular game, the audio representation was often more concise even on screen, as there were often empty or zero-value columns that could simply be skipped.
private website: recovery.com (Score:4, Informative)
Here's an interesting note on NPR relating to a private company that is aggregating the same data.
http://recovery.com/ [recovery.com]
"When Congress approved the stimulus bill, it made a point of setting up a Web site called Recovery.gov to allow citizens to track all those billions in spending. But if you've gone looking for it, you might have stumbled across another, very similarly named site, Recovery.com.
The dot-com version is not run by the government, but it also tracks the stimulus -- and much of its information is more up to date. In fact, it has spending information that the government won't have until October, and its data provide a sneak peak into how the stimulus spending is going.
The site is run by Onvia, a Seattle company that collects and sells data on government procurement. Whatever the layer of government -- whether state, county, school district or local water board -- Onvia wants to know what's being purchased."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112893572&ps=cprs [npr.org]
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:4, Informative)
I work for a nonprofit organization that receives grants from the federal government. Any web sites for the US-funded projects must be Section 508 compliant. That means:
It can be difficult.
Flash has accessibility mechanisms (Score:4, Informative)
Accessability statement (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Isn't this goingg a bit far? (Score:3, Informative)
God forbid that one of this days you have an accident and loose any of your senses
I loose my senses every day. But I'm glad I never lose any of them.