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Re: What is happening with the update of section 508?

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From: Ryan Hemphill
Date: Nov 28, 2011 6:33PM

There is a term in the developer world called 'vaporware', referring to
things that never actually come to market. In the case of 508's internet
protocol, I think it will 'never come to market' in terms of keeping up
with internet technologies and this bothers me a great deal. I look at the
ARIA spec and I see some serious problems there too.

Is there any way to get things like section 508 and even the ARIA spec to
really translate into more of a 'living document' or a software version?
Has there been any interest in that idea?

Maybe I'm a little nuts but it would seem to me, based on what I have seen,
that an initiative that starts in 2006 and is completed in 2011 is going to
have a hard time keeping up with the speed. How many release cycles have
we seen out of Firefox lately? Call me dramatic, but it worries me to see
it take so long to publish something when the internet is moving so much
faster.

My interest in gov't contracts is nil (sorry Bevi) but my interest in a11y
for HTML5 and rich internet applications is very high. I look at the new
508 and it makes me a little sad. I think it's going to be a long time
before we start to take the a11y requirements iterative process into
account with the speed of innovation.


Ryan

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Elle < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> From my experience, private corporations who are required to meet Section
> 508 compliance accessibility standards respond much quicker to "this is
> what Section 508 will be, so it's best to code accordingly" and align the
> work to the draft and WCAG 2 than to sell WCAG 2 as a universal standard.
> We may argue that these are semantics, but such distinctions matter when
> you're making the case with executive leadership and putting a lot of money
> towards that solution.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Elle
>