Thread Subject: Re: General Issues: Remote Access

Note

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From: Robinson, Norman B - Washington, DC
Date: Thu, Jan 18 2007 3:10 PM

I've been able to apply all the existing Section 508 standards
to all remote access software. The real issue is that there wasn't much
industry support (on the Microsoft platform) until recently, where a
great many of our applications reside.

All the classic *nix terminal based emulations have been mostly
accessible, with the exception of mainframe based applications where the
screen was visually designed and information was inherent in the
presentation or orientation of the text, or text was used to simulate
graphical widgets.

The MS Windows based solutions didn't pass the textual content,
events, etc - in effect they were (or are in some cases) simply a screen
scraper that throws the image off of the 'desktop' on the remote machine
to the local client, with no textual information thus useless to screen
readers or screen magnifiers or users who need text equivalents.

This is an important issue and most complex when the reader
doesn't understand that what they see on the screen isn't what the
assistive technologies use, but I don't know if we need specific
requirements for remote access. I think the existing standards apply. It
just requires the reader to not make an exception because the software
is "remote software".

Regards,


Norman B. Robinson
Section 508 Coordinator
IT Governance, US Postal Service
phone: 202.268.8246


-----Original Message-----
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Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 5:06 PM
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Subject: [teitac-websoftware] General Issues: Remote Access



Do we need to consider a special set of requirements for remote access
software? Citrix, X Windows, and RDP have been mentioned.

I would also add mainframe type applications that are rendered on dumb
terminals. The applications are character based and only display
attributes
are provided, such as whether or not a field is protected or is an input
field. There are no semantics provided. AT can't run on dumb terminals
but
these applications may be accessed by AT on other platforms such as
Windows
using emulator software. But most of the existing software requirements
do
not work for these types of applications.

Andi

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