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Re: Section 508 Testing/Section 508 Refresh

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From: Morin, Gary (NIH/OD) [E]
Date: Jun 6, 2011 1:36PM

The issue of Federal-only obligation did surprise me or catch my attention in the initial posting! To my knowledge, Section 508 still only applies to Federally-conducted programs, and not even Federally-funded programs. We don't, for example, advise our grantees that they must comply with Section 508 (only the other Sections of the Rehab Act that they've long been required to follow), though we encourage it where we can. Not sure what the "Section 508 Refresh" will say about this.

I think I was assuming (ok, not a great action, I admit) that they were adopting the Sec. 508 standards as their working standard. I think one of the other responses, from Angela, was Who did the notifying? If Jennifer's work is done on behalf of the Dept. of Education - are they funded or contracted to provide websites that are owned by Education (which, then, do need to be Section 508-conformant) or is Jennifer's organization being funded by Dept of Education but to work their own work (e.g., their websites are not *.gov)? Is the work being done for a federally-conducted project or solely a federally-funded one? Why is testing for Section 508 conformance being done? As a requirement or simply benchmarking?

* The company that I work for has been notified that our website and web-based applications will be tested to determine "how well it complies with the standards of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended in 1998". We do work on behalf of the Department of Education. Has anyone been through this before? While we feel confident that we're indeed accessible, we're wondering which standards they'll use to test by. I've been performing all of my analysis based on WCAG 2 - and I've been researching Section 508 Refresh. Do they use real people to test objectively? Or do they run it through a validator?
* If anyone has had any experience with a government accessibility review I would love to hear about it.

I only mentioned the audio-description and the media player accessibility since captioning was mentioned. Clearly, if there is no multimedia, none of those apply.

Gary M.