Overview

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998 requires all Federal Agencies to ensure that individuals with disabilities who are Federal employees—or members of the public seeking information or services from a Federal agency—"have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the accessto and use of the information and data by" a similar individual without disabilities.

This requirement applies to all electronic forms published by a Federal Agency. In particular, it imposes on the Agency the burden of adding accessibility text (acc text) for the benefit of the blind: this special text must be added to every electronic form in such a way that a commercially available reader program (e.g. JAWS®, from Freedom Scientific) will provide useful information to the blind person filling the form.

The Agency may have some flexibility deciding how the additional text is to be presented for the information to be deemed useful but, in general, the acc text must include:

• All the text available to an individual with normal sight

• Any required positioning information indicating the current placement of the cursor or the currently selected form field

• Any additional commands or verbs that may be required to clarify the action currently expected from the user

The amount of additional text that has to be typed into a form to make it 508 compliant becomes significant. This is particularly true if the form uses tabular arrays of fields. People with normal sight can glance at the row and column headers each time they have to enter data into a field, but a blind person cannot be expected to constantly keep track of the current field selection in the tabular array. For this reason, the automatic reader must enunciate the row and column headers when the cursor moves into a new field.

If the acc text were to be entered by direct typing, form designers would have to dedicate an overwhelming amount of their production time to accessibility tasks. This approach would also be error prone and would not promote standardization of the wording and syntax of the accessibility entries.

Our Solution

INFOCON has designed a powerful application to address these problems in Lotus Forms. It features a graphical user interface in a system that promotes the standardization of entries while minimizing the amount of required typing. Our software allows us to enter consistent acc text into complex field arrays, combo boxes, and all other standard form elements at very high speeds.

It is simply not cost effective to have a designer enter accessibility text by hand, one field at a time. Not only will INFOCON do it faster and cheaper, but our tools and methods guarantee that the accessibility text will be standardized according to your requirements.