section 508

THE OPEN AJAX ALLIANCE (OAA) is using open source web 2.0 initiatives to improve Internet access for the elderly and disabled.

The OAA
announced the open source tooling technology to help developers create accessible web 2.0 enabled sites that meet online accessibility standards. The guidelines
followed are the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), considered as the industry-wide global standard
for accessibility.

When it comes to accessibility have you ever found yourself in the following situations?

• You wanted to make your site accessible but you didn't have the money
• You just finished a web site or application and then found out that it is not accessible or Section 508 compliant
• You thought a site was accessible and you found out that it really wasn't
• You were told that your web application needs to be Section 508 compliant by a certain date and you didn't have the time to fix it

These are all valid issues, and you are not the only one facing them. But once this is the case, it does not mean that you need to forget about accessibility as it is. There is another way to go around it, and not only to make your site accessible or to bring it to legal compliance, but to show your commitment and willingness to work on it.

NEW YORK, Jun 09, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Audio Eye, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of CMG Holdings, Inc., (CMGO
0.04, +0.01, +14.29%) is pleased to announce that Congressman Raul Grijalva has adopted Audio Eye's technology on his official US Congress website:
http://grijalva.house.gov/ .

Audio Eye's technology effectively meets required criteria and standards of Section 508 legislation and needs of disabled, physically challenged, learning,
hearing or visually impaired, low vision, dyslexic, autistic, elderly, even internet novices and mobile users. The patented technology delivers an Internet
service that converts and indexes Internet content and automates multi-format publishing so that everyone seeking Audio Eye enabled content can access
Internet content. Audio Eye's Accessibility software meets standards and criteria for Section 508 of the Americans for Disabilities Act ($2.8 billion market).

Have you tried to print out all the WCAG documentation? You probably got worried after several hundreds of pages when your printer didn't stop producing more guidelines and techniques.

Have you experienced planning to make something accessible and then finding out that the required tasks overwhelm you? This can indeed be very intimidating, and it could make you doubt that you could follow the guidelines. so you in turn postpone your plans and you may even cancel them.

But does it have to be this way? Is there a way to make a product, service or web site accessible and not be overwhelmed by the tasks?

Indeed there is, and it’s quite simple. So let us analyze a seemingly “intimidating” obstacle faced by many people in making their product, service, or web site accessible. By the end of this post, I assure you that you’d have a clearer idea about this issue.

Have you spent hours after hours browsing the structure of your PDF document just to ensure that it is Section 508 compliant?

Did you ever get frustrated because it took you to patch it up longer than writing the original document?

You can save yourself some major time and headache when you get the legwork done in the source document.

When you hear about Section 508 compliance, especially when you have to be compliant on your own dime, you may think that this is just one of those requirements that your company has to pay big bucks for. Maybe you even thought about checking the box, and see what you can get away with if you don't worry about it. Maybe you thought that you are paying, and others are benefiting. In this article, I would like to show where your company can majorly benefit from Section 508 compliance.

Federal agencies clearly struggle to comply with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, members of the public told government officials during a May 12 
public hearing by the federal Access Board to get feedback on a draft of section 508 refresh.

Most attendees said they are encouraged by the improved guidelines, but Claude Stout, executive director of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of
Hearing, said that federal agencies have trouble in particular with making internal documents accessible to their own staff. Not all federal websites are
optimized for screen-reader software, much of the video is not captioned and text size cannot be adjusted in some programs.

Over the last couple of years more attention was brought to Section 508 lawsuits. It is due to the fact that people started taking advantage of their rights, namely, that electronic information should be accessible to them despite of their disabilities. There are many more organizations which could theoretically be threatened by a Section 508 lawsuit, and it is highly probable that in the future it will be more difficult to get away with non-compliance. It is almost a pattern that the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is part of these Section 508 lawsuits. One of the reasons is that as an organization, they support the complaints of an individual, as an organization. Also, this sends a message to agencies which choose not to comply, namely that there is an organization which will help enforcing Section 508, even if on a case by case basis.

Here, we’ll take a look at the major Section 508 lawsuits filed against agencies and businesses regarding their web sites. Our main goal is to learn from these events so we could avoid facing the same legal problems they have encountered.

Lora Bentley spoke with Craig Smith, VP of North American sales and marketing for Xenos. The content management solution provider recently announced the
upcoming release of Xenos Axess, which provides accessible PDFs from high-volume print streams.

CAPTCHA is as Section 508 compliant as you make it to be. It can certainly be done. In this post we will review those Section 508 standards which are relevant when creating a CAPTCHA solution. At this point, we will only concentrate on the current Section 508 standards, not on the proposed recommendations, as they may change before they legally become effective.