[Sigia-l] More on 508 compliance

[Kathy LeMunyon]

Thank so much, everyone, for all of the great info on 508 Compliance.
Following is an email I received from our very diligent QA guy - he found a
site that promises to be really helpful as well.  

Kathy LeMunyon
Senior Information Architect
Rare Medium Atlanta

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For any of you interested in quickly getting a feel for the implications of
508 compliance, I recommend jimthatcher.com as a good place to start.
He has some significant credentials in the field, which you can see if you
goto his site.
What I like about his site is that it provides both overview as well as
technically specific (with sample implementations) levels of information.
Here are some links to specific areas of interest on his site that might
help speed your research:
The beginning of a tutorial Mr. Thatcher prepared for the "Information
Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center", funded in support of
Section 508 by NIDRR and GSA at Georgia Institute of Technology, Center for
Rehabilitation Technology.
http://www.jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm

section 12 of the tutorial, specifically review of each of the 16 508
standards.
http://www.jimthatcher.com/webcoursec.htm


list of practices to avoid in implementing 508 compliance. It's possible to
build a site that's compliant, but virtually unusable; here's how to avoid
that.
http://www.jimthatcher.com/whatnot.htm

A comparison of the 508 provisions with those of the "Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines" (WCAG). WCAG arises out of the "Web Accessibility
Initiative" (WAI) from the WWW Consortium. WCAG is a longer and in many ways
more detailed list of prioritized provisions. Unless a client specifically
indicates otherwise, then for a primarily US site, 508 provisions are likely
to be what we'd have to build to. For a more international site, then we'd
likely have to build to (and price for) some of the additional provisions of
the WCAG. Generally speaking, the 508 provisions were included into the
WCAG, so there is a pretty direct mapping from 508 to a subset of WCAG. Mr.
Thatcher reviews how the two standards compare in their areas of overlap.
http://www.jimthatcher.com/sidebyside.htm