‘Retweet of the Day’ - Primary Roads & highways in metro Washington #DC area are in poor shape due to snow/ice…stay home & #cuddle (via @CrossGov)
The Open Government Directive & Accessibility Shortcomings
After reading GCN’s article ‘GSA takes a fast, free approach to Web dialogue tool’ I decided to take a look at the tool in question, IdeaScale, to see what the buzz was all about. The article explains that GSA joins several Federal departments/agencies already using IdeaScale including the White House, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Departments of Labor & Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A link to the FCC’s IdeaScale site representing broadband.gov public feedback site was provided and my curiosity got the best of me…
Now I don’t proclaim to be a user-experience or accessibility expert, but it was quickly apparent to me that the site lacked appropriate ALT attributes in a variety of places throughout the site. I quickly visited section508.gov to ensure my understanding of Section 508 was correct:
§ 1194.22 Web-based intranet and internet information and applications.(a) A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content) – section508.gov
Once I confirmed my understanding of the Section 508 omissions on the FCC’s IdeaScale site I began to wonder what else, from an accessibility standpoint, might be missing? I used a free, third-party application to evaluate broadband.ideascale.com (FCC’s IdeaScale site for Broadband.gov Beta) and it unearthed a variety of Section 508 “violations” that I will leave to the accessibility experts. Needless to say there were quite a few “violations” noted.
So what does all this mean in the grand scheme of things? My gut feeling is that as Federal departments and agencies rush to meet the mandates as outlined in the Open Government Directive, Section 508 compliance may have fallen through the cracks. The question now becomes will these departments and agencies that are leveraging IdeaScale (or plan to do so in the near future) bring their implementations up to “code” in terms of Section 508 compliance?
I am all for the Open Government Directive and all IdeaScale has to offer (heck, they have made it free for government agencies to leverage) but should government agencies leverage such a quick and easy tool without addressing the Section 508 shortcomings?
An interesting dilemma…what are your thoughts?
GSA works deal with IdeaScale to offer Federal agencies a free, online feedback tool that can be leveraged to meet the mandates outlined in the Open Government Directive.
'Retweet of the Day'
RT @matdevineslife: A monumental man has died. RIP J.D. Salinger; A sad day for me and all the other Holden Caulfields of the world
So the question is, should SharePoint 2010 try to be the end-all, be-all or should it become the “best of breed” in very specific areas?
'Retweet of the Day'
RT @rachelslaj: The iPad: Proof not enough women work in the Apple Naming Department. - Props to @rachelslaj representing Brooklyn, NY proudly.
“After nearly a decade of rumors and speculation, Apple’s finally unveiled the iPad. It’s a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it’s running a custom 1GHz Apple “A4” chip developed by P.A. Semi, with a 10-hour battery life and a month of standby. It’ll come in 16, 32, and 64GB sizes, and it’s got the expected connectivity: very little. There’s a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, and 802.11n WiFi. As expected, it can run iPhone apps — either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen — but developers can also target the new screen size using the updated iPhone OS SDK, which is available today.”
