Hiccup' leads White House to focus on web accessibility standard

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Friday, 30 April 2010 16:14pm

The White House promises to pay more attention to the Section 508 accessibility standard for people who have a disability when developing Web sites after two new US government sites did not meet the 508 guidelines.

In what the White House special assistant to the President on disability issues calls a “hiccup”, the initial release of data.gov and recovery.gov fell short of meeting the 508 standard. The Web sites have since been fixed.

Kareem Dale, the White House special assistant to the President on disability issues, is working with fellow senior officials and the Chief Information Officer Council to ensure there are no future problems. This comes at a time when 508 is being revised, with the draft of the updated standards and guidelines being released for public comment in March 2010.

In Australia, the Federal government recently announced that it will join the international community by committing to the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 compliance of government websites by 2015.


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