I found an interesting piece on accessibility in a publication of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet entitled Online Campaigning 2002: The Primer. This would be the last place to look for insight on accessibility, but it seems politicians “get” it faster than businesses.
You read this in the preface:
“Our Best Practices aim at finding the intersection of smart politics and civic responsibility. Take accessibility, for example. By making your campaign Web site accessible to the 20 percent of Americans with disabilities, you also make your site easier to download for the 80 percent of the online public without residential broadband connections who rely on slower phone modems. The right move, from a strategic perspective, is the same move that engages the citizenry.
A more lengthy discussion follows in a sidebar a couple of pages further. I’ll include it here for your perusal. Enjoy!
Make Your Web Site Accessible to Everyone
There are two groups of citizens who require special accommodations to access your Internet campaign: those with disabilities and those whose primary language is not English. You should take extra steps to ensure that you have access to their ideas, dollars, volunteer hours, and votes. Technological barriers frustrate many people, but they humiliate individuals with disabilities. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of all Americans suffer from a disability that interferes with their daily life. Some of them, such as the physically impaired, want to rely on the Internet as a primary source of information and may have more time than the average person to devote to online volunteering.
Yet another bonus: some of the same technology that allows more disabled people to access your Web site will make it easier for people without broadband connections to access it, too.
A sensible course of action for an online campaign with respect to the disabled is to voluntarily follow guidelines established by the federal government. Federal legislation that became enforceable in June 2001 requires that all federal agencies use technology (including telephones and Web sites) that is readily accessible to individuals with all forms of disabilities. This Section 508 legislation (the law referenced is the Work Force Investment Act) means that if a visually impaired individual contacts an agency’s Web site, the Web site’s basic design must facilitate the communication. Ways of satisfying the requirement include the usage of text versions of multimedia files, voice-recognition software, descriptive text tags in HTML programming language for images, and a no-frames version of the site.
Although Section 508 applies only to federal agencies, and neither to Capitol Hill nor to political campaigns, its effect has been to produce a readily available range of compliant products. (For leads, see the Web Accessibility Initiative section of the Web site of the World Wide Web Consortium, at www.W3.org/WAI.) One well-known accessibility checker, developed by the Center For Applied Special Technology (CAST), is a program called Bobby (www.bobby.cast.org). This is an excellent service that can diagnose your online accessibility to the impaired. You can test a few pages for free; the program to check your entire Web site and the site license, which entitles you to display the Bobby icon, runs into thousands of dollars. A number of free and commercial services and software products to make your Web site accessible can be found on the Web. One of these, another excellent service called A-Prompt, was developed by the University of Toronto and can be downloaded at no charge from http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/. Whatever method you choose, your campaign Web site’s essential online materials should be accessible to the disabled.
