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One sees the impact of the 11 September events in many ways, but sometimes the continuity of issues that survive that wrenching day can make as big an impression. Each year, the FOSE trade show provides a forum for IT vendors to show their stuff to Federal agencies (FOSE used to stand for Federal Office Systems Expo; now it is just a name.), and it provides a good indicator of agency IT priorities.
At the 2002 FOSE trade show, 19-21 March in Washington, DC, most vendors showed, to no one's surprise, that security systems and services had the highest priority. But despite the overriding need to fight terrorism, some vendors still showed support for making Federal Web sites more accessible for people with disabilities. Before 11 September, the campaign to make all Federal systems, including Web sites, more accessible to people with disabilities was one of the top priorities for IT managers. Recent amendments to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, made it mandatory for Federal systems to become more accessible. (See our earlier Suite101 story, Effective 21 June: Federal technology becomes more accessible, http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1081...
New tools to make Web sites more accessible
People with disabilities and their need to communicate with Federal systems are not going away, and at FOSE 2002 a few vendors showed some of the early tools designed to make systems and Web sites more accessible. One company that specializes in systems accessibility, SSB Technologies, unveiled a new online service called Ask Alice that produces a Web-based report on the accessibility of an organization's Web site. Alice is an animated advocate for the disabled, herself blind. Besides providing an assessment of Web sites, Alice shows users who may not be familiar with accessibility issues how to get started making their Web sites friendlier to people with disabilities.
Adobe Systems, developer of the familiar Adobe Acrobat software, has taken up the accessibility issue as well. Ted Windsor, a trainer at Adobe Systems, led a seminar on making Web sites more accessible, using Adobe's GoLive web authoring and site management software. Windsor recommended that designers use three layers to build a Web site: (1) the full featured site, with all the bells and whistles, (2) a bare bones site with basic graphics for low-bandwidth visitors, and (3) a text-only site.
The purpose of this layered approach, and accessibility in general, is to provide different choices to Web site visitors with different abilities. Windsor also offered other suggestions to provide these choices:
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