Ep 261: Section 508 Compliance

Many contracts have stipulations that “This product must be Section 508 compliant.” How do you make sure you meet compliance standards like Section 508 and not lose out during the evaluation phase? This episode will delve into the ins and outs of compliance so that your CPARS ratings aren’t affected and you can easily set yourself to win future bids, all while making a positive impact on accessibility in the process.

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Read Transcript Here:

Michael: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Mike LeJeune here with Game Changers for Government Contractors, and we have another fun episode for you here today. We're going to be talking to Mike Gifford and we're going to be talking about something, honestly, I don't think we've ever talked about here, that is the section 508 compliance and accessibility. And, you know, it's an interesting discussion you and I had beforehand about this. I just wanted to bring you on and kind of go through it. Before we dive into this subject, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Mike G: My name is Mike Gifford. I'm a senior strategist at Civic Actions. My role is to largely play a role in sort of shaping our accessibility program: trying to help our team develop better practices and make sure that we're able to meet the needs of our clients more effectively. But aside from looking at accessibility issues, I'm also very interested in sustainability issues and other issues that are related to, whether it's artificial intelligence or a whole range of other things, my expertise is very much in accessibility.

Michael: Nice. So, for those that don't know, what is section 508 and how do people demonstrate [00:01:00] compliance in this?

Mike G: Section 508 is a part of the Americans for Disability Act, and it's a requirement that a lot of organizations, actually, most organizations in the US have some obligations under Section 508 or section 504. Section 508 applies to a whole range of, different digital devices. It involves the websites for sure, but even things like elevators, and cell phones, and kiosks. Addresses a range of different products but it's all tied around accessibility. Trying to make sure that the content that is being produced, buying for the government and for that matter produced for citizens in general, is accessible so that somebody can perceive, operate, understand, the content that's being portrayed and do so in a robust, real-world environment. It's about trying to make sure everyone is able to communicate effectively through these new digital tools.

Michael: I think, I won't speak for everybody, but I think a lot of people when they hear this, they think of, well, I'm doing this for the blind or the deaf. It doesn't just stop there. Maybe you can kind of explain it again for the folks that [00:02:00] have a general perceived perception that this is only for this group of people. Maybe you can expand on that a little bit and kind of tell me who else these accessibility features, if you will, apply to.

Mike G: It definitely applies to more than just the blind users. That is a unique use case that's extreme. And it’s something that definitely affects more than just blind users in terms of organizing around screen readers. In terms of permanent disabilities, you're looking at about 25% of the population has some form of permanent disability. That's a fairly large portion of the population. Now that doesn't mean that every website or every device will go off and have a barrier that would stop somebody from participating, but it has the potential to.

If you look at temporary and situational disabilities, you actually get to a hundred percent of the population. Because there's a lot of disabilities, like if you've broken your arm, you're trying to go off and navigate a website with your non-dominant hand. Or you're in a loud bar and you're trying to go off and to use Siri or voice control in order to go off and to engage with your [00:03:00] devices. There are things that affect all of us, all the time in terms of how we interact with technology. Now, there's also just over time. We're all aging. We know that as soon as you hit 40, your eyesight tends to get worse, right? We don't think about glasses as being a form of assistive technology. But if you don't have your glasses, that's a really serious issue.?

Michael: How does a company demonstrate compliance with this stuff?

Mike G: There's a few things that companies can do, trying to go off and do some basic testing. There's so many simple free tools out there that you can use to evaluate whether or not your website has known accessibility problems. One of the big ones is WAVE from Web Aim. They've got a free toolbar that you can just install onto your browser and run that to let you know if there's accessibility issues that are part of that. There's also one called Accessibility Insights from Microsoft, which is a really great open-source accessibility tool that they've released and highlights more issues that you can look at.

So those are definitely good [00:04:00] starts. I also recommend that people put an accessibility statement on the website, trying to say what they're aiming for. It's important to try and be aware of how accessible your website is to begin with and how to demonstrate you've made some efforts along the journey of becoming a more accessible website. But to put a statement on there so that you can learn from your users about how you can meet their needs more effectively. What are the barriers that they're seeing? If you have that feedback loop, then you can engage and learn with others in order to see that you're removing the barriers.

Narrator: If you're struggling with your government contracting business, I want to encourage you today to go sign up for a free coaching session with me. You can go in the description of this podcast. There's a link to my calendar, and you can go pick a time where we can sit down for 30 minutes: talk about what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, what you should change. And then if coaching makes sense for you, I'll actually go over the options on how you can get started with coaching so we can take your business to the next level.?Now let's get back into this episode

Michael: As I was doing my research for the [00:05:00] podcast, one of the things that came across is, I guess you call it the VPAT: VPAT certification. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Mike G: If you're producing a product or a service, there'll be educational institutions, governments, and some other organizations in the US that will ask for a VPAT which is this voluntary product accessibility template. And this was a really innovative idea 20 years ago: let's take the responsibility for accessibility and put that into the procurement process and provide a means to have a competitive advantage for businesses that have more accessible products and services. And we'll just create an attestation form that allows vendors to go up and say, these are the accessibility issues we know about. This is what we're doing to address them, and to do that in a common format that could fit into any procurement process in the U.S.

Unfortunately, it didn't keep up with the times. They've become very much sales documents, and so people sometimes ask for them as part of the procurement or contracting process. Really all they want to see is that you have a VPAT. What you actually put in that VPAT almost doesn't make any sense because often the procurement officers do not read them or do not understand them. [00:06:00]

Michael: It's a checkbox.

Mike G: That's right. That isn't always a case. There are some agencies that are much better at them. There are some agencies that rate them and evaluate for how thorough they are. But we've created an alternative to the VPAT because we wanted to make something that fit with software development practices of today. We got a contract with the GSA, the General Services Administration, to create this open ACR format, that is a machine-readable format that allows you to gather and organize information about the accessibility issues of your website by filling in a web form and then it outputs it into a YAML file. Because it's machine readable, unlike the VPAT, which has all the information locked away in a PDF format. The open ACR format is machine readable, so you can do a comparison. You can put four or five different files together and say, oh, here's how they compare. This is how this works better than that one. If you had a few different open ACR files for the same product, you could actually look at it over time. You could say, how does version 2.1 compare to version 3.0? Compare to version 4.5? Are they making advancements in [00:07:00] accessibility over the lifespan of this product? Can we see the maturity of understanding about accessibility in their accessibility conformance report processed?

So that's the goal of open ACR and it does produce something. If somebody asks for a VPAT, you can provide an open ACR or html file for them. They can use that, just as they would a PDF driven VPAT format. We've created a presentation that mirrors much of what the VPAT does.

We've enhanced it a few ways, but we wanted to allow something that allows vendors who want to provide a modern understanding of accessibility and software development to use this format so they can provide an accessible document to their clients as part of a procurement process.

Michael: Legally, are there any other risks that people should know?

Mike G: Absolutely. In the US, there's a good chance that you'll get sued if you do not have an accessible website. There's a lot of organizations that are looking for, sort of, I guess hit and run lawsuits where they can say, okay, this site isn't accessible. Let's send them a letter and see if we can't settle out [00:08:00] of court for $50,000 or something like that. You know, create some sort of level where, yeah, it's easier to pay out of pocket than it is to go into court to address this issue. That certainly is an issue. It's also bad PR. Domino's Pizza had a big court case that got a lot of attention in the accessibility community because they could have paid to go off and make their website accessible and make sure that it met the criteria. And certainly, blind people, and others with disabilities enjoy pizza, so it's not unexpected that that will be something they would want. But rather than fixing their website and making it better for everyone and increasing their market share, they decided to take it to court and to fight it. Then suddenly you've got perspective where so many people are like, oh, Dominos, they don't care about people with accessibilities. That could be me. It could be my brother, it could be my father, whoever. You hear these negative stories associated with Dominos and pizza and like, are you going to want to go to shop at Dominos and bring that home to your family and friends when….

Michael: How dare you, right?

Mike G: Yeah, exactly.

Michael: Just to kind of wrap this up, are there any, what you would say like top three or four [00:09:00] best practices for companies? I know we've kind of talked all about the issue, but maybe there's something you could just kind of sum up. But what are the best practices for companies that are wanting to make sure that their product services business is accessible?

Because, and I almost need to stop myself and back up there, we've only been talking about website. There's also products and other different things and making sure those have accessibility. But what are your top couple of best practices for this?

Mike G: I think the big one is trying to not see this as anyone's job, but to see it as everyone's job. That there are people who can bring into your team who have particular expertise that are going to be useful to try and help train and to guide everyone. But everyone has a role. If you leave accessibility to the very end, which is sort of what has happened in the last 20 or so years where organizations have left accessibility to the very end to verify that it's all good and it almost never is.

But, push it. Push it left in your project management cycle. Try and make it as something that you're dealing with as early as possible. Think about in the design stage, if you can bring in people with [00:10:00] disabilities into the process and have them be part of the discovery process to say what are the things: that they might be there as a resource for your team.

What are the things that you could learn from people with disabilities engaging with your product? Realizing that there are people with disabilities who have valuable experience that they could give to your team because your team doesn't know how to use a screen reader or a screen magnification and isn't necessarily aware of the challenges that somebody else might have.

But if you can bring in people early and think about accessibility early in the process and see it not as a cost center, but as an innovation center. You're really reaching more users and providing better content and providing also just more comprehensive experience for your users. So yeah, bring it in as early as possible and keep iterating it through your life cycle of your product or service so that you're able to see that you're improving accessibility over time.

Michael: Really good points there. I think as we were going through this, the thing that I walk away from this podcast with is: this isn't hard.?Number one, it's not hard. And number two, doing this doesn't just serve that community of people with a disability. [00:11:00] It really does serve your existing users, even if they don't have a disability, because of the things we were talking about. When it comes to feeding Google information and things like that, you may go from getting 2000 visitors a month on your website to 25,000. Because now Google can actually read your stuff and put it out there. And so, this is really good all the way around for a lot of different reasons. And it's not hard.

Mike G: Right

Michael: I think the last point I'll make is; this is all something that a lot of people just are not aware of. You know? I mean, when you're running a business, a lot of times you're just focused on keeping the lights on.

This is one of a checklist of probably 20 things that I can tell you I've talked with clients about and they're like, I know nothing about this topic. There's probably 20 different topics where they're like, I don't know anything about that. I don't know anything about that. And it's just because they're trying to grow and sell their business and their products and services.

?Appreciate you coming on and talking today, just educating people on something that is not talked about very much. And hopefully folks learned a lot from it. So, thanks, Mike. I really appreciate it.

Narrator: I really hope you enjoyed the [00:12:00] podcast today. If you did, I would really appreciate it if you would like and subscribe to the podcast and screenshot it and tag me on LinkedIn or whatever social media you use. So, thank you again for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.