[blindlaw] 508 compliance clone?

[Mike Gilmore]

Hi everybody,
 
I've been thinking about 508 compliance and maybe something NFB could push at the state level. I love how pretty much any document has to be 508-compliant on federal web sites (and I'm guessing state as well. Anyone know?) This is nice when you're trying to view a PDF. Unfortunately, there's a lot of web sites 9Barbri is one of them) who scan their PDF's onto the web site which JAWS will tell you the document is empty. So, we print the document out so we can read it. Has anyone thought of some kind of legislation or working with various web sites that post PDF's by scanning them in to make them 508 compliant, but on the private level? (What I mean is get a private 508 compliant law.) 
 
I bring this up because as a federal worker, I've been e-mailed PDF's that have been scanned in and I've had to ask for the original Word document so I could read it. OF course, every PDF form they put up there is 508-compliant before it's released. (A couple of weeks ago, there was something that wasn't compliant--it was for internal office use. I was able to obtain the Word version and one of the supervisors sent the PDF to the tech folks and told them to make it 508 compliant. That was nice of her, but we can't always expect there to be the Word version still lying around or for folks to not scan the document into Adobe.)
 
Any thoughts?
 
Mike