[NFBF-L] FW: [blindLaw] DOJ Promises to Resume Filing Federal Website Accessibility Reports - Huffington Post - November 18, 2022

[Camille Tate]

For your information.

 Sincerely, 
Camille Tate 
2nd Vice President, National Federation of the Blind of Florida 
President, Melbourne Space Coast Chapter, National Federation of the Blind
of Florida 
Phone: 321 372 4899 

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Nightingale, Noel
via BlindLaw
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2022 7:08 PM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Cc: Nightingale, Noel <Noel.Nightingale at ed.gov>
Subject: [blindLaw] DOJ Promises to Resume Filing Federal Website
Accessibility Reports - Huffington Post - November 18, 2022


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/department-of-justice-website-accessibility-c
ompliance_n_6377124ce4b07a02ca81b517

DOJ Promises to Resume Filing Federal Website Accessibility Reports By
Shruti Rajkumar Huffington Post November 18, 2022

The plan comes months after a group of senators requested that the
department restart its reporting, which was last completed in 2012.

The Department of Justice plans to file its first report in a decade on the
accessibility of federal government websites, following a bipartisan push in
Congress.
"The Department of Justice ... recognizes the critical importance of
accessible technology to millions of Americans with disabilities," the DOJ
said in a letter received Monday by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who had written
to the department in June to demand that the government report on its
compliance with accessibility standards.
The DOJ added that it intends to submit the document "in the coming weeks."
Under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, federal agencies are
required to make their electronic and information technology accessible to
people with disabilities. The DOJ must also collect and report information
to the president and Congress about federal agencies' compliance with
Section 508 every two years, and it must make the report publicly available.
"It's something that should have been done every other year, and now we're
more than 10 years down the road," Glenda Sims, the chief information
accessibility officer at digital accessibility company Deque Systems, told
HuffPost. "But we have to do that. It's monitoring the health of our
important government websites that people need to use and have independent
access to."
The most recent report filed by the DOJ in 2012 showed "mixed levels of
success" in federal website accessibility. In his letter this summer, Casey
and six other senators requested that the department resume its reports and
explain why it hadn't filed one for so long.
"On behalf of the 26 percent of Americans living with a disability,
including the 40 percent of people over age 65 who have a disability, we
write to urge DOJ to take immediate steps to meet its obligations and once
again issue these biennial reports," the senators wrote in June.
"Without regular reports, Congress, taxpayers, and agencies themselves lack
a crucial source of feedback for identifying and resolving longstanding
accessibility issues."
The DOJ's recent letter, which Casey's office shared with HuffPost, did not
provide an explanation for its decadelong lack of compliance. The department
did not immediately respond to HuffPost's request for comment on its renewed
commitment to reporting.
"Despite legal requirements, these reports had not been issued for a decade,
leaving Congress without critical information about how the federal
government is addressing accessibility of its technology," Casey told
HuffPost. "We have a long way to go to make all aspects of the federal
government accessible for people with disabilities, but getting this
information from [the] DOJ is a critical step."
The U.S. Access Board is responsible for developing federal accessibility
standards, which include requirements for ensuring capability for assistive
technology. According to 2019 statistics from the Census Bureau, nearly 11.5
million Americans have hearing disabilities and 7.5 million have visual
disabilities. Website accessibility is important for such people because it
provides equal access to information, said Sims.
But in a 2021 report, the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation
Foundation found that many pages on popular federal websites failed an
automated accessibility test. The report showed that 30% of homepages did
not pass the test, and 48% failed on at least one of their three most
popular pages.
Sims believes that developers aren't intentionally building access barriers,
but rather that the barriers are easy to miss. She hopes that in the future,
developers will be motivated to incorporate accessibility correctly into
their website designs.
She emphasized that the design and development community needs automatic
accessibility checkers in place. "I think that making it a requirement to
put in these automated testing tools will help raise awareness," Sims said.
She added that analyzing accessibility design in this way would "make it
easy for developers and designers and content contributors to run checks so
that we don't always have to be dragging an accessibility expert in to
figure out whether it works or not."

_______________________________________________
BlindLaw mailing list
BlindLaw at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindlaw_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
BlindLaw:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindlaw_nfbnet.org/ctate2076%40att.net