E-readers have more capability for text-to-voice conversion than do standard textbooks. The DOJ is reflecting the hope and change that so many wanted. Enjoy it.

This article, though interesting, could use just a bit more detail. Given that I have been teaching Web design to federal accessibility guidelines specifically targeting the Web under Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I find the change interesting, but have no idea of what it is, since the article seems to say that the government will be instituting something that has already been in place for over a decade.

Does it just mean that the federal government will (more) formally acknowledge the 508 guidelines and now be mandating compliance with these guidelines in much the same way that many states already do?

As a point of clarification, Section 508 is not part of the ADA, it is part of the US Rehabilitation Act. This announcement is newsworthy because including web accessibility as part of the ADA would be a huge step forward.

Many colleges and Universities are already quite aware of accessibility issues with websites.

One challenge is that there are many different kinds of disabilities. Simple "508 compliance" or even "WCAG 2.0 compliance" does not provide accessibility for all people with all kinds of disabilities.

It is much more difficult to make a website accessible "to ALL" than it is to make a building entrance accessible to all.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has long supported The Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility at http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/

However, as I begin deployment of a new library web site at Chicago State University, I have through many environmental scans discovered near-universal disregard. Skills and resources for web site development are spotty at best, and the cost in planning, accountability, and updating seems beyond most location's abilities.

I think the article would be clearer if the writer had known of existing federal standards for website accessibility (I'm even more surprised that Whiting does not mention them). Then the piece could have explained how DOJ/ADA involvement could potentially change the game for those with 508-compliant sites. That would be useful information.

Here's a quick overview of what "accessibility" means under Section 508:

http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm

> Skills and resources for web site development are spotty
> at best, and the cost in planning, accountability, and
> updating seems beyond most location's abilities.

This is so very true. It's hard enough to get a usable WEB-site designed and implemented, and then to foist "accessibility" requirements on top of this might well make it impossible for an institution to want to use the WEB for maximum access to services, and institutional information.

ADA generally increases the cost of brick-and-mortar buildings by 15% (which means billions and billions of dollars of increased cost to comply with Federal Rules that may not actually help anyone but the builders). It would not be hard to see the cost of WEB-based information distribution increase by 50+% in order to meet arbitrary mandates about "accessibility". Experimentation would also be quashed, since any group that felt it was being "denied" by a new WEB-service that does not meet its expectations could generate a Federal complaint, or lawsuit.

> It is much more difficult to make a website accessible "to ALL" than it is to make a building entrance accessible to all.

Perhaps, but, without getting too Clintonian about it, it really depends on what your definition of "accessible" is. For example, with buildings, the working definition seems to be something like "you can make it work, maybe with some not unreasonable amount of effort." Thus, even though you will probably break a sweat going up a ramp in a wheelchair (try it some time), it's not considered unreasonable, so the entrance is considered "accessible."

I design and build websites. It's pretty much all I've been doing the last half-year, and what I've been doing at least half my working hours for the last 5 years.

It is NOT HARD to make a website accessible, using the definition of accessible above. It is only hard to make it accessible if you want it to be COOL. Generally speaking, the "cooler" a site is, the less accessible it will be. All the technologies than enable "sexy" site design (DHTML, Flash, Air, Javascript, Java, etc) are precisely the ones that give screen readers fits; generally, they interfere with other adaptive technologies, as well.

It's simply a matter of priorities and knowledge.

One of the reasons why Google's stuff often doesn't look as "sexy" as, for example, Bing, is that Google's chief web designer is quite authoritarian about insisting on high usability (a "kissing cousin" to accessibility).

All of these sites that people don't have the resources to re-do must have been done originally either giving a higher priority to coolness than accessibility, or else in blissful ignorance of the entire issue.

What would you think about your neighbor who spend $8,000 extra in an Accord Hybrid, and didn't know that it got only 1 MPG better than a regular Accord? Probably, you'd think pretty much the same thing I might think about all the people who approved cool website designs without considering accessibility. If you're in charge of spending thousands of someone else's dollars on something (like a site design), not learning SOMETHING about it first is just negligent.

Any old site, if done in a boring and un-cool way (certainly including the very first one I ever did in the '90's), is almost automatically accessible, at least to the definition above.

Think about the Usonian houses: they're built on one level, low to the ground, mostly without even a step up into the front door. They're accessible just by being modest. Same thing with websites.

Yes, I know about the various accesibility standards. I ignored them in this discussion because they tend to muddy rather than clarify. They certainly contain lots of good ideas; its just that, rather like a building code, if people are determined to create a monstrosity, they'll generally find a way. And, like building codes, they wouldn't be neccesary if people had and used common sense. Another similarity is that 90% of the benefit comes from 10% of the content, and much of the remaining 90% looks a lot like busy-work.

Not too surprisingly, in this way academia reflects the rest of the world. There's been great progress, for example, in captioning television programs and motion pictures, in that it's relatively simple to take the script and convert it to captions. (Certain programs really show that this is what's being done, when a hearing person notes the discrepancy between the captions (original script) and the words actually spoken by the actors. "In Plain Sight," for example, clearly shows the effects of revision, in that the captions differ wildly from the speech, especially at the beginning and end segments.) This is far superior to the old system of someone typing like hell while they listen to the final product; in the BBC Sherlock Holmes series from twenty years ago, "Jabez" was rendered "Jaybeards," for instance.

However, the script provides raw material for captioning only if someone takes the trouble. Disney released UP! on video without captions. Thanks, Mouse. And for some reason, it's beyond possibility to caption promos, trailers, etc.

One would hope academia could improve on the "real" world.

It's been my personal experience that even when you point out accessibility problems with a website and an easy way to fix them, those in charge of the website are indifferent at best. Mostly, I get a shoulder shrug and nothing is changed. And because I'm not the one who needs that accessibility, it goes nowhere. They figure as long as no one else is complaining, there's no need to do anything about it. So far, I have been unable to figure out what I can do to change this attitude.

The thing is, many college and university websites are created by marketing / pr folks who DO want to make the website look "cool" - particularly to prospective students, most of whom DO like all the "cool" bells and whistles that violate accessibility guidelines.

An Austin-based non-profit, Knowbility, offers a very useful set of resources for those interested in designing accessible websites -- http://www.knowbility.org/air-austin/?content=resources. The organization also sponsors regional events promoting accessibility, which are often held on college campuses. The "Accessibility Internet Rally" is a novel web design competition in which accessibility experts judge websites created for community groups, on a pro bono basis, by teams of web developers. Over the years many campus webmasters and students have participated on these "AIR" teams, and winners of the competitions are designs that are most accessible to people with disabilities -- which is really "cool."