I researched at google and found many confusing, looooong explanations for Section 508! made me even more confused.
very simply, what is this Section 508?
A fairly simple explanation can be found here; summed up nicely by this snippet:
Section 508, an amendment to the
United States Workforce Rehabilitation
Act of 1973, is a federal law
mandating that all electronic and
information technology developed,
procured, maintained, or used by the
federal government be accessible to
people with disabilities. Technology
is deemed to be "accessible" if it can
be used as effectively by people with
disabilities as by those without.
This page also offers another good, simple explanation:
Section 508, in simple terms, requires
that when Federal Agencies develop,
procure, maintain or use electronic
and information technology,
information and data should be
accessible to people with disabilities.
Obviously there's lots more involved in this process, but you already knew that. Hopefully this clarifies things a little bit!
What is Section 508 Accessibility Law?
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act
of 1973, is a US law requiring the
federal government to make all goods
and services-including web sites and
intranets fully accessible to people
with disabilities. It identifies
specific standards for Internet and
Web accessibility, which are often
used as a basis for evaluating whether
or not Web sites meet accessibility
requirements.
I gave a talk about this at the last PyCon:
http://djangocon.blip.tv/file/3261238/
508 compliance is about making your site accessible to everyone, no matter their handicap. While much of 508 is focused on people using screen readers, you also have to consider those that are physically handicapped (and may have trouble mousing over tiny areas), or those that are deaf (and would love to play your Flash game, but can't hear the beeps required to win!).
Google harder! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508 first paragraph is a pretty straight forward summary.
The idea is the following: unless your product is fully Section 508 compliant you may be unable to your product sell to the US Government organizations.
Related
I noticed that tutanota and mega.io mentioned "Privacy by design" in their homepages. So, I became curious and found the wikipedia page about Privacy by design, but it seems to be an abstract concept (a collection of principals). However, I was looking for something like - do a and b or implement y and z. For example, mega.io uses Zero Knowledge Encryption (User-Controlled End-to-End Encryption). What other features do a product need to have to be called a "Privacy by Design" service.
By their very nature, abstract principles do not concern themselves with implementation detail. There are many different ways to implement them, and mandating one approach over another is simply out of scope – what matters is the net effect. It's also applicable to non-tech environments, paper records, etc; it's not exclusive to web dev.
Privacy by design (PbD) is a term coined by Ann Cavoukian, an ex-information commissioner in Canada, and it has a collection of principles, as that Wikipedia page describes. PbD is also referenced by GDPR. I've given various talks on privacy and security at tech conferences around the world – you can see one of my slide decks on PbD.
So how do you use them in web development? Take the second principle: "Privacy as the default". This means that if a person using your web app does nothing special, their privacy must preserved. This means, amongst other things, that you should not load any tracking scripts (perhaps even remote content), and not set any cookies that are not strictly necessary. If you do want to track them (and thus break the user's privacy to some extent), then you need to take actual laws into account, such as the EU privacy directive, which is what requires consent for cookies and trackers.
So although the principle itself did not require these measures, it influenced the technical decisions you needed to make in your implementation in order to comply with the spirit of the principle. If that happens, the principle has done its job.
So what you have to do in order to claim privacy by design (though it's not like you get a badge!) is to introspect and consider how these principles apply to your own services, then act on those observations and make sure that the things you design and build conform to the principles. This is a difficult process (especially at first), but there are tools to help you perform "privacy impact assessments" (also part of GDPR) such as the excellent PIA tool by the French information commissioner (CNIL).
If you're thinking about PbD, it's worth looking at two other important lists: the data protection principles that have been the basis of pretty much all European legislation since the 1980s, including GDPR, and the 6 bases for processing in GDPR. If you get your head around these three sets of concerns, you'll have a pretty good background on how you might choose to implement something privacy-preserving, and also a good set of critical guidelines that will help you to spot privacy flaws in products and services. A great example of this is Google Tag Manager; it's a privacy train wreck, but I'll leave it to you to contemplate why!
Minor note: the GDPR links I have provided are not to the official text of GDPR, but a reformatted version that is much easier to use.
I just found out that there's some countries(UK, CANADA and some more) that actually have a LAW about the web-site accessibility. I was shocked, because one thing when there's some RECOMMENDATIONS and another thing is a LAW, witch means anyone can sue you for not being 'standard'.
I'm interesting in your professional opinion about why is it bad to use LAW based on WCAG 2.0 recommendations to make web-site accessible to disabled people. If you may, please provide a good examples with proper comments. There's not so many people who're fluent in WCAG 2.0 standards.
I found at wikipedia criticism about wcag here what it says:
Criticism of WAI guidelines
There has been criticism of the W3C process, claiming that it does not
sufficiently put the user at the heart of the process.[2] There was a
formal objection to WCAG's original claim that WCAG 2.0 will address
requirements for people with learning disabilities and cognitive
limitations headed by Lisa Seeman and signed by 40 organisations and
people.[3] In articles such as "WCAG 2.0: The new W3C guidelines
evaluated",[4] "To Hell with WCAG 2.0"[5] and "Testability Costs Too
Much",[6] the WAI has been criticised for allowing WCAG 1.0 to get
increasingly out of step with today's technologies and techniques for
creating and consuming web content, for the slow pace of development
of WCAG 2.0, for making the new guidelines difficult to navigate and
understand, and other argued failings.
*I may be wrong, but I think CODE should not be restricted by any law at all. It's a godamn CODE ffs
I think governments should encourage web-site owners(businesses!) to make they sites accessible, but not restrict them to some wcag for example.
Thanks!
I think there is a basic misunderstanding about how the law aspect works, it isn't based on WCAG.
In the UK, most of the EU, Canada and Australia there is no mention of WCAG2 or any particular standard for website accessibility in the law itself.
The law in the UK and in other countries like Australia says (and consider this an extreme paraphrase) that any product or service you provide should not discriminate against people with disabilities.
Whether you rely on a website to be accessible is up to you, you just have to provide your product/service in an accessible way somehow, you could do it on the phone and in a physical place.
NB: Most countries have "advisory notes" that do talk about WCAG, but see those as a means of making things accessible, not the core legal requirment.
Given that the website is generally the easiest way to provide something accessibly, WCAG2 is the most recognised set of guidelines and if you use that and make a "reasonable effort", any legal complaints will be easier to deal with.
Taking the book example (from the comments elsewhere), a paper book may not be accessible to someone who is blind, but the publisher is obliged to either make the digital copy available as an ebook (which can be read out by a computer or other device) or make the content available to services that create audio versions. They don't loose out on sales, and it is not a hardship to provide an accessible version.
There are lots of ways to make products and services available and thanks to the web being created as accessible-by-default, it is a very good channel for that.
Also, WCAG does not say "you have to do it this way or you are not standard", it says things like "All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose". It doesn't define the code you use (although there are obvious ways to acheive that), the guidelines are written so there there a multiple ways of acheiving the aim.
Some people complain about that and think it should be clearer and easier to implement!
Bottom line: If you are paid to make a website, making it accessible is part of a professional job.
Accessibility is not just "code", accessibility is about discrimination.
And fortunately, there are laws to sue people, not for not being standard, but for removing access to people with disabilities.
Is it mandatory in some countries to make all websites accessible?
If so, what would happen if someone in country with this mandate does not make a website accessible?
Can the government remove or block the IP if the site is not accessible?
How could the government know if any website is not accessible? Do they check every single website?
Does only the people/company who make the inaccessible site get any notice from the government?
Why are there so many accessibility guidelines -- WACG 1, WCAG 2.0, DDA, Section 508, etc.? If the whole world follows W3C for XHTML and CSS, then why have some countries made their own guidelines?
Is it mandatory in some countries to make all websites accessible?
Yes, particularly the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.
This is in order to comply with legislation that prevents discrimination against disabled people. While this is, or can be, seen as a burden I find it helps to think of it as widening your audience, consumer or user-base.
If so, what would happen if someone in country with this mandate does not make a website accessible?
Being a legal requirement means that a court is/will be able to impose sanctions, depending on their interpretation of the local laws, that might involve enforced compliance with the laws, a financial penalty (fines, etc) or some other punishment until compliance is established.
Can the government remove or block the IP if the site is not accessible?
That depends on which government and the specifics written into the laws. It seems unlikely that they would block the website because of non-compliance with accessibility legislation. It seems far more likely, though I am biased because of where I live (the United Kingdom), that reparations would be sought through the judicial system.
How could the government know if any website is not accessible? Do they check every single website?
In the United Kingdom it seems that complaints would be brought by disabled users that are prevented from successfully using/accessing the site or service. These complaints would likely be taken to the court system, see above.
It is even more likely that the user would inform the owner of the website directly, before bringing a complaint to court, in order to give you/the owners a chance to apologise (never underestimate the power of a sincere apology) and enhance the site.
[Do] only the people/company who make the inaccessible site get any notice from the government?
I would imagine, and this is why this isn't necessarily a great place to ask the question, that the owners would be notified. It is, however, quite likely that, as the site developer, you would quickly receive complaints from the owner of the site since you made it/designed it. But the legal burden of responsibility is likely to depend upon the contract under which you were employed/contracted.
If you feel that accessibility would add an undue burden upon yourself, it's always worth specifying to the client the costs of adding compliance with accessibility requirements, and telling them of the specific laws under which they are requirements.
But, for this, you need to speak to a lawyer.
Why are there so many accessibility guidelines -- WACG 1, WCAG 2.0, DDA, Section 508, etc.? If the whole world follows W3C for XHTML and CSS, then why have some countries made their own guidelines?
Because all laws are set locally, or, in some cases, internationally via treaties. The W3C can make suggestions and guidelines, but it is not, thankfully for IE, illegal not to comply with CSS2.1. It is, however, illegal not to comply with the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) in the United Kingdom.
All the above is not the advice of a qualified legal representative, or counsel. For specific advice consult a lawyer who practices the law in the country/region in which your client is based, or in which your website/product will accessible.
This would imply a lawyer from the United Kingdom for a British local government website, for a German authority website it would, of course, imply the services of a lawyer from Germany.
Is it only mandatory to make site accessible for Govt. own website and for stock exchange listed corporate sites. or for all type of sites?
I can't speak as to the exact requirements, since I'm not a lawyer. However a quick Google turns up the following web-page that seems to address this question: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml
To paraphrase the linked page:
The DDA makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service that it provides to members of the general public.
I read this to mean that all websites that provide a service to the public are required to be accessible under the terms of the DDA. This would include Government websites, but also home-shopping websites (from, for example, Sainsbury's, Asda, Tesco's, etc) and the Royal Mail or cinema ticket-reservation sites.
From 01/10/1999 service providers must take reasonable steps to change any practice that makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services
The key term here, I think, is 'reasonable steps.' I presume, from this, that if the website/service generates an income of £10000 per annum, and the cost of compliance with accessibility would be in excess of £10000 then you could argue that it exceeded any reasonable effort/cost to become compliant.
However, this is the reason that progressive enhancement is popular in Javascript and CSS. If the service, at its most basic, is accessible then Javascript and CSS can be used to make it prettier and shinier (whatever that means to you), but it should degrade back to a functional UI when JS or CSS are disabled. In this situation the site is compliant, but a disabled person might not have the same shiny, moving buttons.
Accessibility means that they must be able to access the service/site without unreasonable difficulty. It does not mean that the site has to look/behave exactly the same.
A direct quote from the linked page:
2.13 - 2.17 (p11-13): “What services are affected by the Disability Discrimination Act? An airline company provides a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its website. This is a provision of a service and is subject to the act.”
In addition to above answers:
The W3C has a page listing relevant laws in different countries, including links to the relevant laws (often in the language of that country though):
http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/
As I said, it's very hard to answer in general. I guess you will be getting a list of answers specific to countries - maybe a good idea to make it Community Wiki.
For Germany, according to Wikipedia and other sources:
Newly built web sites of federal administrative bodies in Germany have to be accessible by law since 2006. The accessibility guidelines are defined in a directive named BITV (german text here). BITV follows the WCAG 1.0 Guidelines very closely.
Similar laws exist for the country's sixteen states ("Länder").
The creation of accessible web sites is encouraged by a number of government and EU initiatives and private initiatives like the BIENE Award (German only).
To my knowledge, no plans to enforce accessibility in non-government websites exist at this time.
As to why countries implement their own guidelines, among other things, language certainly is an issue: To put guidelines into a law, you need the guidelines in your native language, double-checked by lawyers.
There is an ISO standard, ISO 23026 for reccomended practices for website engineering and website lifecycle management and this does not vary for country specific guidelines. This std includes clauses for website accessibility as well. This standard touches upon guidelines for website accessibility, usability and security, etc.
Why are there so many accessibility guidelines -- WACG 1, WCAG 2.0, DDA, Section 508, etc.?
Just on this point (and assuming “DDA” refers to the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act), the Act doesn’t contain any guidelines on web accessibility in particular.
It makes a legal requirement for companies to provide equivalent service to disabled and non-disabled customers, and that requirement applies to websites just like any other service.
But the Act doesn’t count as another set of guidelines in itself.
I believe Section 508 was based on, and is almost identical to, WCAG 1.
That just leaves WCAG 1 and 2, both of which are from the W3C, and version 2 now supersedes version 1. So there’s actually just one set of guidelines, unless you’ve got any more examples.
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There are a lot of good solutions for audio and video conferencing, task, calender and document management. We got specs, uml diagrams, code generators, etc.
But still companies pour tons of cash so that people can be physically there even in the times of recession and i wonder why?
Nothing beat a face to face meeting. Period.
I work with a remote development team every day and I can only support other responders in saying that NOTHING beats working face-to-face. You need the subtle cues of body language, facial expression, and the ease of communication when you're physically present such as doodling on a whiteboard. Video conferencing is a close second but the organizational issues are difficult to overcome (meeting rooms, webcams, bandwidth...).
Communication through documentation works to some extent, but is often perceived as unnecessary overhead by developers who drank the Agile kool-aid. I try to use the phone, skype, MSN or e-mail as much as possible, but it works better with those people of the team that I've actually worked with in-person for at least a few days.
Distance isn't to much the problem, to be honest. You're either co-located or you're not.
We use a combination of Skype IM, Skype Voice, mobile phones and email to keep in touch. We haven't really got into webcams properly, but even then, there's something about face to face contact you can't really replicate with technology.
I think most companies see splitting up their workforce as a step-change. A company that started out with homeworkers is better able to find and establish an office to move them into than the other way round. Money is only one consideration - it really does change the way the team works, and if you get it wrong, you don't have a team, you have a bunch of solo developers who actually take longer to do things.
Of course, it's also easier to recruit and mentor new members of the team if there's an office for everyone to work in.
Many people do better face-to-face. Many people do just as well at a distance. However, people in management tend to more focused on interpersonal relations, which generally means they're face-to-face people. So, as a general rule, people in management tend to dislike or distrust meeting at a distance.
Furthermore, meetings are very often unproductive. This applies to meetings at a distance and face-to-face meetings. Indeed, it's significantly easier to get off-topic, unprofessional, and unproductive when meeting face to face. However, when an at-a-distance meeting is unproductive, it's almost always seen as such because it was at a distance. It can be exceptionally frustrating to deal with the technology and limitations of remote meetings, and it's infinitely easier to blame the situation and the technology for your lack of productivity.
To sum up: people are a problem.
I have a few cynical and contrary opinions on this, based on my experience working for a large Australian organisation with branches all over the country and my current remote work for a US company.
Cynically - face to face works so you can do deals off the record. This may not be as corrupt or as underhand as it sounds but an astounding amount of management-level decision making happens where people negotiate relative tradeoffs involving influence, favors accrued and owed and stuff which is hard or embarrassing to quantify. Even when an organisation has a commitment to using teleconferencing, groups emerge who negotiate off-camera and thus acquire a competitive advantage.
At the purely technical level, I think face-to-face is nowhere near as important as cited. The political issue is in drawing this distinction - if you label your stuff as non-political and safe to do via remote comms, you are explicitly labeling the other negotiations as somehow not safe. Another aspect is that people looking to move up to management need to become visible and a known player in the face-to-face discussions.
Developers, including myself, are notoriously poor at picking up the non-verbal cues cited above (just ask my wife!). In a relaxed atmosphere of trust, they can use emoticons and in-jokes explicitly in IM sessions without worrying about translating someone else's expression, especially across cultures.
IM sessions, with the ability to search the transcript, are far more efficient than verbal or video conversations, when discussing projects. If you don't pick up some nuance at the time someone says it, you can go back and examine the exact sentence in context.
I use video chat infrequently and the main use of voice chat is so I can talk to my boss in his spare time whilst he's driving. Those are good conversations to give me a general feel for how things are going but usually inadequate for technical.
Here's a podcast that talks about distributed software development: Managing Commercial Software Projects. Here's a blurb from the show page:
Andy Singleton is an entrepreneur who
has long studied and practiced the art
of distributed software development.
Influenced by the open source and
agile movements, he has arrived at
some startling conclusions about how
to manage commercial projects. Among
them: don't interview people, don't
estimate schedules, and don't spend
time in teleconferences. In this
conversation with host Jon Udell he
explains why not to do these things,
and what to do instead.
I thought it was pretty interesting.
Face to face meetings provide a lot of visual feedbacks which you do not get in other means. This is must if you want to discuss important subjects like architecture, reviews etc, which tend to be slow or useless if done over phone, email, twiki etc.
Typically status updates can be done via other means, we normally use Skype, Twiki, Email, Phone keep in sync.
I really like communication via IM, email or phone. It's totally ok and I really appreciate using it.
Now comes the big "but" (with a single 't'):
You are not able to "just walk over" your colleague and ask him** a short question. For sure, you can IM him or mail him. But it will take some times till he answers your question.
The other point is drinking coffee. You cannot just drink a cup of coffee with him and talk about your problems.
If you let your brain release your thoughts, problem will disappear. And that's one reason behind drinking coffee with colleagues.
I really need personal communication. I need it. About 70% of the communication can be replaced by IM or whatever, but the 30% are very important.
** him = him/her
Some 80% communication is non-verbal, video conferencing helps a bit, but is not good enough.
There have been studies done over success rate of business negotiation and project cooperation depending on type of communication used. It was ranging from 90% success face to face, to less then 10% with email and text only IM.
For example one of such studies, conducted by Harvard Business School professor Kathleen L. Valley yielded for example such results:
"among 24 four-person decision making
groups interacting via computer, there
were 102 instances of rude or
impulsive behavior. Another 24 groups
that interacted in person yielded only
12 remarks of that nature."
Related Wired article: "The Secret Cause of Flame Wars"
I'm a totally blind individual who would like to learn more of the theory aspect of computer science. I've had an intro data structures class and the general intro programming but would like to learn more on things such as software design, advanced data structures, and compiler design. I want to do this as a self study course not as part of college classes.
Unfortunately there aren’t many text books available on computer science from Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic where I normally get my textbooks. I would appreciate any electronic resources preferably free that could help me get more of a computer science education rather then the newest language or platform that a lot of programming sites appear to focus on.
You might find the Experiences of a Blind Computer Scientist a good read.
MIT's Open Courseware would be a good resource for you with the amount of videos/audio they have.
Really though, for the core computer-science topics I find it pretty hard to beat some of the better textbooks out there. Some offer digital versions of their book with purchase and some don't. For those that don't, I would just purchase the book and then download via a torrent site a digital e-book equivelant. Since you already own the book I don't think this would be a major problem.
UC Berkley has a couple of computer science courses online for free as mp3 and video files (including RSS feed for each course). And if reading PDF files aren't an issue you could check out O'Reilly's Safari.
The text book for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs appears to be accessible. Software engineering radio is a good podcast that I listen to but recently has focused a lot on model driven development and UML which doesn't interest me. The UC Berkley
lectures are of varying quality, it's like all other college classes it depends on the professor. I've found I can follow along with the cs162 lectures fine but not so much with the cs61b. Part of this is because of the professor and part is probably because 61b is more math heavy since it's a data structures class. Unfortunately the RSS feeds are useless since the file names are meaningless. I used my podcatcher to download the entire lecture series, then used the converting capability of foobar 2000 to rename the files with there track number so I could listen to them in order. I've used Safari at work before and it is accessible although to expensive for me to get a yearly subscription. Open Courseware appears to have a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately I don't use itunes so instead of downloading each mp3 file individually I used the firefox extension DownThemAll! with a custom filter to grab all the mp3 files at once from the specific course I wanted. Another series of books that looks useful are the data structures books by Bruno R. Preiss several of which are available online at
http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus5/
Some of the equations are represented as graphics but I can often tell what the general idea is by context.
I wonder would the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman be of any use?
If the audio content is enough on its own without the video, they are an excellent digital resource.
The podcast "software engineering radio" is excellent. Though not CS courseware, it is the most academic and intellectually stimulating podcast I have found about software development and computer science.
http://www.se-radio.net/
personally I am just blown away by the questioner. I mean, the challenge alone of programming is too much for most people but being without the primary sense used in the task is amazing to me. What is ironic though is I bet that given this challenge the questioner is still FAR more adept at most CS tasks than the people I work with day to day. Just saying.
I'm also a totally blind programmer, currently working for Microsoft. The most valuable resource for te technical books is Safari (safari.oreilly.com). You can read thousands of computer science texts there. if you're in the USA, you can also get many of those titles for free from BookShare (www.bookshare.org). In both cases graphical images will be an issue, but there's no easy solution for that. Most good books have enough descriptive text that one can manage without the diagrams.
I to am a new blind programmer! I only lost my vision 5 years ago. Anyway, I have been programming in Visual Basic 2008 throughout the past year. It turned out to be more accessible than I had at first suspected.
I start a Java class next semester and the required text is a free online text! It is posted below.
Introduction to Programming Using Java, Fifth Edition
http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/
Can some of you seasoned blind programmers share with us any blogs or websites where other blind programmers can be found??
Check out this Stack Overflow question about podcasts.
A language called Quorum is a lot like Python but optimized across a few more syntactic details, and the corresponding development environment is designed with the blind in mind. https://quorumlanguage.com/ This might fit especially well with the use case where most students are using Python.
A 2016 blog about CSed (actually a response to a blog post) points to
program-l discussion board for blind programmers at https://www.freelists.org/list/program-l
The EPIQ conference for blind and other programmers interested in Quorum
https://quorumlanguage.com/epiq.html
Also, see other ideas in a similar question on another SO site: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3441/teaching-a-blind-high-school-student