MORE... on 508 compliance

508 compliance... ewww, did I just say that?? eGov was in Washington DC early last week (July 9, 10, 11) and aside from some interesting words from Larry Ellison (CEO Oracle), Macromedia was showing off their set of Dreamweaver and UltraDev extensions for 508 compliance.

Of all of the tips and tricks I received from them the most important and most valuable was that there is a huge difference between compliance and accessibility. As of this time only government sites will be held accountable for compliance of 508. Being in compliance will almost assure your site is accessible to those impaired, but it is not neccessary and should not be!

The goal of good web design should be the accessibility part. I personally do not see any other reason for 508 besides for the lawyers to make a huge lump of money as people start suing sites for non-compliance. BLAH!!! If the site is accessible in the first place then compliance will never come up! I am more than guilty on many, many occassions of not creating accessible sites. www.redcross.org is the prime example but steps are being made to change this and I suggest Macromedia extensions!! They are great, and there are 11 or so of them that can be found at http://www.macromedia.com/exchange.

The UseableNet suite is the best one so sign up, become a responsible web designer and make your content engineers and web masters happy !!