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We often hear about a web site being 508 Compliant or needing to be 508 Compliant, but how many of us really understand the true meaning of Section 508? Sure, we all know that being 508 compliant means that your site is accessible by people with disabilities, but what exactly is involved in making this happen?

What is Section 508?
In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require that Federal agencies make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 lists 1194.22 guidelines specifically for web-based intranet and internet applications based on access guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that help promote accessibility.

What that means is that Web Accessibility involves the ability of a web page to be read and understood by anyone, using adaptive technologies where necessary.

Populations to consider include:

• Blind people using assistive technology such as Braille or voice screen readers
• People with weak vision who may not be using assistive technology
• Deaf people
• Color-blind people
• People with motor control weakness

Making your site 508 Compliant
The good news is that you don’t have to redo your website from scratch in order to be Section 508 compliant. Here are some easy-to-implement tips to follow:

• DO include descriptive ALT tags for all images which have meaning or content
• DO use relative font size
• DO use high-contrast text and background colors
• DO include text links in addition to or in place of image-based navigation
• DO NOT place text over distracting background images
• DO NOT use color as the sole means of conveying information
• DO NOT use animated gifs, Flash presentations, or Java Applets that cause the screen to flicker with a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz (These can cause seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy)
• DO NOT force users to click a button or link rapidly, or to fill out a form in a short period of time
• DO NOT use frames of any sort

Priority Levels of Section 508

Priority 1
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

Priority 2
A web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.

Priority 3
A web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

Conformance Level “A”: all Priority 1 Checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “AA”: All Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “AAA”: all Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied

A description of the Priority Levels checklist can be found on this page: Priority Levels Checklist.

Further reading

If you’d like to get more information on the subject, these sites provide a deeper understanding of Section 508 compliance:

• 508 Site: http://www.section508.gov/
• W3C: http://www.w3c.org
• Access Board: http://www.access-board.gov

We always recommend that our clients review their site analytics with us at least once a week. Reviewing the data often requires some leg work in marrying information from disparate sources. From there, our dedicated analysts interpret the data to explain fluctuations, identify opportunities for improvement, and make predictions (forecasts). Every review and analysis results in progress towards the primary KPI’s of the site. Piece of cake, right?

The difficult step for most organizations seems to be in forming an ‘analytics habit.’ Reviewing web analytics regularly and drawing useful conclusions from it should be a requirement of every company that has a website and should be followed as web marketing 101. We frequently notice that marketing departments with limited resources managing campaigns across all channels have a difficult time giving analytics review cycles the priority it deserves. Most companies are great at starting the process and performing the weekly reviews for the first 4-6 weeks. After that, it is a battle with other priorities to get everyone’s time and commitments. It has never been difficult showing that regular analytics analysis results in huge benefits for the organization. It has been difficult getting people to sit down regularly, over an extended period of time, to gather and analyze the data. Many of our clients would prefer to outsource 100% of this work, but it really needs to be a team effort in order to be successful.

Almost all organizations perform regular maintenance on their web sites. Adding content, making updates to product information, freshening up the homepage, adding new job post and press releases have all become an ongoing part of having a web site. Performing maintenance without analyzing the analytics behind the site has the potential of actually making the site worse. Interpretation of the analytics shows what site visitors are looking for and how they want to find it. At least 20% of all updates to a site during maintenance should be focused around optimizing the content and the functionality of the site to serve the requirements of the organization and the perceived interests of visitors.

After a company has performed an analytics analysis every week for several quarters, it becomes a very healthy analytics habit. These are the companies that start to think of new ways to use analytics and integrate analytics from several channels (i.e. offline). We find that these are the clients that receive the most benefit (ROI) from their web initiatives and are the most likely to have successful initiatives moving forward.