I agreeto Idea It all come back to Top down Agency awareness with Section 508
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It all come back to Top down Agency awareness with Section 508

Very interesting conversation going on and from my perspective I see everything coming back to increased awareness. When we talk about Product Accessibility you have to first distinguish which “product” you are talking about. Put into the process of the current law it can be any product that we use, develop, maintain or procure. You’re talking about almost everyone within your organization needing to be aware of Section 508 from the person creating websites, documents and PDF to the purchasing agents and administrators as well as the executives. Everyone has a role and that role must be defined. I believe if we ever want to fully get our arms around the problems we have we need to get everyone onboard.

In order to accomplish this we have to have top down Section 508 training. Not to make everyone experts and able to check websites and documents but so that they know that there is something out there called Section 508 and they understand their role in its implementation. My thought would to create a suite of training tools for different agency roles such as Executive, Administrator, Developer and Procurement. Have each agency create an implementation team and have an agency like GSA, with the assistance of some third party agency, provide Train the Trainer training to these implementation teams so that they can go back to their agencies and get the needle moving in the right direction.

Submitted by Community Member 1 year ago

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  1. The idea was posted
    1 year ago

Comments (3)

  1. Jim Tobias

    Role-based training is a great idea. That way, people only get what they need to know (although they can always choose to learn more). One of the problems of accessibility training is that so much of it is an attempt to 'clone the expert'. It's not feasible, when most people have only a 2% 508 role -- it's just a tiny bit of their job.

    Having seen some of the excellent training materials that are already out there in the federal space, we may not need to develop a lot of additional training materials. Let's have a 'film festival' of what we've already got, take the best and disseminate it widely, and identify where we actually do need more materials. There's an idea where IdeaScale could really be the best tool -- once it's made more accessible, right?

    1 year ago
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  2. Doug Pearson

    People who produce IT (i.e., people who produce documents, spreadsheets, software, etc), people who request IT (and therefore test it for acceptance) must have the knowledge and skills to discern whether their IT is accessible.

    These are the "most people [who] have only a 2% 508 role" and I'm one of them. But I still don't have the needed knowledge and skills. And, yes, I still need in-depth training to do this 2% job well.

    1 year ago
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  3. Community Member

    Its been over eleven years. Over thirteen if you include that the law was signed under the Clinton Administration.

    Awareness, as we've seen it, isn't working.

    1 year ago
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