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Government Leader home > June 2005 issue
June 2005; Vol. 1 No. 2
MANAGING 508: Wizard to the Rescue, Online tool helps agencies keep up with accessibility
By Jason Miller
After a lengthy certification and accreditation process, the General Services Administration’s online tool to help agencies be sure they are buying accessible products is available for download.
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| | | Version 1.5 of the “Buy Accessible Wizard” | |
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Version 1.5 of the “Buy
Accessible Wizard” lets agencies
store data about
Section 508 purchases and
helps users apply accessibility
standards to micropurchases—
those under $2,500.
GSA’s Center for IT Accommodation
and the Accessibility
Forum launched Version 1.0 of
the Wizard last July. But it did
not receive authority to operate
until May.
“We had some concern about
storing data on a public Internet
site so now agencies can install
the tool on their network and
save data that can be used for
future Justice Department surveys
and for employees to use
as a reference for buying 508-
compliant products,” said Terry
Weaver, director of GSA’s Center
for IT Accommodation. “This
tool will streamline 508 compliance,
help ensure agencies are
performing it uniformly and
document compliance.”
Justice surveys agency
progress in complying with 508
standards every two years.
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| | This tool will streamline 508 compliance, help ensure agencies are performing it uniformly and document compliance. —GSA’s Terry Weaver |
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Weaver said there are 66 provisions
in six categories under
Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation
Act Amendments,
and agency employees don’t
always understand how to apply
them to their systems.
The Wizard makes that
process much easier, and since
the exemption for micropurchases
ended April 1, the tool
should become even more useful,
Weaver said.
“We mined through the Buy
Accessible portal and summarized
vendor statements of how
many of the 508 provisions are
met by the product and then
rated the product based on their
compliance,” Weaver said.
GSA officials used the Wizard
to review 93 products based on
the United Nations Standard
Products and Services Code.
In the 10 months since GSA
released the beta version of the
Wizard, agencies have liked
using it, Weaver said. Anecdotal
data found that agencies cut
the time it takes to review products
for 508 compliance to 20
minutes from as much as two or
three days, she added.
The IRS, for instance, recommended
the Wizard for all
micropurchases.
GSA and contractors developed
the application using
open-source tools: a MySQL
database manager from MySQL
Inc. of Seattle, Java Server
Pages, JavaBeans and Apache
Tomcat Web server software.
The number of visitors to GSA’s
site, at www.section508.gov,
also increased to 1.7 million
from 340,000 in January,
Weaver said.
The site recently added a
course on buying accessible
telecommunications products
to its stable of online educational
seminars.
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