GSA: accessibility compliance improves everyone's quality of life

Sitting in a sports bar, watching the Redskins play, it would probably never occur to the suffering fan that he or she is reaping a benefit from an assistive technology: the closed captioning on the television created for people with hearing loss. "You don't care if it's a loud environment," says GSA's Terry Weaver, you're able to follow the game.

As director of GSA's Information Technology Accessibility and Workforce Division, Weaver says that changes to technology today "are going to be benefiting all of us. Speaking as a boomer, I know I need it."

As the U.S. Access Board readies to update accessibility guidelines, known as Section 508, Weaver explained GSA's role in the process to FederalNewsRadio. She said that money talks, and when GSA does the talking, suppliers listen.

It's really a carrot kind of approach. We're saying "Gee, companies, we are your single biggest buyer. Maybe we're one percent of your purchases, but there's nobody bigger than us." If we can buy things that make technology work for people with disabilities, they don't want to make a government version and a non-gov version. They're going to make one version, so the ripple effect goes out and suddenly you find things that are accessible for folks that started out being a government requirement but made good business sense down the line.

Especially exciting, said Weaver, are the evolving technologies of web 2.0.

"It's something the Obama Administration has clearly shown an interest in. We're out there looking. How do we collaborate with the citizens? How do the citizens get involved?"

Weaver said that includes all citizens, including those with disabilities. The goal is to create hardware and software, "so that everybody gets to play."

Currently, under Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, federal web sites are required to use technologies to make them accessible to disabled users. The rules may seem thorny and nearly indecipherable to both federal and private web designers, Weaver said that's not the intent.

Section 508 "isn't a stop order. It's actually a include-everybody approach. If someone says '508' to you, they're not telling you to cut it out, they're saying make sure you make it work for everyone."

FederalNewsRadio's Jason Miller previously reported that GSA has been analyzing selected procurements to see how they mention 508, and the results have not been good, Weaver says.

She says well over 50 percent of the solicitations they look at do not mention 508 at all, even though it's for technology products or services.

Weaver says GSA also will up the ante in 2010 in how it evaluates requests for proposals.

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On FederalNewsRadio:

The Daily Debrief - GSA prepares for 2009 IDEAS Conference

The Daily Debrief - New standards for Section 508 compliance are coming

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