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The best reason to be Section 508 compliant (besides the Law) is increased visibility in search engines and better usability for your visitors. Another benefit is the ability to have your content viewed in a wider variety of User Agents (such as cell phone based web browsers).

It is almost ten years now since the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act requiring agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.

Section 508 was enacted to ensure people with disabilities are not excluded from accessing information by requiring the elimination of technology barriers. The barriers most often encountered by the disabled on the Internet are excluding technologies such as Java, JavaScript, and the overused technology of Flash animation. First, let me say I am not an anti-Flash extremist. I have in fact used Flash technology in designs and find there are many compelling applications for it. YouTube is a fine example; as are interactive training applications. The NOAA web site illustrates the proper use of Java technology in a 508 compliant manner well. Unfortunately, most of the applications of Flash and Java technology are gratuitous and seem implemented by otherwise well meaning web designers, much to the detriment of both the web site and the disabled visitors (customers) of the site. The most significant sight impaired visitor your web site will ever have is a search engine robot. You should always design your site as if the robot were your prime audience FIRST and then add the eye-candy (read Flash) later.
Here are some reasons and places on your site not to use Flash:

* Navigation. You should never make your web site navigation accessible only via Flash. This is a sure way to eliminate the disabled visitors of your site from navigating it. It also eliminates spiders from crawling your site if the only links are embedded in Flash.
* Content. Embedding content is a sure way to control the presentation of your site and also a sure way to prevent most search engines from including your site in their results. If a person is sight impaired they may not be able to access your content no matter how pretty it may appear to the sighted.

Other design errors to avoid for Section 508 compliance include the use of Frames and lack of a text equivalent for every non-text element such as images or Flash animations. I suppose at this point the quickest way to demonstrate what not to do would be by an example and illustration of what the sight impaired person (or search engine robot) may “see”.

Here is an example of what not to do for a Section 508 design: City of Stuart, FL Web Site

Here is a nice screen shot of this web site rendered in a (sight impaired) text based browser. As you can see from the image, the sight impaired get a message of “go away” rather than the alternate content which should be there. Of course this should bring home the fact that frames are possibly the worst thing you can do for your web site.

Now let’s go a little further and follow what links we DO have. The first is labeled “banner”.
I won’t bore you with an image of the banner frame- the frame contains this text: [banner_rev2_web.jpg] -which should drive home the reasoning behind the ALT requirement for non-text elements. An alt tag should be there to label the image with something such as “The Official City of Stuart web site” or similar.

Following the main frame link we have this page rendered in the Lynx browser:

You should see the first thing on the page is navbar.swf - a Shockwave/Flash file containing the navigation for the web site. Most search engines (and virtually all sight impaired visitors) will not be able to navigate the rest of the site other than the regular links on this frame page. The item on this page labeled EMBED is ironically a request to take a survey for feedback on this web site. The form posts to a simple FrontPage web bot save results component so the use of Flash here is gratuitous. A text link to the survey would work much better. In both cases where Flash is used here, GIF images with alt texts could have done the job with widespread support for virtually all user agents, even for the site impaired.

The fact that the designer took the time for a survey on her site indicates her care for the improvement of her customer’s experience with their web site product. Unfortunately, this site needs much improvement and perhaps more so is typical of the implementation seen with many service oriented web sites. It is important to remember the site exists solely to serve the visitors and failing that service leads to increased load on your staff as well as other costs. A Section 508 compliant web site has many benefits and chief among them is the saving of your resources when visitors can locate and access information quickly without tying up your staff on the phones, with email, or Faxes.
You may be wondering how you can check your site for Section 508 compliance. A quick check can be done using Cynthia Says which has an automated Section 508 test. It should give you a quick checklist of issues to resolve with your web designer should the test indicate failure. Most web sites will not pass all the tests and you should use the results as a guideline rather than looking for strict compliance. You can also find more information on the Official Section 508 website.