In 1973 the United States Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act that is designed to ensure that people with visual, motor, auditory, or cognitive disabilites would have access to government resources that are currently available to people without those disabilities. That legislation was amended in 1993 and again in 1998. Section 504 and Section 508 of the act have particular significance for educational institutions that receive federal funds or whose students receive federal funds for tuition or other services provided by the institution. Section 504 states the following: "No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States... shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." This law has been applied to colleges whose students receive Pell Grants or other government funds. Section 508 applies to accessibility to the Internet.
- Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards (Section 508)
This site, published in the Federal Register on December 21, 2000, is the actual law that describes how the standards will be implemented.
- Introduction to Web Accessibility
This site explains the challenges faced by 20% of the populations that have one or more of four major disabilites: vision, hearing, motor, or cognitive and how Web sites can be designed to improve their ability to access information from your Web site.
- Creating Accessible Images
This site explains how to use graphics effectively to increase accessibility for people with blindness, low vision, color-blindness, deafness, motor disabilities, or cognitive disabilities. This site is especially useful for providing "long description" HTML tags for images such as graphical tables that are necessary for sighted readers but incomprehensible through a screen reader used by a person with sight limitations.
- Appropriate Use of Alternative Text
"Adding alternative text for images is the first principle of web accessibility. It is also one of the most difficult to properly implement. The web is replete with images that have missing, incorrect, or poor alternative text. Like many things in web accessibility, determining appropriate, equivalent, alternative text is often a matter of personal interpretation. Through the use of examples, this article will present our experienced interpretation of appropriate use of alternative text."
- Cognitive Disabilities
This site explains the differences between cognitive and functional disabilities and how to design Web sites that assist people with cognitive disabilities.
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