WCAG 2.1 (or latest version) and Section 508 Requirements
In order to meet accessibility requirements set forth by the United States Access Board, and enforced by the United States Department of justice, a website must meet Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 (or latest version) standards for all content and documents on the website. There is no exemption for content and documents that predate the adoption of Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 (or latest version) standards.
As you may recall from the overview course, On January 18, 2017 the United States Access Board approved a rule change that included adoption of W3C WCAG 2.0 Standards (now version 2.1), and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently requiring state entities that receive federal funds to have accessible websites. The DOJ is considering imposing a broad requirement on state governments to have accessible websites whether they receive federal funds or not. These changes affect all web related content, like any of the content on your web pages and documents (Word, PDF, Excel and more) within your site. There is no exemption for documents and pages that were posted before the rule changes went into effect.
REMOVE AND DELETE IT, or REMEDIATE IT!!
Accordingly, it is important for State of Nevada content management system editors to remove outdated content and documents from the website. Any content and documents that are not removed will need to be remediated by the site’s content editors to meet accessibility requirements.
Siteimprove
Siteimprove can assist you in cleaning up your current website content and documents.
Siteimprove Identifies:
- Siteimprove identifies in documents
- the number of documents and document types
- how big each document is (Siteimprove only monitors PDF files smaller than 15 MB)
- how many times users have clicked on a document during the monitoring period
- accessibility issues in content (HTML)
- which accessibility issues to fix first to improve the accessibility overall score
- historical site progress in terms of the number of A, AA & AAA issues
- Misspelled words
- broken links in content and in PDF documents
Siteimprove Provides:
- a description of each accessibility issue,
- why it is important and how to fix it
- links to additional techniques on how to meet ADA success criteria
- an inventory of pages, documents and files of all types
- the number of referring pages (pages that link to a particular page)
- the date the page or file started being monitored by the tool
- the number of page views
- The page level in the site
- a method to monitor the readability of content
- a method to monitor the readability of content
- a method to monitor for Social Security Numbers
- a method to monitor for email addresses
Siteimprove Reports
The Siteimprove Monitoring Tool provides editors with a multitude of reports that include:
- A list of the non-compliant documents (Accessibility > PDFs)
- A list of website pages and the number of page views since Siteimprove began monitoring the page
(Quality Assurance > Inventory > Pages)
- A list of the number of the different types of documents in a website and whether it is an internal or external document. Clicking on a documents of that type and includes how many times users have clicked on each document. Useful in determining which documents to delete from the site and which to remediate.
(Quality Assurance > Inventory > Documents)
- A list of the different media files types in a website and whether it is an internal or external file. Clicking on a type displays a list of files of that type and includes how many times users have clicked on the file. Useful in determining which files to delete from the site and which to remediate. (Quality Assurance > Inventory > Media Files)