Section 508 Compliance Made Simple

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, requires that when Federal agencies develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology (EIT), they shall ensure that EIT allows Federal employees with disabilities to have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access to and use of information and data by Federal employees who are not individuals with disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the Federal agency.

Section 508 also requires that individuals with disabilities, who are members of the public seeking information or services from a Federal agency, have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to that provided to members of the public without disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the Federal agency.

For many documents, Adobe Acrobat Professional offers all the tools you need to be Section 508-compliant.  But sometimes you will see errors and come to a stopping point.  At that point, you'll need more robust Section 508 compliance tools, such as SS Bart Group'sAccessibility Management Platform (AMP) to provide a deeper level of analysis than Acrobat Professional.

When beginning a Section 508 compliance effort, first review the Agency requirements. While there are standard 508-compliance requirements, there may be differences in how they are applied.  For example, some Agencies require that all photos be described while others want the image to be tagged "artifact" when the image is decorative, such as a stock photograph.  Additionally, there may be some guidance for what information to use in the meta data tags. 

Ideally, we recommend that clients provide us with an original clean electronic document to convert to PDF.  Scanned documents can be made compliant but there are extra steps required and it is thus more resource intensive to make compliant.  For documents originating in Office products (i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), it is much easier to add alternative text in the original document prior to converting to PDF.

When converting a Microsoft Office document into a Section 508-compliant PDF, it is important to change conversion settings to "Enable accessibility and reflow with Tagged PDF" prior to creating the PDF.  Do not "print" to PDF as this will not generate a compliant file. 

When making an existing or converted PDF Section 508 compliant, tag the file for accessibility using Acrobat Professional, then run a full check  to identify any errors to be fixed in both Acrobat and AMP.

Then check the reading order to ensure the flow that an automatic reader would use is consistent with the document content flow.  Then ensure each image has alternate text that describes it for the blind. 

It is important to ensure that metadata is included in the PDF.  Metadata typically includes author, title, subject, and keywords.  If this data is not included in the original file, use the Adobe Acrobat Document Properties Window to add or edit metadata. Although the lack of metadata will not render errors in the compliance check, it is a component of making a PDF Section 508 Compliant that is not to be skipped.

Bookmarks help people navigate through a long document. If the bookmarks pane displays by default when the document opens, it lets people see the menu of bookmarks.  Bookmarks should be included in any PDF of ten pages or longer.  If one exists, the bookmarks should follow the document’s Table of Contents or otherwise use the major headings of the PDF document. 

Depending upon the project, it is possible that a number of unidentifiable formatting errors could occur due to the way the document was originally created, saved, and/or formatted.  When this occurs, use AMP to identify and correct the errors by utilizing the program’s powerful testing engine, work flow, and catalogue of accessible development best practices.  This is another reason why providing the document in its original format is important.

Powerpoint slides that have been converted to PDF are a common example.  An accessibility checker will throw errors when background images are not tagged.  Sometimes, the best course is to re-do the Powerpoint into a simpler form, removing the decorative images and leaving in only those images that have meaning for the presentation.

For Section 508-compliant videos, OPP recommends using Adobe Premier which in combination with SubtitleWorkshop to create subtitles that match with the audio file. This enables you to make videos completely 508 compliant with time-stamped XML files compatible with all formats (flv, wav, and mp4).  This is of course an over-simplification.  OPP has a 15-page step-by-step guide in-house to document our process for making Section 508 compliant videos.

For more information, https://www.section508.gov/ - is the primary resource for guidance on Section 508 Compliance.