RantWoman has received, from one of her favorite blind networking venues, news of a blind lawyer who works for the Department of Homeland Security who has sued his agency for ignoring the legal requirements of Section 508. The person who originally posted this bulletin, Jamal Mazrui, of the FCC, writes:
I think this is a first-of-a-kind test of a law, Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, which has been poorly implemented by the federal government, and before now, not challenged legally by a federal employee with a disability (there have been administrative complaints, but not a challenge in court). In my opinion, proper implementation of this law could make a considerable difference in the availability of accessible technology to people with disabilities.
Section 508 imposes no mandates on the private sector. Rather (perhaps ingeniously), the mandate is on the federal government to uphold a high standard of accessibility in the information and communication technologies (ICT) that it purchases from the market. There are reasonable exceptions if an accessible option is not available for procurement, or if the cost of such an option constitutes an undue burden or fundamental alteration.
Since the U.S. government is the biggest buyer of ICT in the country, however, the market incentive is significant. Most companies would probably not find it sensible to make an accessible product for federal customers and a different, inaccessible version for the rest of the market.
PDF and text versions of the lawsuit document, filed in federal court can be found as follows.
www.EmpowermentZone.com/Leiterman508lawsuit.pdf
Text
www.EmpowermentZone.com/Leiterman508lawsuit.txt
Commentary from RantWoman's experience:
--RantWoman is aware that Congress, in its post 9/11 zeal to cut red tape and get down to the business of battling terrorism or wracking vengeance or whatever. exempted the DHS from all kinds of pesky labor relations and other standards of sensible public agency behavior. RantWoman has no basis for knowing and may not go look up whether these exemptions at all include Section 508. Even if there were some kind of exemption for this agency though, this agency needs to interact with other agencies dependent on some of the same technological infrastructure so EVERYONE needs to be making strides to more accessibility.
--RantWoman notes in the complaint that the complainant is a lawyer, not a software test professional, but because of poor accessibility of the software his agency uses, he spends a very large percentage of his time troubleshooting software interactions, stuff his tech support staff darn well should have spared him upfront. RantWoman used to be way more of a fuss with the geek guts of things nut than she is now. RantWoman frequently just wants it to work and "it" definitely includes functionality to do whatever task is at hand in concert with needed assistive technology. RantWoman has too much experience herself with the problem of still effectively getting drafted for software test duty instead of whatever she thought her task was. Hint to the federal government: software test professionals are probably cheaper than lawyers!
--RantWoman does not consider herself an expert on legislative intent re: Section 508, but one point of setting standards is to help make complying with the standards easy and automatic. In order for things to get automatic, someone has to enforce standards. (For comparison, RantWoman finds BBC websites good with a variety of accessibility measures; RantWoman was reading something by a developer who used to work at the BBC and he was talking about how it was automatic to check accessibility features, the tools he was using made it easy AND he involved a blind guy (even N of 1 is a big improvement over n of 0))
--The complaint does not mention ANY process during software evaluation or upgrade cycles to include accessibility as a requirement. Plenty of organizations DO recognize accessibility as a requirement. In the worst case decisions get made with a proviso that the upgrade will be accessible even if the current version is not. So RantWoman does not particularly buy the "no accessible alternative" argument.
--This guy's chain of command sounds like it is not even trying and the automatic salary increase mentioned in the complaint is an example. He is a lawyer not software test staff. Articulating requirements SHOULD ensure that as much as possible beta testing happens before it gets to his desk. Articulating requirements SHOULD also cause his agency to evaluate how many other people would be positively impacted by improved accessibility.
--RantWoman has sat in rooms with people from large organizations, people who work way deeper in software development than she herself would go near. They talk about how accessible software is nearly always better quality in other respects as well. So again, if you include accessibility in the evaluation criteria....
Not too long ago RantWoman sat on a webinar about exactly Section 508 compliance. The speakers were someone from DHS, someone from Social Security and someone from a third agency RantWoman does not remember which. RantWoman did not always track who was speaking but one person talked about someone about to file a complaint. The person speaking on the webinar sounded like a very thoughtful Section 508 evangelist and he talked to the person about to file a complaint. They discovered that indeed someone else was affected by the same problem and were able to secure commitment to accessibility with the next upgrade.
The webinar was interesting in another respect. IT was put on by the ADA Center of the Great Lakes. The webinar tool had a bunch of accessibility features, so many that RantWoman read through on a fast skim, decided that she would care more if she were going to use the tool repeatedly and just participated by phone without worrying about all the interface subtleties. There was a channel for sign language interpreting which added technical difficulties at one point. For better or worse, It was definitely an interesting demonstration effort.
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In response to comments from another poster about short product development and deployment schedules:
The product development and deployment cycle can be pretty short for some products, too short to make accessibility an obvious bet--unless it is clearly articulated as a requirement, a condition inherent to a specific marketplace.
For the federal government or a single federal department, though, the environment does not change that fast for many production applications, things that all employees in certain work categories are going to need to use. (For comparison, RantWoman is still running Windows XP with a very nice clean Windows Classic desktop thank you very much. The city of Seattle is just this year upgrading to Windows 7; most large organizations where RantWoman has worked are NOT running the bleeding edge of anything--except sometimes as far as accessibility and compatibility with accessibility tools.)
EVEN IF the federal government needs or thinks it needs special customizations, they can state accessibility as a requirement, a starting point and customize from there.
For example, one of the issues mentioned in the lawsuit is the use of inaccessible security dongles. These are small electronic devices a user might have to read off a screen and type into some step of a login process. Users who cannot see or who have dexterity problems might easily be flummoxed by these things. RantWoman long ago had a job involving a dongle. RantWoman still officially had adequate vision, but barely adequate for a small screen with very poor contrast displaying the numbers RantWoman was supposed to type. In return for typing the right numbers as part of a login sequence, RantWoman received approximately, the authority either to change God's password if provided convincing proof by phone that she was indeed talking to God or to route God's secretary to the head of Data Security when she wanted RantWoman to permit her to read God's email. In other words, the dongle was only half the security gateway even in that tiny example.
RantWoman notes on the list where she read of the suit, a couple times a year, someone gets a new job and posts an inquiry about how to deal with inaccessible security dongles. People posted various workarounds which means there ARE workarounds that the part of DHS this guy works for could evaluate for their situation.
OR, because all the workarounds RantWoman has ever seen undo one or more layers of redundant security, someone COULD realize there is a problem and invent another kind of dongle with the necessary security functionality that has different interface on the user end. Looking at the dongle issue with an eye to accessibility might surface points that are problems for both blind people and for other categories of users.
RantWoman for instance might guess that the Department of Homeland Security would want to collaborate with and use data from the Department of Defense and the Justice Department. RantWoman has stumbled into conversations indicating that both of those places also have issues about inaccessible login and access regimens. In other words if someone were to look across a reasonable market they would discover more market than if they are just responding in the moment to one federal manager.
But this is RantWoman popping off. Probably she should find someone to pay her to think about this further,. RantWoman will be interested to hear what happens to this suit.
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Further commentary about vocational rehabilitation, Schedule A hiring which prioritizes hiring veterans and people with disabilities, these days all too often overlapping categories, for some percentage of federal positions, and in passing bout working rather than being on disability.
RantWoman would not say this conversation is particularly about rehab agencies EXCEPT to the extent that rehab agencies might be expected to know about things like the realities of Section 508 / 504 accommodations in the federal government, Schedule A and standard federal employment practices the same way they know about ADA and the private sector.
Perhaps another way of looking at the problem is to start with Schedule A and keeping people gainfully employed rather than, say, on disability. How do those two goals conflict with different managers' incentives and short term considerations or other barriers to increasing accessibility?
RantWoman had a conversation one time with someone she knows who has personnel responsibilities in another federal agency. RantWoman was asked a question about Dragon Naturally Speaking in a voc rehab context as opposed to all the ways it is used commercially. First software geek rant: stuff that is inaccessible for blind users probably does not have the hooks needed for other tools implemented either. Remember RantWoman's point above about better accessibility generally equals better software overall. The conversation left RantWoman with the impression that agencies feel a certain push to get people hired under Schedule A so that might be another angle for making the point that the guy filing the suit is not just living as an individual with too many weird specialized needs but instead typifies problems common among many agencies.
There. It's a fresh Monday morning and RantWoman must now return to crises closer at hand.
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