The Commonwealth's Accessibility and Web Standards were approved by CIO Lem Stewart, and the Information Technology Investment Board accepted his approval last week. Therefore, the official effective date of the Standards is November 4, 2005. The Standards are designed to facilitate access to and use of e-government for all Virginians.
This should be interesting. Does anyone comply?
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11 comments:
I completely agree with the accessibility standards but I wonder why all the web sites have to look the same... Some of the agencies have some really well organized, attractive sites. They are certainly much more interesting than the standard VITA is pushing out. Maybe they're trying to get all the agencies to get the sites the same so they can outsource them too...
VITA: noncompliant
VDOT: noncompliant
DMV: noncompliant
DSS: noncompliant
TAX: noncompliant
Virginia.gov: noncompliant
DGS: noncompliant
Someone's going to be shelling out some big bucks to get IN compliance...
Wonder how much they'll have to pay to get Virginia.gov in compliance... Don't they pay NIC $4 million+/yr. for maintenance?
They certainly make it look so easy... If only all the agencies had static html pages with simple menus...
Virginia.gov looks like the easiest to get in compliance, at least from what I can see on the surface. The new standards look like they're based on it, anyway.
The other sites mentioned above look like they have varying degrees of work ahead of them, from just a bit to a helluva lot. I imagine there won't be a "compliance fairy" that will be doing all that work for free. So who will be footing the bill?
The webmasters in the agencies have to fix them or they can hire someone. The word was pretty much "they will be done" at the VITA seminar. The agencies have a year to get in compliance and 3 months to get a plan to VITA detailing when the sites will be compliant.
I think many of the employees at the seminar had mild heart failure. Some mentioned that they don't even have web people at their agencies anymore and their sites have been static for years. There were several questions about sites that are basically "agency employee use only" are included since they didn't have a face to the normal citizens. No dice, they have to be done as well. The panel also pointed out that the accessibility standards also apply to any applications like vb apps, access, etc.
The resident expert at the meeting, Daniel Ross (DRS), announced that the changes were "no big deal". As for the accessibility changes, the attitude was basically "the law has been around for a while so you should have done it anyway"...
I imagine the job will be less cumbersome for agencies that have mostly text-based pages but those that have more "application" type sites have their work cut out for them. No JavaScript, No tables for formatting, no changing left menus, no defined font sizes, etc.
Of course, any agency can ask for exceptions due to hardship but will still be required to provide “equivalent facilitation”.
I came away with the impression that the bottom line is the old "You can do it or we will".....
At the last Va. government webmaster meeting in mid-2003, it was announced by VIPNet and VITA that... "this will not be another unfunded mandate."
That it would not go forward w/o the $'s.
Uh huh.
If only there were a central state IT agency to cost-effectively help all agencies with this... No, it makes much more sense to send each agency off on its own merry, peculiar way, helter skelter, and wish for the best.
Was the last webmaster meeting really in 2003? Whoever was in charge needs to be voted out, and someone else take over the meetings. Otherwise there isn't much point in having the group.
Why don't we get any comments from VITA or the Secretary of Technology or the Governor's Office? theshadow asked. Are we not important enough for their time?
Wouldn't it be interesting if VITA had a "forum" or blog for these types of questions? Now that the deal is signed it would seem that they would be able to answer questions. It surely would help their pr...
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