Introduction
In April 2014, the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted its General Comment No 2 on the issue of Accessibility, which applies to member States within the UN that have signed the treaty. The General Comment to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) seeks to provide guidance to all relevant stakeholders, such as states and international organizations, on how to ensure accessibility for persons with disabilities. The treaty serves as the first of its kind to address access to information and communication technologies (ICT) for users with disabilities, and may now serve as a basis for State parties to reinforce and regulate national legislative frameworks.
Notably the CRPD, Article 9, paragraph 13 places particular onus on public and private actors regarding ICT. “The focus is no longer on legal personality and the public or private nature of… information and communication, and services. As long as goods, products and services are open or provided to the public, they must be accessible to all, regardless of whether they are owned and/or provided by a public authority or a private enterprise.” This public and private distinction is a first of its kind. Prior regulations placed the requirements for accessible ICT solely on public or government entities. These entities were essentially held to be established in some way for the public good, and therefore had a right to be accessible to the public audience. The shift in language which now includes “all products and services open or provided to the public” places such accessibility requirements on private industry as well, and will set the tone for implementation of such standards by UN treaty members to the CRDP.
The United States & Section 508
Currently in the United States there is no accessibility standard applied to the majority of privately managed ICTs. Accessibility requirements in the US generally target public or governmental actors. These government accessibility guidelines and practices for ITCs are codified under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. . The Established in 1998 as an amendment to the 1972 Rehabilitation Act, Section 508’s stated goal is to eliminate barriers in information technology. The law applies to all Federal agencies and requires those agencies to give employees and members of the public with disabilities access to information that is comparable to access available to others.
Section 508 focuses on accessibility standards in the following areas: software applications and operating systems; web-based intranet and internet information and applications; telecommunications products; videos or multimedia products; self-contained, closed products; and desktop and portable computers. In terms of access to websites, for example, federal agencies must make efforts to ensure their sites are accessible. One example of accessibility is providing alternative text or “alt text” for images. The purpose of the alt text is to convey the information portrayed in the image for users with low-to-no vision to be able to access the page content through a screen reader. In such a case, the user would hear the alt text, which describes what the image conveys. Another example of a 508 accessibility requirement is providing sufficient contrast (a ratio of 4.5:1) between foreground text color and background color so users with low vision or colorblindness can view the text on a web page.
In instances where meeting accessibility requirements is too difficult or too costly to implement, federal agencies may request a waiver. In such cases, the agency may still be legally compliant, yet the website or services may not be accessible.
Updates to Section 508
The Section 508 Standards are part of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and address access for people with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. Section 508 provides guidelines for the minimum requirements for compliance. Since its establishment in 1998, however, there have been many advancements in regards to accessibility in the context of ICT. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web, has established Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which built and extended upon what were originally section 508 requirements. These recommendations incorporate new technologies, like HTML5 and WAI-Aria tagging. These enhancements provide greater levels of access to services and content, while providing better contextual markup across sites that aid users. Like the implementation of other established accessibility features, these enhancements are useful not only to users with disabilities, but users with temporary disabilities or who simply benefit from some form of assistance. For example, sufficient color contrast on a website not only helps users with low vision, but also sighted users who find themselves squinting at a mobile phone screen on a bright and sunny afternoon.
The United States Access Board (USAB) is the independent federal agency tasked with the creation and implementation of accessibility guidelines and standards. The USAB, which created the Section 508 Standards, is expected to update those standards in the coming year with recommendations from the WCAG 2.0. According to its website, the USAB submitted a proposed rule to update the Section 508 Standards to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on February 23, 2014, which has 90 days to complete a review. Once cleared by OMB, the proposed rule will be published in the Federal Register and will be available for public comment for a specified period of time. Updates to the law will require a timeline for government integration of the new standards, along with penalties for failure to comply. These updates are expected to improve access for users with disabilities, and enhance the user experience overall. Unlike the UN’s adoption of CDRP General Comment No 2, however, there is nothing to suggest that such accessibility features may ever be required from non-state actors.
Conclusion
While the adoption of the CRPD is a step towards making accessibility a universal expectation for both public and private actors, it will likely take some time before accessibility is included in the consideration of all online sites, services and tools. While the United States only requires such accessibility for government websites, the adoption of CRPD serves as the next small step towards setting an international standard for both public and private level of universal accessibility for ICTs and may lay the foundation for universal accessibility requirements.
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