Chapter 2. Meeting Accessibility Requirements | Joseph Lowerys Beyond Dreamweaver

On June 21, 2001, Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act went into effect. As of that date, all Federal departments and agencies were mandated to make their web sites accessible in accordance with the specific regulations of Section 508. If you work on a Federal government web site, you already know this and are, in keeping with the law, creating accessible web sites. If you're not a developer for a U.S. government agency, you can skip this chapter, right?

Wrong. Section 508 has had a tremendous ripple effect across the entire web:

State, city and municipal governments are following the Federal lead.
Universities, colleges, and other educational institutions ”many of which depend on Federal grants ”are embracing accessibility standards rapidly .
Companies that do business with any government ”but especially with the Federal government ”have a vested interest in complying .
Businesses that are outside the government circle see an increased market available through accessible web sites.

Macromedia itself has significantly embraced the pursuit of accessibility standards, even to the point of establishing a product manager where there is no single product. The accessibility initiative has had a profound effect on Dreamweaver MX. In addition to the software becoming far more accessible for web developers who have disabilities , numerous features were added to make the crafting of accessible web sites workable and efficient. Moreover, Dreamweaver provides functionality to validate anything from the current page to an entire site for Section 508 compliance and more.

The goal in this chapter is to help you build Section 508-compliant web sites in Dreamweaver MX creatively and efficiently . To that end, you'll find a great deal of specific information about the various statutory requirements and, perhaps more importantly, how you can best implement those requirements. You'll also see how to use Dreamweaver to check your work ”both for new pages and for existing sites.