Jack Thomas
LIS 391
Learning Technologies Timeline
9/23/2002

United States Rehabilitiation Act of 1973 finally helps people with disabilities access information.
(June 25, 2001)

Almost thirty years after originally becoming law, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was re-authorized in 1998 and mandated on June 25, 2001. Section 508 outlines Electronic and Information Technology Acessibility Standards that help improve access of electronic information resources like the Internet and help make new technologies compliant with devices like screen readers, used by people with visual impairments to hear pages of text from electronic, ordinarily silent sources like monitors. The standards cover a wide variety of topics from proper TTY (Text-Telephone) systems to providing appropriate color and contrast options in software to requiring the use of text to describe images on a website.

Recent advances in information storage and retrieval in the past decade or so have created a new information rennaissance by utilizing electronic systems to speed up and expand access. While good for society as a whole, the move from traditional paper documents to more expensive electronic versions of countless information systems (like card catalogs, books, and even entire libraries), has increased the "digital divide" - a phenomenon that describes the difficulty of some portions of society (namely, the poor and the disabled) to access information in this electronic age.

The mandate this June (2001) forces all goverment agencies to not only consider those persons with visual impairments and other disabilities, but also to change their actions to ensure that all newly purchased technologies are fully compliant with the Section 508 standards. These requirements help overcome the growing problem of the digital divide and promise the possibility of equal access to information in an age which highly values universal and increased access to information.

Related Sites:
Section 508 Standards
(Especially take a look at 1194.22, which outlines requirements for Internet Webpages)

Brief History of Section 508 Standards

Section 508 'not as hard as people thought'
Looking back on the Section 508 Mandate (5/20/02)

Section 508 Resource Page
Everything you ever wanted to know

Talking Tax Forms Developed
One recent government response to the 508 Requirements (August 30, 2002)

U.S. Government study prompts World Summit on Accessibility
(June 25, 2022)(AP)

Twenty-one years after the U.S. Government's first officially mandated compliance with electronic accessibility, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a recent study has proven the global interest with accessibility of information. Several years after major U.S. goverment agencies like the Internal Revenue Service brought 508/assistive technology-compliant tax forms to the now outmoded Internet, the British and French governments jointly began forming an accessibility campaign throughout the European Union with a goal of further improving access to information.

The U.S. goverment has been collecting data on 508 (and subsequent 509 and 510) compliance and the general interest of using accessibility guidelines on the international level. The study, completed this past March with the help of several key governments including Britain, France, Germany, and China, shows not only that the global community is concerned with the ever-present digital divide, but also that accessibility standards like those in America seem to be subtly decreasing the digital divide.

Inspired by the promising results the study produced, leaders and aides from these countries videoconferenced last Thursday, and through several subsequent e-mails and asynchronous meeting sessions, announced to the world the planned World Summit on Electronic Information Accessibility sometime in the 4th quarter of this year. U.S. President Cuthbert met with reporters yesterday, saying that "we have a duty to our fellow citizens of the international information ecology to provide unimpeded access to all types of information, especially that information globally networked in systems like the GlobalNet. Our advances in information access prompted by the growth of the Internet 25 years ago should not go unusuable to today's user of the more robust GlobalNet."

Anyone who was there for the growth of the Internet and is now looking at the GlobalNet today can't argue that this new network provides even more promise for information access and retrieval. It is this promise of opportunity that world leaders seem to want to address in the World Summit just a few months from now. The planned World Summit comes at a very opportune time as the GlobalNet is still coming into its own. It is hoped that standards that might be formed from the upcoming summit, tentatively scheduled in London, will be able to be integrated into the GlobalNet while it its structure is still fluidly being developed and changed. An early entry into the standards of today's technology, it is hoped, would promote the consideration for accessibility in ubiquitous computing technologies still in development.