Re: 508 Question

My interpretation is that, like a few other parts of 508 and lots of 255 and ADA that it is, for all intents and purposes, ambiguous and will require a court to determine the actual meaning.
Last summer, President Bush signed the ADA restoration act which removed a lot of the ambiguity from the original and made it a much stronger bit of legislation. As for 508, I'm not at all sure if the Congress has any idea of when they may revise the law and, given things like a financial collapse, economic stimulus and a pair of wars, I doubt it will be too much of a priority.
I suppose the best thing would be to look at the notes from Congress from the committee hearings, floor debate, etc. and try to derive legislative intent from the discussion that didn't make it into the strict language of the law. 

cdh
On Mar 27, 2009, at 9:23 AM, Homme, James wrote:


Hi,
Paragraph (l) of the Section 508 web standards reads as follows.
When pages utilize scripting languages to display content, or to create interface elements, the information provided by the script shall be identified with functional text that can be read by assistive technology. I’m focusing on the word “identified” in that paragraph. This sounds like that assistive technology only needs to know that script elements exist, not that it necessarily needs to be able to use those elements. Note that I’m only going on the language of the paragraph, not how I think that pages with scripts should function, as in assistive technology should be able to work with the script elements besides identify them. My question is how do you interpret this paragraph? 
Thanks.
Jim


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Jim Homme, Usability Engineering.
412-544-1810.
Catch the gratitude attitude.
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