Can the government really be “open” if it’s not open for everyone? As Federal, state, and local governments put more of their data online, it is important that they take into consideration the needs of all of their constituents, including those who are disabled and use special technologies to access the Internet. This becomes especially important as new data portals such as Data.gov are built and put online.

In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to require Federal agencies to ensure that their information technology products were accessible to those with disabilities. Section 508 introduced specific requirements that determine what it means for a product to be accessible and along with specific details on what it means for a web-based product to be considered compliant. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has also provided additional guidance through their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). In essence, to be considered “accessible,” visitors must “have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to that provided to the public who are not individuals with disabilities.” Disabled visitors must be afforded the same access to the content of a website that is available to those without disabilities.

Here at Socrata, we take accessibility seriously, and strive to make it possible for everyone to explore government data catalogs and discover interesting and provocative datasets. As such, we’ve invested significant engineering effort into making Socrata data sites Section 508-compliant for visitors who use accessible technologies. Some of the steps we’ve taken to aid accessibility include:

• Ensuring that all content images include descriptive “alt” attributes, that textual links are used for navigation whenever possible, and that form elements use “label” tags to describe form fields.
• Designing our Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to allow accessible technologies to automatically scale the text and content of our website to make it viewable for those with reduced vision.
• Providing “skip links” to allow users to jump between sections on the page using only a keyboard.
• Keeping the semantic layout of our pages separate from their visual layout, allowing them to gracefully degrade when Cascading Style Sheets are disabled or when the site is viewed with a screen reader or refreshable braille display.
• For pages where the use of AJAX or JavaScript would interfere with the use of accessible technologies, we provide keyboard-accessible skip links to allow the visitor to switch to an alternate version of the site that does not make use of JavaScript or AJAX technologies.

Together, these features allow visitors taking advantage of technologies such as screen magnification tools, screen readers, or refreshable braille displays to discover, view, and manipulate data made available through Socrata-powered data sites. For more information about Socrata’s Section 508 efforts, visit our accessibility statement or our profile on GSA’s BuyAccessible Product Directory.

Photo by lissalou66 and released under the CC BY-ND 2.0 license.