The Situation
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires all electronic federal government materials to be accessible to people with disabilities. The law drives consistency and standards for software, documents, websites, and other government materials.
In supporting both internal operations and the people served by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), 508 compliance can’t be overlooked. Edwards Performance Solutions (Edwards) found that CMS’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) needed a practice to confirm that nothing blocked people with disabilities from using the documents on its SharePoint site.
When documents are correctly categorized, labeled, tagged, titled, and formatted using standard conventions, every team member has equal access to information.
Our Solution
After identifying documents that didn’t comply, Edwards set new file naming rules for all CMS SharePoint documents, including removing underscores. Edwards created an Authoring and Evaluation Guide, a cheat sheet that meets CMS and Health and Human Services requirements and lets users easily create and tag documents to 508 standards.
Following strict quality assurance practices, Edwards also used the JAWS (Job Access With Speech) screen reader to confirm that blind and visually impaired users can easily access documents through text-to-speech.
Knowledge management sessions taught contractor team members about 508 requirements, so documents were posted and labeled consistently on CMS SharePoint sites. Edwards also worked with CMS to build content-rich SharePoint storage with proper templates and categories, making document libraries easy to use under 508 standards.
Web-based content and applications need extra work. As a developer of eLearning courses, Edwards followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which include voice recordings, searchable text, text alternatives for images, and keyboard shortcuts. CMS also has its own rules for supported browsers and operating systems. At Edwards’ recommendation, CMS now requires independent accessibility testing to confirm 508 compliance before courses are released agency-wide.
