Ronza Othman, a blind attorney with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Baltimore, has lobbied her agency to use technology that people with disabilities can use. | Thanks to Ronza Othman
Congress mandated a portion of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act known as Section 508 in 1998, which requires federal agencies to make technology accessible. But almost a quarter of a century later, they still fail to do so. And it’s not just about ordering lunch. About 30 percent of the most popular federal websites fail to meet accessibility standards, according to a 2021 report from the Foundation for Information Technology and Innovation. Enforcement is virtually non-existent, and agencies spend little effort or money to comply.
“My company’s clients are currently dealing with training required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that don’t work with screen readers for the blind and with intake kiosks at the Social Security Administration that aren’t accessible,” said Eve Hill, an attorney at Brown, Goldstein & Levy, who testified before the Senate Committee on Aging about the issues last month.
Hill, along with Anil Lewis, executive director for blindness initiatives at the National Federation of the Blind, and Jule Ann Lieberman, assistive technology program coordinator at Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities, asked senators to make sure the federal government adheres to federal disability law.
Most frustrating, proponents said, is that making technology accessible isn’t difficult. It just requires foresight. And it’s important. More than a quarter of Americans have a disability.
In the past 10 years, the DOJ has not made public any of the biennial reports that Congress has mandated on Section 508 compliance. As of the DOJ’s last report in September 2012, less than half of federal agencies had established a compliance plan. Those who did had an average operating budget of $35,000 per year spent on the task.
In June, Chairman of the Senate Aging Committee Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and ranking member Tim Scott (RS.C.), along with other lawmakers, wrote: Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
They asked McDonough for detailed information about the accessibility of VA websites and plan to reconcile it, noting that only 8 percent of his public sites and even fewer of his intranet sites were compliant. “The lack of fully accessible Web sites at VA is a potential barrier to the one-quarter of all veterans with service-related disabilities, and could be a harbinger of similar shortcomings at other federal agencies and departments,” the senators wrote.
In a letter in response to Casey, McDonough said the VA’s most used websites have an accessibility rating of 95 percent or higher. The department is now conducting daily accessibility scans, he said, to bring other sites into line.
In their letter to Garland, the lawmakers asked why the DOJ has not made more public of its reporting on the agencies’ compliance. The department said it is working with the White House Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration to pass its data on to Congress and the president.
Widespread Problems
Carlos Montas, a former employee of the Veterans Benefits Administration in Nashville, Tennessee, who is blind, can empathize with Othman’s struggles.
When he took a job at the agency in March 2020 that required him to call veterans to explain their benefits, his manager gave him digital audio workstation software and a braille display, which allowed him to read text on the screen with his fingertips.
But neither technology was compatible with much of the software he needed to do his job. He found that performing simple tasks, such as attaching a document to an email, was impossible.
He said the VA set performance benchmarks and eventually fired him for not keeping up. He filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and won his job back, along with back wages. He dropped out for a job at the EEOC a few months later.
Hearing impaired people also struggle with federal technology. Early in the Covid-19 Pandemic, Advocates with the National Association of the Deaf said HHS videos did not have proper subtitles and were not available in American Sign Language.
In their letter to McDonough, Casey and Scott highlighted the VA’s own data showing that hearing loss is “by far the most common disability associated with service delivery.” Hill said that deaf or hard-of-hearing people struggle with training and educational videos without captions.
The VA, which serves about 9 million veterans a year, is at the center of the problem, according to Casey and Scott. In March, the senators said the department had acknowledged that “hundreds of thousands of Section 508 compliance issues remain to be resolved.”
But accessibility issues span much of the federal government.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think tank that promotes the use of technology in policy solutions, audited federal websites in 2021. They found that 30 percent of those, including popular sites like weather.gov, energystar.gov and census.govfailed an automated accessibility test and nearly half had web pages that failed the test.
The report recommends that the General Services Administration, which supports the logistics needs of other federal agencies, establish an accessibility testing lab to ensure sites are compliant and expand its existing Digital Analytics program to provide real-time accessibility testing. to feed. It also suggested that Congress require the DOJ to make its 508 accessibility reports public.
Eric Egan, a policy officer at the foundation, said he was not aware of the steps the GSA had taken to implement the reports’ recommendations. He said the foundation was encouraged by the oversight of the Senate Committee on Aging.
A GSA spokesperson said the agency collects self-reported data from agencies about their compliance with Section 508, analyzes it and makes recommendations. GSA is also involved in a multi-agency effort to update Section 508 compliance guidelines.
‘A flawed process’
Proponents of people with disabilities say that solving accessibility problems doesn’t have to be expensive. In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Aging, Lewis tried to dismiss senators from the idea that accessible technology costs a lot. “Accessible encryption is just good encryption,” he said.
He gave an example. If the federal government created all of its documents on typewriters and then handed them over to a contractor to digitize, it would be expensive and inefficient. Rather than stacking outdated technology on a newer framework, government should use technology that designs around accessibility from the ground up, he said.
Some vendors offer such tools, says Sommer Panage, who leads a team of engineers focused on accessibility at Slack, the instant messaging service. She said Slack has long considered the needs of people with disabilities in product design and recently changed its internal operations to create its software. more consistently accessible.
Managing a team of engineers focused on accessibility, Panage said her team is now making sure people with disabilities can use each new feature before it’s released, while also making sure it works with third-party accessibility tools.
“There’s a really big matrix of the combinations of different operating systems, different screen readers, different screen readers within each operating system, and then Slack itself,” she told POLITICO. “What we’ve really been working on now is thinking holistically about that matrix.”
But advocates of people with disabilities say the federal government is lagging behind. Agencies don’t often test technology for accessibility before implementation, and the consequences are rare when government contractors fail to ensure people with disabilities can use their products, said Doug George Towne, chairman and CEO of Access Ready, a disability rights advocacy group. “It’s a flawed process,” he said.
Othman said a culture of money laundering makes life worse for people with disabilities in her workplace. For example, when her office updated the copiers, the agency was given the option to pay a small additional fee for a voice pack, which would have made the machines accessible to employees with visual impairments. A lever mount was also available to help employees in wheelchairs raise the copier lid. But the agency chose neither.
After employees, including Othman, complained, she said the office bought a few packages instead of deploying the technology across the office.
Information blackout
President Joe Biden was credited early in his administration for: prioritize accessibility. An interpreter has regularly translated Biden’s speeches into sign language, and the White House has provided subtitles for those watching online. The White House press secretary is always accompanied by a sign language interpreter, and the administration has provided live audio descriptions of events at the White House for those with visual impairments.
In June 2021, Biden issued an executive order asking agencies to “improve accessibility, ensure lodging can be requested, increase promotion and hiring opportunities, and reduce physical accessibility barriers.”
The Office of Management and Budget already requires 24 agencies to report twice a year on the accessibility of their technology infrastructure.
Patty Murray (D-Wash.) talks to reporters at the US Capitol. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
But those reports are not public. It’s part of a broader information obfuscation that Casey and four other senators, Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Kirsten Gillibrand (DN.Y.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Richard Burr(RN.C.), drew attention to in a letter dated 11 august to Comptroller General Eugene Dodaro.
The senators asked Dodaro, who heads Congress’s watchdog division, the Government Accountability Office, to investigate, writing that “the lack of public reporting and accountability leaves Congress and taxpayers without sufficient information about the level of compliance with the access requirements for the disabled.”