What is Section 508

Section 508 was originally added as an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in 1986. The original section 508 dealt with electronic and information technologies, in recognition of the growth of this field.

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In 1997, The Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act was proposed in the U.S. legislature to correct the shortcomings of the original section 508; the original Section 508 had turned out to be mostly ineffective, in part due to the lack of enforcement mechanisms. In the end, this Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act, with revisions, was enacted as the new Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, in 1998.

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​​What It Means To You

Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act prohibits federal agencies from buying, developing, maintaining, or using electronic and information technology that is inaccessible to people with disabilities. More than a decade later, Congress put teeth in the legislation by passing the Workforce Investment Act which gives people with disabilities the right to sue agencies in federal court and file administrative complaints for noncompliance.

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It is the inherent seriousness of Section 508 that has made it a veritable industry benchmark for accessibility by thousands of organizations and businesses across the U.S. and around the world.

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​What We Do

Documents posted on web sites need to follow the same accessibility standards as the web sites themsleves. When you post a PDF document on a web site that needs to be Section 508 compliant, the PDF document also needs to follow the Section 508 standards. We can help you make your PDF documents accessible and Section 508 compliant. We will check the accessibility of your documents, and make the necessary changes so that you are ready to post them on your web site.

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In addition, we will also make sure that these documents work well with screen readers, and screen magnification software. Our PDF accessibility services will ensure that your documents are usable and accessible to all people, regardless of abilities, or assistive technology. What you will get:

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• A document which follows all Section 508 standards
• Will have the proper reading order
• Proper tagging of table cells
• Deletion of unwanted artifacts that can cause problems with screen readers
• All images will be described to people with visual impairment
• All information will be properly tagged
• All forms will be usable for people with disabilities

Concentrate on the work you need to do, and we will take care of accessibility and ensure that you comply with legislation.

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Accessibility and Print Design
Miller Graphics understands what it takes to get a job to print, and how a concept layout needs to be adjusted before release. We make sure all supporting art files adhere to printing standards and we have the capability to work with the printer on any RIP issues that may occur. These and other protocols are basic standards that all artists should take into account when releasing a job to print.

 

But what happens when the client wants that print job to be viewed on their web site? Well it’s easy — just make a low res pdf of the native file and you're done, right? Wrong! Most designers do not take accessibility into account when designing for print. And when you think about it, why should they? There are only two programs that were built for print in mind: QuarkXPress and Adobe inDesign. QuarkXPress has no accessibility features in its programing whatsoever. Even if an artist wanted to have accessibility in mind in his/her print design, they would not be able to achieve it if using Quark.

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inDesign on the other hand has a multitude of accessibility features in its programming. Setting up headers, bookmarks, links, image tagging, tables, reading order, etc. can make a documents remediation much easier when exported to pdf without sacrificing design. But to have a designer set up that file for accessibility may not be that easy. Their job is preparing a file for print — and they may not even know whether or not the file is to be uploaded to the web. So they would be less inclined to do the extra work involved in preparing files for the web.

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At Miller Graphics we understand the importance of incorporating print and web. Right from the start, we can set up your print job with accessibility incorporated into your file for easier PDF remediation. This will make the process more cost-effective if the job is a control that may have multiple revisions and reprints. We can also convert your Quark or Illustrator files into inDesign and set it up for accessibility so that you have a clean file ready to go if needed.