Section 508 Compliance Test

While XHTML validation may be a good indicator of the robustness of a website's design or the level of technical awareness and discipline of a website's developers, it does not present the whole picture. The Access Board has been charged with defining a set of standards for accessibility that will serve as the measuring tool to determine if a public website satisfies Section 508. Theoretically, all government and commercial websites must comply with Section 508; thus, the purpose of this test is to see if this is true and, if not, to gauge how bad the situation is.

The main tool for testing compliance with Section 508 is Bobby, a commercially available tool for parsing and analyzing a page to determine how many of the Access Board's 16 standards for compliance a test page satisfies. To test the level of Section 508 compliance of the test subjects, I ran Bobby on each page, recorded the number of accessibility errors -- which prevent a page from receiving 508 approval -- and the number of user checks -- which are triggered by potentially troublesome parts of a page but need to be checked by the page designer to see if they apply. Then I determined what percentage of the lines of code actually have accessibility errors.

1. Popular Sites (news, sports, etc.)
2. UNC Related
3. Search Engines
4. Government
5. Standards advocates (sites that promote good design)

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