Business Development

508 compliance, which is also known as the standards of Web Accessibility, is a way for the web application to be easily located and accessible by all people. A good web presence could give a company more than a traditional offline point of contact which clients could ever offer. It can even attract at a lower cost clients that otherwise would not be able to reach you. To be able to do such a challenging task the application should be developed according the section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act amended in 1998 by the Congress.

The section 508 states that all states and federal agencies have to assemble their websites as accessible by people with various disabilities, i.e. hearing disorders, blindness, learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities, etc. Since the date it was accepted, the section expanded its scope and became an advisable standard to all the web sites.

The websites which do not represent federal agencies are not under the obligation of the Rehabilitation Act but the principles of the 508 compliance have been adopted by the developers of the world-wide-web standards. Nowadays, the accessibility is one of their primary concerns. This includes developing websites that have graceful transformation level form one form to another. Such websites should remain accessible despite any change of the conditions under which the visitor accesses the site. It is believed that this makes the web more easily used in various conditions by all kinds of people.

This means that a web page should be accessible considering the normal conditions imposed by the developer, but it should also serve equally well when the person that uses it cannot use a mouse or a keyboard, as in a process of driving their car (in a hands free environment) or accessing the web application on their mobile phone.

By developing a section 508, the developers often provide their clients with higher quality websites which have a bigger ranking in search engines such as Yahoo or Google. As usually all of these search engines use text based robots to index the content of a web page, a website that lacks some accessibility feature or is not created with 508 compliance might not ever have a chance to reach higher in the result pages.

All these facts make the developers who produce their web applications using the 508 compliance to stand out in the market. Such compliance is a must for any serious website which wants to attract and reach all kinds of clients and often could result in a very competitive advantage.