Online registration providers are waking up to the needs of people with disabilities, with two suppliers recently announcing compliance with Section 508 guidelines from the federal government's Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board.
This past September, Event Rebels.com, the 2-year-old Ellicott City, Md.-based provider, and San Francisco-based Certain Software launched new, accessible versions of their online registration systems.
EventRebels' vice president Charles Karow explains that for people with visual impairments, the new registration page is coded to be read by browsers that convert Web pages to the spoken word. There is alternate text for all images, and the pages have high contrast for better readability and never convey information by color alone (for color-blind individuals). The software has been approved by “Bobby,” the industry standard for measuring compliance with Section 508.
For Certain Software, Section 508 compliance is part of a new enterprise version of its Register123 software (see page 36).