A year after the General Services Administration’s landmark assessment on Section 508 conformance, many agencies are still struggling to meet digital accessibility requirements for their online assets.

GSA is expected to publish the results of its 2024 assessment later this month, but accessibility officials shared some preliminary findings during an annual interagency accessibility forum last month.

“Overall, we see a stagnation on accessibility efforts, with the majority of entities still showing no movement year over year,” GSA Senior ICT Accessibility Specialist Kristen Smith-O’Connor said during the Nov. 13 event. “Some of that is related to lack of resources for testing.”

GSA’s inaugural fiscal 2023 report showed “widespread non-compliance” with how well agencies were conforming to Section 508 requirements for their digital content, such as websites, electronic documents and mobile apps. At the time, three-quarters of agencies were struggling to meet digital accessibility standards for not only internal technologies for federal employees, but also public-facing technologies.

For 2024, agencies’ conformance to digital accessibility standards in their Information and Communication Technology assets remained low governmentwide. GSA has said that limited staffing and resources are key drivers of agencies’ ongoing challenges with digital accessibility.

Still, Mike Gifford, a senior strategist at digital services firm CivicActions, said he sees the increased transparency of where agencies are in their current accessibility levels as a step in the right direction.

“It’s really good to see the work that’s being done on this, and the efforts to raise awareness within the organizations, especially the part about how much staffing is required for accessibility and the understaffing of accessibility across the board,” Gifford said. “I think the most important thing is that this is being done, and that this needs to keep happening. This type of annual evaluation of websites is really the only way we’re going to go off and make improvements in government agencies.”

At the same time, GSA’s preliminary 2024 results showed some developments that pointed in a more positive direction. One finding, for instance, showed that more agencies are reporting having a Section 508 program manager — and “very few” don’t have an accessibility program manager at all Smith-O’Connor said. Program managers are also spending more of their work hours on efforts that support Section 508 conformance. There was also a small increase in the number of full-time staff members who are conducting accessibility-related work.

The developments come after the Office of Management and Budget recently directed agencies to make Section 508 conformance a higher priority. In a 2023 memo, OMB called on all agencies to name a Section 508 program manager, regularly evaluate their accessibility efforts, and establish feedback mechanisms to remediate web issues, among other efforts.

Moving forward, Smith-O’Connor said GSA’s efforts to improve Section 508 conformance and agencies’ accessibility goals will bleed into fiscal 2025 as well.

“One of those is that we’re continuing our efforts to determine the feasibility and requirements of an accessibility design and testing lab. That is still very much in flight for us,” Smith-O’Connor said. “We are also in the throes of research regarding establishing a governmentwide service to help agencies acquire products and services related to the accessibility of ICT.”

Agencies can expect the 2024 assessment’s composition and layout to be “very similar” to last year’s, Smith-O’Connor said. But she added that GSA is now including year-over-year comparisons on the accessibility questions and criteria. The assessment will also dig into various trends and explore potential drivers of change. GSA is expected to publish the full 2024 assessment on digital accessibility, with more detailed results, by the end of December.

Digital accessibility and AI, training for employees

Beyond looking at agencies’ conformance to Section 508, federal officials during November’s interagency forum also considered the various challenges of incorporating accessibility in the expanding use of AI across government.

“The problem that we encounter to this point is that with generative AI, most of the tools are trained on this mountain of data that is quite biased towards inaccessibility — in language, attitudes expressed online and in just the code,” said Andrew Nielson, GSA’s director of the governmentwide IT accessibility program. “If we’re asking generative AI to help us build new stuff based on what it’s trained on, the result is going to be more inaccessible content.”

But Nielson added that it’s possible to overcome that bias by creating more effective prompts, which can lead to more accessible content. To be able to do that, accessibility officials said training federal employees in digital accessibility and Section 508 conformance will be crucial.

“We’ve been really working hard to update all of our online trainings,” said Michael Horton, a senior ICT accessibility specialist at GSA. He added that the most popular course currently offered is a basic module on what Section 508 is, and why it’s important.

Gifford also said improving conformance has to involve the creation of better training programs and the development of accessibility expertise, particularly for software development teams and others who build federal digital assets. And the sooner accessibility is brought into consideration in the web development process, the better, he said.

“There are ways to build automated tools so that these are caught earlier in the process, but training and onboarding is part of that, so that people understand what their expectations are,” Gifford said. “The further you shift it left, the easier it is, the more robust solutions you get — and they tend to be less expensive as well.”

An automated data collection from the 2024 Web Almanac showed that the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had a majority of their webpages meeting digital accessibility standards. But many other agencies are still struggling to improve Section 508 conformance in their digital assets. And Gifford said the data collection doesn’t cover the full picture of accessibility, which is more difficult to measure in digital spaces.

“If you build a ramp, once it’s there, everyone can see that there’s a ramp,” Gifford said. “But with digital accessibility, on most websites, people can’t tell whether or not they’re accessible. You either need to have somebody with a disability who’s using assistive technology or somebody who understands what the guidelines are. And if you don’t have somebody who’s in those positions, they’re not going to be able to tell whether or not basic accessibility is being provided or not.”

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