1785941 - (bugzilla-section508) Section 508 Compliance (accessibility)

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, task)

Description

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

There are a number of US government agencies who use Bugzilla internally (NASA is a publicly visible example). New US government projects have to comply with the new accessibility guidelines in Section 508 of the Communications Act, so if we want them to be able to upgrade we need to comply (at least in our newer versions). See https://section508.gov/ . There is a template for a compliance statement at https://www.section508.gov/sell/vpat/ .

This is the master bug for a compliance audit. Violations of Section 508 can be filed as dependencies of this bug.

I am looking for a volunteer who could audit the 5.2 and harmony branches for compliance, file bugs for things that are violations as dependencies of this bug, and figure out how much of the VPAT we can actually provide at this point. Even if we're not compliant yet (I suspect we aren't) I would love to be able to provide a statement with the 5.2 release saying how compliant we are, and listing what's left to be fixed to make us compliant.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This is only temporarily blocking the 5.2 release. For the 5.2 release we don't need to be Section 508 compliant, but I'd like to know where we currently stand, and we can work on becoming compliant in the future. We'll need to do the same thing with the harmony branch prior to Bugzilla 6 being released (eventually), and I'm hoping we can have Bugzilla 6 compliant out of the box.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I'm told BMO did a bunch of accessibility stuff on Bugzilla so the Harmony branch may be more compliant than 5.2 is.