Posted by Alessandro Vernet on Jul 22, 2009; 8:52am
URL: https://discuss.orbeon.com/Event-Handling-within-nested-XBL-components-tp45002p45011.html

Hi Betty,

Betty Harvey wrote

I have started some initial testing with Orbeon forms and Section 508
compliancy. I am not finding any issues with Section 508 yet. However,
my analysis hasn't been extensive.

Before I delved into testing further I thought it might be useful to
see if any else has done any formal analysis of Section 508 compliancy
in XForms in general or Orbeon's implementation of XForms. Likewise
if anyone is aware of any formal studies, use cases, etc. about
accessibility and XForms that would be great!

When it comes to web applications, section 508 to me is a non-controversial subset of the W3C WCAG 1.0. I linked the relevant part of section 508 below; it is quite short and you can relatively quickly go through it, and I really don't see anything that would be a show stopper for using Orbeon Forms (or even other implementation of XForms) on a web site that need to be compliant with section 508.

http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12#Web

The main "problem" with WCAG 1.0 (but not with WCAG 2.0) is section 6.3 which mandates that you must at least provide a version of your pages that can be accessed with a browser with JavaScript turned off. We developed the non-script mode of Orbeon Forms to be compliant with that requirement. Section 508 doesn't have an equivalent to WCAG 1.1 section 6.3, so if you just need to be compliant with section 508, you don't even need to worry about this.

Alex