Becoming 508 Compliant For Your Christian Club on Campus, Part 1

Everyone knows blogs fill that need to talk about something that you can't about with anyone with in real life.

For me it is about becoming Section 508 Compliant.

"What?" you are saying, "that is boring. No wonder no one wants to talk to you about it."

True, I won't be talking about it during play dates at the park with the other moms. I'll want to, but I'll probably have better luck talking about canning my peaches. Yet I do think this is a very important issue for those of us in campus ministries on college campuses. Let me explain.....

It all started last month when I checked the university's website to see if our club was linked on their "club" page. What I found, was that our club was listed, but there was no link to our webpage. We contacted the university, and they restored the link, but with this ominous warning: "your link will be removed if you do not become Section 508 Compliant."

My first thought was there was a relation to the sudden flurry of wheelchair accessible sidewalks my city was putting in our neighborhood. There's been a lot of talk about ADA compliancy the last 10 years, but now we are finally seeing some action. Perhaps this 508 thing has to do with people with disabilities having access to the Internet.

A little Google search, and I not only discover Section 508 was signed into law by President Clinton in the late 90's, but there has been all kinds of conferences and consortiums since then to figure out just exactly what it means and how it is to be implemented. Basically it is a law requiring federal websites (and other information technologies) to give equal access to people with disabilities (U.S. Congress and the Justice Department are curiously exempt).

What does that have to do with a link from a California university website? Many states have passed similar laws to give equal access to information and Section 508 is the standard that everyone is adopting. The Accessible Technology Initiative was enacted by the California State University system to bring all CSU schools into compliance.

Therefore, if you have a Christian group on a CSU campus, and you want a link from the official university website--you need to have a Section 508 compliant website. Other university systems, both public and private are sure to follow with similar policies, if they have not already done so.

This summer I'll be re-working our campus website to make it compliant, and I hope to blog about it so others in the same situation can save time in updating their websites.

Next post: Section 508: Who Cares? I've Got More Important Things to Do.







a majority of my "mind time" these days is thinking about the subject of 508 compliancy...and I just need to blow off a little steam by blogging about it a bit. My rationale is that there are others out there like me who are facing the issue, and wondering how to go about it as painlessly as possible.


But I just manage a small website for our campus ministry at Cal Poly Pomona here in California.