1. Understanding Section 508 and Digital Accessibility
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires U.S. federal agencies, and the organizations that work with them, to ensure all information and communication technology (ICT) is accessible to people with disabilities. This includes websites, web applications, software, documents, mobile apps, and hardware such as self-service technologies. Any organization that receives federal funding, including states, local governments, schools, and universities, is also expected to meet these requirements. Section 508 is both a law and a technical standard. Meeting the Section 508 standard enables federal agencies and federally funded organizations to fulfill their legal obligations. The standard outlines specific accessibility criteria for hardware and software, including web content and applications. While Section 508 is a federal regulation, all organizations can benefit from maintaining awareness of the best practices that align with conformance.
2. What is Conformance, and What Should I Do?
Conformance refers to how well your digital resource satisfies the applicable accessibility requirements defined in Section 508. For software including web content and applications, this primarily means meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A and Level AA success criteria, with a few exceptions. Achieving and sustaining conformance with accessibility standards can be challenging. A WebAIM 2025 analysis of one million websites found that more than 94% of homepages had at least one failure, with an average of 51 errors per page. Even organizations with the best intentions can struggle to maintain accessibility over time if it isn’t built into how they create, procure, and monitor digital resources. The good news is that improving accessibility doesn’t have to be complicated. Many teams can begin identifying and addressing accessibility gaps in their digital content well before a formal audit. This guide outlines the foundational practices and technical requirements that help organizations build Section 508-conformant digital experiences.
3. Getting Started with Section 508 Conformance
If your organization designs, develops, integrates or sells federally funded ICT, you play a role in creating accessible, Section 508-conformant digital experiences. This guide offers a practical, scannable guide to the core requirements and foundational practices that support sustainable accessibility.
Organizational & Process Foundations
A strong accessibility program starts with a strong foundation. These steps help organizations build sustainable, repeatable processes that support long-term Section 508 conformance.
- Make accessibility a visible priority
- Long-term accessibility begins with an organization-wide commitment, ensuring it becomes a priority and a standard practice, not a one-off effort.
- Identify the ICT you design, develop, or procure
- Inventory all digital products, systems, tools, and documents that are subject to Section 508 requirements.
- Conduct an audit of your ICT
- Evaluate all of your ICT against Section 508 requirements to uncover accessibility gaps and inform next steps.
- Prioritize and remediate accessibility gaps
- Address issues identified in the audit in a prioritized manner. Focus on fixing high-impact issues first and iterate continuously to maintain conformance.
- Provide training across teams
- Equip designers, developers, content teams, and procurement staff with the knowledge they need to build accessible experiences.
- Document accessibility using a VPAT
- Strengthen processes to include accessibility early and throughout
- Integrate accessibility throughout the process of building, testing, and maintaining ICTs. Waiting until final testing can result in costly fixes.
- Measure accessibility maturity on an ongoing basis
- Track progress, identify bottlenecks, address regressions, and evolve your accessibility program over time.
Core Section 508 Technical Requirements
This section summarizes some key requirements that help ensure digital content is accessible to all users. While these requirements are not exhaustive, they cover the core WCAG 2.0 A/AA requirements most teams need to address to meet Section 508.
- Provide alternative text for meaningful images and icons
- Non-text content should include descriptive alternatives, so users of assistive technologies, like screen readers, can understand its meaning.
- Caption videos and provide transcripts or audio descriptions
- Ensure multimedia is accessible to people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or low vision.
- Use proper structure: headings, lists, tables
- Semantic markup helps screen reader users understand and navigate your content.
- Ensure text and interactive elements have sufficient contrast with their background
- Users with low vision must be able to read text and distinguish interactive controls; low contrast color schemes reduce readability.
- Ensure all functionality is operable via keyboard
- Links, menus, dialogs, buttons, and complex interactive widgets must work without a mouse.
- Provide clear, descriptive link text and page titles
- Users must understand where a link leads or what a page is about without relying on the surrounding context.
- Provide a visible focus indicator
- Keyboard users should always know where they are on the page; a clear visible indicator helps identify which link or control currently has keyboard focus.
- Clearly label form fields and provide meaningful error messages
- Labels for each form input field must describe what data the field collects, must persist while the user interacts with the form, and if an input error is detected, error feedback must explain what went wrong and how to fix it.
- Avoid relying on color alone to convey meaning
- Always use text, patterns, or icons in addition to color cues so that users who can’t distinguish colors can understand information.
- Ensure components expose name, role, and value
- Screen readers must be able to interpret controls accurately, especially custom UI elements, which requires ensuring accessibility information is properly conveyed in code.
4. Testing Your Digital Experiences for Real-World Accessibility
Creating real-world accessible experiences goes beyond checking whether your content meets requirements. The goal is to understand how people with disabilities experience your digital resources; how they navigate, access content, complete tasks, and where things break down. This approach helps organizations develop long-term, sustainable accessibility practices that actually work for users over time.
Start with automated scans
Automated tools can find common accessibility issues such as missing alt text, low color contrast, missing labels for form elements, and structural markup errors. While these tools can’t catch every error, they do provide an important snapshot of your digital content’s current state. Ultimately, automated tools are a starting point, not a final verdict.
Validate with assistive technology
Assistive technology-led manual accessibility testing, using industry-standard tools like JAWS®, ZoomText®, and Fusion®, help organizations understand accessibility from the user’s point of view. Testing with these tools goes beyond automation, uncovering errors such as confusing reading order, missing context, or poor keyboard navigation.
Test user flows, not just individual pages
Accessibility isn’t experienced one page at a time. Users access digital resources to complete tasks—logging in, searching, submitting information, making purchases. Testing entire workflows helps identify barriers that may not be obvious in isolation. Focus on whether users can:
- Understand where they are
- Fully access and understand content
- Navigate efficiently
- Complete actions without confusion
- Recover from errors
When to consider an accessibility partner
Some organizations require more structured, ongoing support. They may have large digital ecosystems, complex workflows, or lack the internal expertise to address accessibility remediation issues. Vispero’s Accessibility Managed Services provides organizations with customizable, scalable support grounded in a history of accessibility innovation and human-centered expertise. We help organizations build sustainable accessibility practices, streamline workflows, and implement improvements as technologies and standards evolve.
5. Need more help?
If you’re looking for a quick first step to assess your Section 508 conformance levels, you can sign up for a free website accessibility scan, which will identify machine detectable WCAG conformance issues on your website. It’s the easiest way to see how your content conforms to WCAG. If you are unsure of how to bring your digital assets into conformance with the Section 508 standards or how to interpret the individual requirements:
