General Discussions

**FixateMedia** · 03-12-2006, 03:36 PM

Hello,
I have recently accepted a position with a firm here in Seattle which does a lot of work with Section508 websites. I am an experienced web designer/developer but have never had any work dealing with such sites. This isn't putting my position at risk because they already knew it before I was brought on board. However, it is something I am going to have to learn and become familiarized with.

Have any of you worked with designing/developing sites that are to be followed by these guidelines? They tell me that the sites I develop for clients that are Section508, I will need to use 100% CSS - NO TABLES! From my understanding, using tables for the initial layout shouldn't pose any problems...all of my text content could be held within a DIV vs. HTML Table... Of course I'll use proper ALT tags and what not, but does using Tables actually cause a problem when screen readers go through the site?

Any info would help. I've found a few articles online, but are there any books about this?

Thanks,
Ron

**vangogh** · 03-12-2006, 08:27 PM

I'm pretty sure you can use tables. You just need to make sure the tables are compliant.

I usually test my sites at the Cynthia site and fix up the errors they report.

Here's another site you can go to for information:

http://www.websitetips.com/accessibility/
http://www.section508.gov/

You may still want to work with 100% css layout for a variety of other reasons and maybe it does make it easier on screen readers. I'm pretty sure tables can be made compliant. I use css to layout my sites, but there is the occasional table on a page and I've been able to get them to validate for 508 compliance.

**FixateMedia** · 03-12-2006, 11:02 PM

Well what do yah know! A SEC508 validation! This will help me greatly with my work - I am excited!

This has made my evening! I will go to work tomorrow with a freshly energized brain of confidence!

Thank you very much sir.

**vangogh** · 03-13-2006, 01:22 AM

I've been using the validation site to learn better what it and isn't 508 compliant. It's helped a lot and with each new site I'm getting less and less errors from the start.