Websites are required by law to be accessible to people with disabilities. Embodied in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, these regulations were interpreted in 2001 to prescribe techniques for designing web pages in ways that should make the web accessible to people with disabilities.

Open Town Hall complies with those regulations. Making Open Town Hall accessible to everyone, including the disabled, is integral to our mission of broadening participation.

Nevertheless, 508 compliance alone is not sufficient to ensure true accessibility. The accessibility techniques were written more than 12 years ago, in an age when modern web pages had a big black title, a few blue links and a bunch of tiny black text in a jittery font. Remember that? Reading more than a few pages was exhausting. Unfortunately, this is the experience that people with disabilities usually have today using assistive technology to read web pages, even those that are 508 compliant.

We can do better than that. Peak Democracy is committed to making participation as easy as possible for people of all abilities. As a central part of that commitment, we are pleased and honored to announce a new member of the Peak Democracy Board of Advisors: Katherine Schneider.

Katherine Schneider, Ph.D. is a retired clinical psychologist living in Eau Claire, WI with her ninth Seeing Eye dog. Katherine has published a memoir To the Left of Inspiration: Adventures in Living with Disabilities, a children’s book Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding Your Gold and a book for seniors, half of whom will develop disabilities, Occupying Aging: Delights, Disabilities and Daily Life. She originated the Schneider Family Book Awards for children’s books with disability content through the American Library Association and an award for superior journalism about disability issues through the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

We met Kathie last year when Eau Claire launched its first Open Town Hall topic. She contacted us with some suggestions for improving accessibility, and it turned into a watershed moment for us. Having her insights and guidance have opened up a whole new way of thinking about accessibility - thinking that is already bearing fruit.

Kathie is helping us to review the performance of Open Town Hall as it interacts with assistive technology. With each deploy, we are now able to include at least one new accessibility feature that improves the online experience for disabled users (see our next blog post regarding our latest accessibility feature.) Perhaps most importantly, we are developing a deep appreciation for the chasm that exists between the perceptions of most sighted people and those of blind people, and of ways to bridge that gap using modern technology as well as old-fashioned listening and imagination.

If you are interested in bridging that gap, I recommend you read Kathie's blog. If you know of other thoughtful users with disabilities who would like to share their insights with our development team, by all means invite them to connect with us. And, stay tuned for these blog posts, where we will be announcing new insights and features to help bridge that gap.