Compliance

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner highlights a complaint that the process used in publishing the redacted version of the Mueller report was not Section 508 compliant:

While the discussion surrounding the Justice Department’s release of their redacted version of the Mueller report rightly focused on the substantive issues of the investigation, many of my Twitter feed were also complaining that it was released as a non-searchable PDF file.

Much of the discussion focuses on the document we’ve seen not being Section 508 compliant. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. § 794d) requires all federal agencies to maintain and use systems that are accessible to people with disabilities.

Ahem. Speaking as someone who has actually overseen Section 508 compliance, there are pretty good reasons that the document we’ve seen was not compliant. Even applying the most rigorous standards, in order to ensure compliance your best strategy is to use a specialist. There are organizations that specialize in review and certification of Section 508 compliance. It would have taken weeks or even months just to let the contract for that. I have little doubt such a delay would have been seen as proof positive of evil intent.

Section 508 compliance of the redacted version of the Mueller report is probably the least of our problems. That having been said what would we have if federal agencies failed to comply with the law and even their own regulations? We’d have precisely what we have now.

1 comment… add one
  • Andy Link

    As a former federal employee, there were many times when federal rules were in conflict and therefore compliance was impossible.

    I suppose I “violated” section 508 many times because in my job I often had to deal with documents with “wet signatures” and was never given tools or training to make scanning such documents 508 compliant. In my particular case the requirements for maintaining security records (subject to inspections), the requirements for preservation of federal records (also subject to inspection) too precedence over 508 compliance (not subject to inspection) and those three areas were often in conflict.

    I don’t think most people realize just how bureaucratically complex the federal government and its rules are.

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