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Section 508 was passed "to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals" (http://www.section508.gov). In order to provide federal agencies with a method to measure the accessibility of information technologies, Section 508 provides a set of guidelines which describe the technical requirements necessary to make these technologies accessible. However, the federal government was not the first to develop these guidelines; in fact, Section 508 is based off the accessibility guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium.
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) claims "at least 10% of the population in most countries has disabilities," and acts "in coordination with organizations around the world..." pursuing "...accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development" (http://www.w3.org/WAI/). The first set of guidelines the WAI released in 1999 included a thorough analysis of web accessibility including alternative text, tables, and style sheets. The WAI accessibility guidelines were created primarily for the web, but can be applied conceptually to any aspect of multimedia. For example, Macromedia Flash uses a non-linear format which is difficult for linear screen readers to understand, but recent versions (MX and MX2004) allow alternative textual representations for visual and auditory content.
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