Just as buildings need to have wheelchair ramps, modern websites must comply with various accessibility and web standards. The U.S. Access Board has just published a final ruling that takes effect January 18, 2018, and has revised Section 508 (the part of federal law that defines web accessibility standards) to include WCAG 2.0 (a modern, independent standard for websites.)

This is both exciting and nerve-wracking. While we welcome these new standards and plan to fully support them in our Drupal 8 upgrade later this year, we have also come to understand that having an accessible site isn’t as simple as passing a validation scan.

Given the importance of this topic and our evolving knowledge of what it means to be accessible, we’ll be working on this more in the coming months. In the meantime, we remain committed to supporting Section 508 (and therefore WCAG 2.0 AA in 2018) and we hope you will join us in thinking about how you can embrace these standards as part of your overall accessibility strategy.