Section 508 is not a deadline. It is already law.
Federal public-facing data has to be accessible today, and agency digital services have to be mobile-first, consistent, and usable under the 21st Century IDEA Act and OMB's digital experience guidance. Most embedded dashboard and map viewers meet none of those requirements. We built the alternative.
1998
Section 508 enacted. Current standard in force since January 2018.
2018
21st Century IDEA Act: accessible, mobile-friendly, consistent.
2023
OMB M-23-22: digital-first, plain language, tested with real users.
Nothing on this page counts down, because nothing here is pending. The question is not whether your agency will need to comply. It is how long it has not been.
Whoever you are in this decision, the current setup is working against you.
For the CIO or chief data officer
You own a digital experience mandate and a stack you cannot make conform.
The 21st Century IDEA Act and OMB's digital-first guidance are written about your whole web estate, not about one page. Every embedded dashboard product in it is something you are accountable for and cannot fix, because the accessibility defects are in someone else's rendering engine.
For the program performance lead
You publish goals and results, and the format fights the content.
A target being missed is the most important thing on a performance page and the hardest thing to publish well. It needs a number, a direction, a reason, and a status that survives grayscale, and a dashboard tile gives you a colored square.
For the Section 508 program manager
You sign the conformance statement for software you did not choose.
You are the one who fields the complaints, writes the remediation plan, and explains to a vendor why their component fails 1.4.11. The alternative is publishing through something whose accessibility you control at the source.
For public affairs and congressional relations
The numbers get quoted back at you wrong.
Obligations get reported as spending, undisbursed balances get reported as waste, and the correction never travels as far as the mistake. A page that distinguishes the three and explains why is a page that survives being read by someone in a hurry.
Don't take our word for it. Tab into the map.
This is not a screenshot. It is the product's own map and column chart running on this page against the demo agency's award data, cross-filtering each other. Arrow keys move between states, Enter selects, and everything the chart shows is also a table.
This isn't optional, and it isn't coming. It's here.
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Federal electronic information and technology must be accessible to people with disabilities. Law since 1998; the current technical standard, incorporating WCAG 2.0 AA, has applied since January 2018. There is no transition period pending and no deadline approaching. section508.gov (opens in a new window)
- 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act. Agency websites must be accessible, mobile-friendly, consistent, searchable, and secure. An embedded viewer that fails on a phone fails this whether or not it also fails 508. digital.gov (opens in a new window)
- OMB M-23-22, Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience. Sets government-wide expectations for design, plain language, and usability testing with actual users of the service. Publishing through a third-party product means most of those decisions are not yours to make. Office of Management and Budget, September 2023 (opens in a new window)
- OPEN Government Data Act. Public data assets must be published as open, machine-readable data by default, with metadata, in a catalog. A dashboard someone can look at is not a dataset someone can use. Title II, Evidence Act (opens in a new window)
Your agency already assembles every one of these datasets for USAspending, for the annual report, and for the Hill. The only question is how well you publish them.
The same platform that carries a university's serif brand can wear the federal design standard.
The demo agency's portal is not styled to our taste. It follows the U.S. Web Design System's conventions: the standard's own typeface, its near-square corners, its neutral gray surfaces, a government blue ramp. That is a theme in our token system, not a fork, and it is the same code the other four demos run. If your agency has a design system, the product wears it; if it does not, it wears the government one.
The old way
This way
- A dashboard tile labeled “spending”
- Budget authority, obligations, and outlays told apart, with the gap explained
- A performance page where every light is green
- Missed targets first, each with a written reason and what changed
- Status shown as a red or green square
- Icon, word, and position against the target: readable in grayscale
- A downloads page of unlabeled CSVs
- A catalog entry per dataset with coverage, cadence, license, and a full data dictionary
- An embedded map viewer that fails a keyboard walk
- A tile map where every state is a real button, arrow keys and all
- A conformance statement you sign on someone else's behalf
- Accessibility in the components you own, tested on every route at build time
- A screenshot in a slide deck
- A link that opens on exactly the filtered view you were looking at
How to buy it
- Available through Carahsoft
- Reseller and contract vehicle partner for public sector procurement.
- Contract vehicles
- Vehicle listings and contract numbers available on request.
- Section 508 documentation
- Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT format) provided for evaluation.
Contract vehicle listings are a placeholder pending award. Email info@boulderinsight.com for current vehicle numbers and the Accessibility Conformance Report.
Take the tour
Nine things to try in the demo
0 of 9 tried
- See budget authority, obligations, and outlays told apart
- Find the number everyone misreads as unspent money
- Drill from a program to a recipient to an award
- Cross-filter the whole page from the state map, by keyboard
- Read a performance target the agency is missing, and why
- See a mid-year measure judged honestly instead of against a year-end target
- Watch small-geography counts get suppressed for privacy
- Open a data dictionary and download the dataset behind a chart
- Read the FOIA log, including the requests that were denied
See it as the public would.
The demo agency is fictional and every figure in it is simulated. Every page says so, at the top, permanently.
Look for the demo bar at the top of the portal to find your way back.