508 and OTS development software a ruse???

[dismissme]

I am an eLearning ID for a gov't entity. My courses are required to pass stringent 508 compliance tests. I have been using Captivate, and at times Lectora. I am having several issues from the screen reader not reading in order, to jumping back in to the TOC and getting stuck there, quizzes not being compliant and on and on. Upon researching I have found experienced developers stating that no OTS course development software will give you 100% results for 508 compliant courses. What I am wondering is should I just bite the bullet and dive into programming with HTML5, CSS and JS? I have had the classes but never tried to code outright, I will have a huge learning curve but feel it will be worth it. Also I need justification for the time involved to come up to speed. My manager takes a lot of stock in the software companies claiming to be the '508 answer'. I know marketing for dev software claims to be 508 compliant wizards but from what I have found, they are not, they just have their little specialties. I would appreciate thoughts on this topic. Thank you.

[sinious]

In the 15 years of compliance (19 total) of dev I've done professionally, I've found almost nothing that is a 100% solution capable of handling it perfect. I always knew the languages individually myself and had to develop workflows to assure compliance. You need the workflow because when you inevitably want to update what you made, tweaks necessary to fix the compliance need to be reapplied, depending on the IDE.

My vote will always be to learn HTML/CSS at minimum. JS is only necessary when your site gets highly dynamic, generating any kind of element in the flow that needs compliance such as in order screen reader support. It won't take you as long to learn as it will to find a solution that doesn't require it. You will feel better about every project and any product producing perfect compliance right now is bound to fail in the future at some point, or cost a heap to upgrade.

Knowledge trumps all!

[dismissme]

Thank you I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. I am also going to use your response to support my proposal to my manager!

Thanks again,

Carol