WASHINGTON — On Friday, U.S. Senate Aging Committee Chairman Bob Casey, D-Pa., Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jon Tester, D-Mont., and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Mark Takano, D-Calif., sent a letter to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, urging the VA to do more to make the agency’s websites and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.
The Members of Congress called on the VA to accelerate its efforts to remediate long-standing accessibility issues and provide consistent transparency into which of the VA’s websites are not yet accessible.
In June 2022, Casey led a letter to the VA, urging them to improve their website accessibility in compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires government electronic and information technology to be accessible for people with disabilities. The VA responded to Casey’s June letter, providing more information about its remediation efforts. Casey and his colleagues write in response to the VA’s letter, noting several points of concern, including the Department’s current inability to conduct federally mandated accessibility data collection due to contract lapses.
“We greatly appreciate your efforts to improve the accessibility of VA’s technology and the significant amount of information your staff undertook to provide information in response to our questions. Yet, there is clearly more work to do, as evidenced by Mr. Ron Biglin’s statement to the Aging Committee. Mr. Biglin, a blind Pennsylvania Air Force veteran, reported that the VA’s health portal, My HealtheVet, does not work with screen-reading software the Department provided him. We want to ensure that all disabled veterans, and the VA employees who work for them, are on a level playing field when accessing technology,” the Members of Congress wrote.
In response to the VA’s statement that the agency will change how it reports on its website accessibility based on which sites are most frequently used, Casey, Tester and Takano emphasize that Congress and taxpayers must be apprised of the full scope of VA’s Section 508 compliance. They ask that “VA continue to report the total number of websites that are not compliant with Section 508 rather than self-selecting how compliance is measured.”
The signers express concern at the length of the VA’s current remediation timeline—for example, they note that while the National Cemetery Administration’s updated remediation plan “is a significant improvement, it reported that fixing 950 un-accessible PDFs will not be completed until 2026—roughly one per day.” They are also concerned that VA staff training to ensure staff are prepared to “to assist individuals with disabilities” is optional rather than mandatory.
In their letter, Casey, Tester and Takano request that the VA:
