A friend was asking for some advice about a certain situation involving a Flash site and creating a low bandwidth website.

What is Section 508?
The legislation referred to as “Section 508″ is actually an amendment to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The amendment was signed into law by President Clinton on August 7, 1998. Section 508 requires that electronic and information technology that is developed by or purchased by the Federal Agencies be accessible by people with disabilities.
Now, the above has also been adopted by Financial, Retail and Automotive websites that I’ve seen.

Here is the situation: A company makes a website that is made of one Flash movie.  There is content that is valuable within the  movie, not only for users but also search engines.  So the question comes up, ’should I just make static pages and link from a sitemap or make a “low bandwidth version”?. There are some other factors involved with this situation, but this is the jist of it.

My solution was to make static pages, place a link in the footer called “508 Compliant Version”. This then links out to the static pages with the good content on it. Then, on the Flash detect page, if someone doesn’t have Flash, give them the opportunity to either download or view the 508 pages. Wah La!

To me, there is a fine line that is a form of cloaking. Why? well, unless you look for the link, you can’t find the static pages. And unless the users don’t have Flash installed, you won’t see the option the download or view the 508 pages.

Now you ask, why call it 508 pages and not just a Low Bandwidth version? I look at it this way, if the pages are specifically for being compliant, then you have now taken into consideration the disabled people, hence built for the users and not specifically for the search engines.

What are your thoughts on this?

Famous Quote: Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly. - Dalai Lama