Section 508: How Federal Agencies Scored

It is an annual assessment of how well United States federal agencies are meeting their Section 508 obligations, mandated by the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 and run by the General Services Administration. Agencies answer a structured questionnaire covering policy, acquisition, testing, and remediation, and their responses are scored into two indexes: the Accessibility Implementation Index, which measures whether the programme exists, and the Accessibility Conformance Index, which measures whether the technology is actually accessible. GSA publishes the agency response data as open government data.

In the FY2025 assessment, 35 of 60 agencies, or 58.3%, rated Low or Very Low on the Accessibility Conformance Index. Only 14 agencies, 23.3%, rated High or Very High. Those percentages are our own computation from the published agency response data file rather than figures quoted from the GSA narrative, so they can be reproduced directly from the source CSV.

Testing and remediation. 37 of 60 agencies, or 61.7%, rated Low or Very Low on that factor, making it the weakest area in the entire assessment. By contrast, Acquisition was the strongest factor, with 46.7% of agencies rating Very High. The pattern is that agencies are comparatively good at writing accessibility requirements into policy and contracts, and comparatively bad at verifying that what they bought and built actually works for disabled users.

No, and the gap between the two indexes is the most revealing thing in the data. Only 26.7% of agencies rated Low or Very Low on Implementation, which measures whether the programme, policies, and staffing exist, while 58.3% rated that low on Conformance, which measures whether the technology is accessible. Having a governance structure is not the same as having accessible websites, documents, and software.

No. Agencies self-report their answers, and no independent audit of agency websites, documents, or internal systems produces these ratings. That matters for how you read the results: self-assessment generally flatters, so the real state of federal ICT accessibility is unlikely to be better than what agencies reported about themselves and may well be worse.

No. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act applies to United States federal agencies and to the ICT they develop, procure, maintain, or use. State and local government are covered instead by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has its own rulemaking and deadlines. This assessment therefore says nothing about the accessibility of a state DMV site or a city services portal.