Officials from the Section 508 Accessibility Program say that too few agencies are including the proper requirements in their new IT solicitations, so the office — which ensures that federal technology is accessible to people with disabilities — is working on new tools that will help ensure procurement requests are specific enough.
John Sullivan, program director for the General Services Administration (GSA) office, said this week that his team has been scanning procurement requests appearing on FedBizOpps to see if agencies are providing enough detail about what they need in the IT products they are buying. In many cases, there isn’t any such language at all.
“We have a tool that has been going out and looking at [whether] the requirements are being specified in the contract — not even asking are the right ones specified, but are there any requirements,” he said Tuesday during a webinar hosted by the Americans with Disabilities Act National Network. “Across the federal government, the rate is low, very low. So that is why we are here today, to say that across the board we have got to get these requirements into solicitations, and we need to see what the roadblocks are and the hurdles to doing so.”
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