GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service said in a FedBizOpps notice posted last Wednesday that IBM will help manage the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and the System for Award Management (SAM) as well as migrate data and functionality to an updated version of the SAM system.
FBO.gov was recently switched to a new hosting environment by the contractor that manages the site, Symplicity Corporation. The General Services Administration directed questions on why the change was necessary to the company, which did not return requests for comment.
Users with strong security measures that restrict access to only a handful of known websites—a practice known as whitelisting—might not be able to get to the site until the new IP address is added to the approved list.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/05/dont-panic-fedbizopps-working-it-just-has-new-ip/147980/
A group of blind federal contractors filed a lawsuit against the General Services Administration last week over a contractor website they say shuts out the visually impaired.
The System for Award Management website, SAM.gov, contains numerous buttons, checkboxes, drop-down menus and “mouseovers” that federal contractors must navigate each year in order to keep their contractor status current. Those bells and whistles make it difficult or impossible for screen reading software that blind people use to navigate the Internet to decode the site, the suit claims.
GSA phone-in help desk employees are also not sufficiently trained in disability issues, the suit claims, making it even more difficult for blind contractors to complete their registrations.
The suit was filed as a class action by the American Council for the Blind and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The groups claim GSA violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which, among other things, bars discrimination against federal contractors and grantees based solely on a disability.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2014/04/lawsuit-says-gsa-discriminates-against-blind-contractors/83179/
