I run a site (ASP.NET) for a company that is in different counties, based on the link the user clicks on the landing page all the tags on the page gets a string of the county added to the end of it href tag. (ex. www.somedomain.com/home.aspx?county=x ) I then use the querystring to provide county specific information.
Is this out of compliance with 508? any suggestion how to do this without javascript?
The acid test is always: if I visit your site without JavaScript, can I still use it?
It's not always necessary for me to be able to use all your functionality, or for all the features to work the same way, but I should still be able to read your basic content.
In this case, however, what is the advantage of doing this by editing all the links instead of setting a simple, traditional cookie? Store my county choice in a cookie and (a) there's no need for JavaScript, and (b) the setting will be saved for future visits as well.
This is not out of compliance with 508. If you look at the requirements they don't spessify many technical requirements. As long as your site is accesible with just the keyboard you should be in good shape. Since you can tab from link to link using Javascript to create the links isn't an issue. It would be an issue if you used Javascript to draw on the canvas and required a user to click with a mouse.
There's way more to Sec. 508 compliance such as compatibility with screen readers, color choices in case users are color blind and users that access your content using alternate input methods.
For interaction compliance the rules can be summed up as: Can relevant info be obtained without having to explicitly use a mouse movement (hover) or click (pop-up menus, disclosure triangles)? Or can text descriptions of image-based content be accessed by accessibility tools e.g. describing the current value for a dynamically generated object such as a progress bar.
You can control tab-order in HTML elements, not just HTML forms. Don't rely on a hover event to show additional info. This is also useful for touch-based interface devices that have no "hover" concept.
Can font sizes be increased without breaking the overall layout? Some users may simply be hard of sight and use larger font settings than you are designing with.
There are tons of free resources describing the various compliance levels you can work towards, tools to test your content for compliance and instructions on how to turn on Universal Access software built into modern OSes.