States Can Make Digital Accessibility Easier for Municipalities (Part 3)

State agencies need to set up web pages to guide local governments and enable them to meet the new DOJ web accessibility regulations. After all, the challenges that state agencies face are no different from those of their state's counties, cities, and towns. Apart from reminding them how to achieve program access (as discussed above), here are some examples of resources that state governments should provide:

• Accessibility Statements. Good accessibility statements describe multiple ways that people with disabilities can use to easily access government services instead of simply describing their efforts to make their websites accessible. States can help their local governments by describing why this helps with ADA compliance and how it fits in with their overall digital accessibility efforts. They can also highlight particularly good Accessibility Statements so residents with disabilities can easily access services if they have trouble or report accessibility problems they uncover.
• Offer Resources for Local Governments to Understand Digital Accessibility. Over the last 30+ years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), local governments have come to understand the basics of accessibility. Yet few understand web and digital accessibility at anything more than a conceptual level. Understanding why digital accessibility is important and how it can empower residents with disabilities will help make web and digital accessibility a priority instead of just a set of technical requirements. At the same time, states need to offer resources and information for how web accessibility is accomplished. This includes educating local governments about how to test websites for accessibility, steps that content creators can take to keep websites accessible, and the roles that their vendors play in accessibility.
• Prioritization and Remediation Strategies. How do local governments decide which technologies and which web pages to fix first? The new DOJ web accessibility rules affect all state and local governments. For governments that haven’t previously considered digital accessibility, this can be confusing. This doesn’t mean that everyone should be confused. It certainly doesn’t mean that everyone should be reinventing the wheel by devising their own strategies to solve the same problem. Instead, state governments can lead the way by publicizing at a very high level how they are prioritizing technologies to fix (e.g. based on public impact or cost) and how they plan to remediate them. By keeping it at a high level, local municipalities can then follow similar strategies and know that they are not alone or venturing into unknown lands.
• Develop Statewide Contracts for Accessibility Solutions. In our last post, we talked about states should make it easier to share information about content management systems (CMSs) and web applications used between different municipalities. Another great strategy is to make it a lot easier to get inexpensive (or free) access to valuable tools for accessibility. For instance, in Colorado’s Statewide Intenet Portal Authority (SIPA) offers an Accessibility Grant Program, which gives towns and counties in Colorado with access to the CommonLook suite of tools for PDF accessibility (including training).
• Celebrate Local Wins and Best Practices. No state has the perfect solution, and every local government faces its own challenges. Because the Title II web accessibility regulation is a challenge that everyone faces, try to bring everyone together, identify solutions that have worked well, and spread those best practices to everyone. Good leadership isn’t about developing the best answers but it is always about letting the best ideas blossom.
• Procurement Policies. Title II doesn’t talk about procurements, but local governments of all sizes depend on IT procurements to deliver their services. Plus, we’ve found that most of the biggest accessibility barriers on government websites are due to the vendor’s technology—not the content generated by local governments. Governments should offer municipalities advice on how to choose the most accessible technologies so their websites can be more accessible. Fortunately, they can borrow heavily from the Federal government’s efforts in implementing Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Also, Colorado’s Office of Information Technology is actively collecting similar resources for its HB 21-1110 (which is even stricter than the new DOJ rule), which can be a great resource for other states.