Transcripts

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

 

Joe (00:03)

Welcome to Voices in Local Government. My name is Joe Superville. Today we're covering the Department of Justice final ruling on website accessibility and the impact on local governments. Our experts to help city and county managers and their staff understand what the rule means and what to do next are Dava Riley, Chief Operating Officer of Civic Plus, and Mike Pacello, Chief Accessibility Officer of AudioEye. Thanks for joining today.

 

Mike Paciello (00:27)

Nice to be here, Joe.

 

David O'Reilly (00:28)

Thank you for having us.

 

Joe (00:30)

All right, first question. Can you start just by summarize the ruling, including any key differences compared to what the previous rule was? And if you could try and keep the legal IT or marketing jargon as low as possible and just talk to our audience of Sydney County managers and their staff as if they're not experts on this topic.

 

David O'Reilly (00:54)

Sure. So maybe, maybe if I give a macro answer, because that's, that's where my expertise is, Joe is kind of how it impacts the technology. And then Mike can probably give a much better answer on the, on the, on the details, but the, the, the, the need to be accessible has always been there. The change in title two as we interpreted is the DOJ are over weighting, right? They're, they've, they've injected teeth or given teeth to the requirement to be accessible and they've given specific timeframes for websites and mobile technology to be accessible and that changes, we can get into that later, contingent upon the population sizes and thus there's a correlation to tax income of those specific municipalities and counties. But Mike, if you want to talk about the legislation itself, I'll leave it to the experts.

 

Mike Paciello (01:47)

Yeah, Dave described it really well. You know, the thing here really, the new stuff, so to speak, in fact, are the rules around the compliance requirements around web and software, mobile, particularly mobile application accessibility. Until now, most of Title II is part of what's called the Americans with Disabilities Act. Most people know that. And it's more of the brick and mortar. So, you know, bathrooms need to be, you know, accessible to people in wheelchairs, for example, people with disabilities. You've got ramps and walkways and things along those lines, braille and hotel rooms and things along those lines. All brick and mortar. What's, you know, how do I get into a building? How do I walk around? How do I navigate, you know, in an environment, in a city, otherwise? This is all about the web and software. And so that's where the new stuff, so to speak, has come in.

 

Joe (02:44)

Okay, and I think Dave mentioned it might depend on size, but are there any key dates that have already happened or upcoming? Maybe not necessarily deadlines, but can you just go over some of the key dates?

 

David O'Reilly (02:59)

Mike, do you want to do that? should I? Yeah, so the ruling came in, I believe June 28th this year. And we have, if there is less than 50 ,000 people, those municipalities have about three years to get compliant. More than 50 ,000 people, two years. And for what's called special districts, so that could be like fire districts, that sort of thing, they have three years from the date of the ruling.

 

Mike Paciello (03:00)

Yeah, go ahead, Dave.

 

Joe (03:26)

Okay, and we're going to get into some of the urgency and what can governments do to start making this happen now and not procrastinate on it for lack of better term. Depending on the sizes and the capabilities and the staff resources and all this, but before we get to that. So people are aware of it now they know it's happening they know there are some deadlines coming up so let's get right into the actionable steps local government can take to ensure compliance.

 

And one more caveat, kind of as we go through them, can you, can you try and include maybe, maybe for each step, there might be a different answer, but can you try and include what, role maybe by title, maybe by skillset, the point person or the project manager, whatever you might want to call them would be because again, the city county manager's not necessarily doing this themselves. They might be delegating. As we talked about earlier, there's it involved, there's marketing, there's compliance legal stuff. So, as we go through each step, if you.

 

could try and keep in mind or give some advice to the local governments out there that might be shortstop, like who on staff maybe can handle this kind of thing. But Dave, why don't you get us started? Like what is literally just the first step, actual step for local government?

 

David O'Reilly (04:36)

Yeah, important question, Joe, and the way you framed it is important because depending upon the population and the resultant tax income of a city or county, they're going to have different levels of staff, right? Typically, the person we're talking about here is the PIO, but some of the larger state bodies, or sorry, county or city bodies may have a CIO, they may even have somebody whose specific job is to look at accessibility. it really is whomever in your organization is responsible for accessibility. Ultimately, that could be the city manager, but you're probably right that that's not the person who is taking the lead in this. And also a lot of these bodies will have legal representation, either full -time or not full -time.

That's ultimately where this sits and why it's important, right? Because nobody wants that letter from the DOJ saying you're not compliant. I think the important thing is understand the accessibility compliance, the accessibility standards. Take the time to understand what accessibility is, what it means for your residents and the systems that touch your residence. through that lens, right? How can we make sure that the important information we put on our websites, on our mobile technology for residents is accessible, not just by those of them with 12th grade reading level and above, but by everybody. And that includes people who may have colorblindness issues. That includes people who may have reading level issues. That includes people who can't view a picture on a website and who need an audio description of that. So There's lots of variance here, but it really is the broadest net possible for accessibility.

 

Mike Paciello (06:39)

Yeah, Dave struck a nerve there in terms of who's going to take responsibility for this within any organization, know, small government, larger whatever the office is. And one of the things that I found is that more and more of the offices are staffing up. They knew that this was coming down. I think it's irony that I'm going to use the term ramp, right, because that's so analogous to the accessibility and disability mantra in our, you know, our vernacular, so to speak. but they're ramping up. It may very well be a chief accessibility officer. Some organizations, government organizations are that large, but more often than not, it's someone who's got an accessibility lead kind of associated with their responsibilities. The very first thing they need to do is find out where they stand. Whereas as a government entity, they lie in terms of their digital presence, where they are with their web presence, their websites, whatever they've got in terms of applications, and try to do some sort of litmus test to figure out how accessible or inaccessible we really are. And then start looking at building a plan and a strategy about how to tackle those things. The disabilities that David just called out primarily are cognitive by and large, but there's obviously the blind, there are individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing. so there's so much video out there that needs to be captioned. So there's a lot of folks and personas that you need to start thinking about in terms of providing an accessible experience for the residents that you serve.

 

Joe (08:20)

Yeah, Mike, you said litmus test. the word audit might be scary and, unappealing for most, but Dave is, is that, is that fair to say that an audit is one of the steps? maybe, maybe I don't, I don't to necessarily jump through the whole list. And by the way, I should have mentioned, there, there is a civic plus has provided like an actual checklist that we'll link to wherever you're listening. You could just click right on it. So don't feel like you have to take notes audience. Like, this is going to be there, but, Dave, do you want to add anything to that?

David O'Reilly (08:54)

Sure, sure. mean, yes, the audit word can be scary, but ultimately in life, you can't go about fixing anything until you understand where you're at. So the audit really is about comparing where are we at today as a digital entity and where do we need to be to be deemed accessible by all. So it is important to do that work. is the grounding work. it is in, it's an interesting conundrum that we all face here, but one that that's not insurmountable and shouldn't be scary to people because the very thing that you're auditing is a living and breathing information source. So that it's not like writing a book and then rewriting it in an accessible fashion and printing it. A website is changing every day.

You have multiple parties adding information to it. You have multiple different data sources probably linked out from your website. it's, it's, it's the starting point is the audit, but it, is a, this is a lifestyle change, if you like, that people need to go through to, get, to get to accessible.

 

Joe (10:03)

Yeah, yeah, like I shift an actual mindset. And then, so once you've kind of done the audit and the planning, the actual execution of this, maybe it's not an either or, but how would you split the difference on here are the internal rules or best practices moving forward on everything we do digital versus we got a ton of backlogged archive pages that no one's even using anymore, but.

 

David O'Reilly (10:08)

Exactly.

 

Joe (10:33)

they still apply and we gotta do that. So are there even options like can you just kill that stuff and start over? Can you backtrack? Where would you start for the execution phase?

 

David O'Reilly (10:45)

Yeah, I mean, I think you got to try and establish a clear compliance plan. I think it's really important that you publish that internally and that all the stakeholders realize, OK, this is where we're trying to get to. are nuances and businesses like ours can obviously help. Other businesses can too. There are nuances in terms of what you can quote unquote kill in terms of information and what you need to keep. And so obviously there is, you know, there are sunshine laws that mean that that things that have happened in the past, need to still be discoverable. so there's, there's nuances there. You can't just kill all the non -compliant stuff and start again. but the best place we feel to start is kind of looking at your website, looking at the documents within your website, looking at your mobile technology. And typically again, like most things in life, the 80 20 rule is like, okay, how can I, how, how can I use traffic volume? to really get after the stuff that people touch most often and then start to adjust that and fix that through either an overlay or source correction.

 

Mike Paciello (11:57)

Yeah, I'm sorry if I could just interject a couple of thoughts there. And then David just brought up a word here that I'm a little bit, I want to be really cautious, especially with our audience's living. But what we're trying to do, is create like we would in any kind of development, engineering, life cycle. You're creating a plan with a strategy based on analytics that you probably already have within your organization.

Mike Paciello (12:26)

you know, here are the pages with the highest hit count. These are, you know, again, I'm thinking about this from the perspective of a government entity. There's an awful lot of, you know, forms, form -based pages. Here's how you do the registration. Those are the pages that are going to take a lot of the high hits. So you're looking for your analytics. What are the pages that are critical to the operation, not just of our organization, but to our residents who need to access them? And those are the high priority pages and applications that you want to ensure out of the box are meeting compliance standards that we've laid out.

 

Joe (13:09)

Yeah. And I was going to say from the, from the marketing perspective, which is kind of what I do, it's a good exercise to go through that anyways, and reevaluate where, are we actually getting the traffic and the need? are the, whether they're customers or residents, what, what are their priorities and then start with that.

 

Mike Paciello (13:24)

And there's a very good chance that most organizations don't truly know where they stand, where accessibility compliance is. Privacy, that's easy. Everybody's been doing that for years. But on the accessibility spectrum, it's a different game. And if you don't have what I like to call this think accessibility mindset, it's probably not sitting there in your top 10 things to really tackle. So like anything else, build a strategy, prioritize.

based on what your organizational prioritizations are, and then tackle the problems and the challenges at that level. I do want to mention one thing, and we'll probably get into this a little bit, because David brought up the notion of the overlay. The overlays, traditionally, where accessibility is concerned, they've got this kind of persona look that they are themselves.

assistive technology solutions, and the reality is they're not. What they are more likely is kind of a personalization tool. And in fact, they're probably more helpful to the average human, to the individuals without profound disabilities than they are actually with people with disabilities. So, David was talking about earlier, individuals who may have some cognitive limitations or people who typically don't use these technologies that people with disabilities use. to be able to increase the text on their page because the fonts is a little bit too low and they don't know how to set those things in their browser or they don't know how to do it at the operating system level on their computer systems. That's what those overlays are very helpful for.

 

Joe (15:07)

All right, and this word already came up, but let's get into a little bit more of the residents. Dave, can you talk to us about a feedback program? How does it work where it's not just the local government doing what they do and then maybe it hits, maybe it doesn't, and then the residents are left like, what are they even doing over there? How can these efforts actually connect with the real needs? And then how can the feedback, I hate to say feedback loop is kind of a cliche, but how can you actually get that information, real data, not just like the survey where, we got, there's that joke, the same 10 people are always responding to the survey mostly to complain about something, not just like, cause it's great, but how do you get the real resident feedback so you can kind of course correct as you're going through this whole process?

 

David O'Reilly (15:50)

Yeah, great question. And it's rooted in the accessibility mindset that Mike alluded to, but really getting out in the community and finding those people who have accessibility challenges and engaging those people and showing that here's why we're doing this. You are important to us, your voice matters, and garnering that feedback because...

You're right. The, STP or same 10 people analogy is in local government all the time. And those voices are of course need to be heard and are equally important, but typically the people we're trying to hear from here are not the ones to raise their hands are not the ones to, complain. So it's more important that we, we understand that we have everything from the front desk to available information on our website.

 

we would like your feedback here is what we're trying to achieve. We need to get to WCAG compliance and we want your help with it. And obviously then hopefully, you can drive that engagement and act upon the feedback that you receive.

 

Mike Paciello (17:09)

The beauty of this question is who are we trying to help here? We're trying to help residents, our own people, so to speak. So I would be, if you can afford it, if you can be this proactive, there are a number of things that you can do. You can do social networking and do a local outreach and looking for, if you go out and you do a local outreach and say, look, we're looking to form a group of folks that can give us some feedback. people who are blind, people with low vision, people with hard of hearing, who have perhaps a physical mobility disability and ask them for their help, I guarantee you, this is really important to the disability community. They are more than happy to help out and give you some feedback because when they help you, they're helping themselves. And also there's this whole notion, again, a mantra amongst the disability community is that nothing with us without us, right? That's literally saying. So you're getting people with disabilities involved in the accessibility of your digital environments is really crucial to making a successful experience.

 

Joe (18:20)

Okay, and well the next question you kind of already answered, but I wanted to circle back to that urgency question. And everything you just said about why for the residents, I think answers a lot of that. But as we know, there's always there's always projects on the list and budget short here. There's reasons to kick that can down the road a little bit, especially if the timelines three years. So Dave, I mean, both one, I want to hear from both you on this, but Dave started us off with.

Why now? When we went through some steps and I think knowing that there are practical, actionable steps are helpful, but just make the case to that city manager, even if they're delegating this now. Do it now, not next month, not next year. Convince them to start today.

 

David O'Reilly (19:05)

Yeah, I mean, it's inertia is not your friend here, right? The truth of the matter is that the longer you're aware of this compliance and do nothing, the less compliant you're becoming all the way through that journey, right? So what you have to fix today is going to be a lot harder to fix in two years time. The other practical consideration, Joe, is three years might sound like a lot. It really isn't. By the time you complete your audit by the time you identify your partners to help you with this, the time you engage with your local community. And then you need to do most likely a redesign of your website. That's probably something people will choose to do as part of this work. You're looking at, you know, a six to 12 month project there after you know where you want to get to. So you add all those time blocks together. Some of the work can be done in parallel, but some of it is serial. For example, until I figure out what I have to fix, can't figure out how to fix it, right? So by the time you add all those time blocks together, you're butting up against the DOJ timelines. The other thing is you, Mr. City Manager or Mrs. City Manager or Mrs. City Manager, whomever it is, they're not alone. So they're going to be coming to the organizations that can help them.

And there's going to be an enormous amount of work that needs to be completed. I don't think if I were in those shoes, I'd want to be at the back of that line, and wait, waiting for that, that work to be done because it's, there are limited resources. We're all staffing up, you know, people who serve local government and local government themselves are all staffing up to deal with this because we have to, but that takes time, right. And the expertise takes time to flow through. So, yeah, it's act with urgency act deliberately and, and, and get after this. The other last point, sorry, Joe, that I just want to hammer home is the great thing about this ruling is it's also just the right thing to do. Right. So, so that's another reason to go do it. It is, it is the right thing to do and it will, it will help your, your residents.

 

Joe (21:28)

Yeah, yeah. Real quick, Mike, I actually literally had that. It's just the right thing to do in my notes. But Mike, I tried to avoid my rambling question, which it probably was anyways. But yeah, it is the right thing to do. And same thing. I don't think anyone listening right now is arguing with that. It's just more of a question of how, when, the why, the why I think we have. But Mike, do you want to add to that? also, can you, Mike, if there's any common challenges beyond just like the budget and the staffing and all that, but the practical work of it, if you want to add to the urgency question, but also kind of take another turn and speak to us about common challenges you've seen in the work you've done and the help you've already put into this and then how the local governments can maybe preempt or avoid or overcome those challenges.

 

Mike Paciello (22:16)

Sure. Yeah, and I appreciate David's point here. We do have a timeline. We do have like a two or three year period here. So, you know, getting our arms wrapped around what the situation is and where we see it today is really important. But there's also another real important aspect of this ramp up period. And that is to make sure that we build some core competency inside our organization. So training and building some awareness.

You know, David used the expression before WCAG, I call it WCAG, but these are the worldwide web consortium design guidelines that every organization worldwide, internationally really default to. So you're not looking at something that's unique and new. These are tried and tested and they are international standards to work with. But if you don't understand them, right, if you don't know what it means to make a form or make a table or make a graphic, or make a video accessible to people with various disabilities, you you're behind the eight ball. So you've got to get on this, train staff internally and get them ramped up to speed. I know AudioEye, for example, right now is working with Civic Plus and we've got some early learning courses to help train people to ramp up exactly with that kind of expertise. So that would be the first thing that I would look at, the first two steps is Number one, figure out what these standards are and where we stand within our organization from an accessibility standpoint, compliance standpoint. Number two, let's get people ramped up in terms of their knowledge and their awareness so that the urgency turns into what's important, right? If you're motivated by things that are important, and I know it's great to say that, It's a good thing to do. It's a nice thing to do. But the fact of the matter is, I think that you're going to find that most people with disabilities, they see that as kind of being treated special. And that's not what they want. They're citizens. They're residents. They're part of the community. They just want to be able to do what everybody else can do.

 

Joe (24:31)

Yeah, even when it's paying the local property tax, they don't necessarily want to do it. They want it to be easy so they can just get it done, right?

 

Mike Paciello (24:36)

Yeah, exactly. So work with, I think, doing those two things initially to get started. Now, another thing that you will want to do, again, depending on who's doing the development for you, my experience is that at least half of the government organizations outsource the development work. Right. So are now your partners who are doing this development. Are they up to speed? Do they understand? And I can give you, if I had a nickel for every time I ran into a dev company or design company and said, yeah, we know accessibility. We know what compliance is. And then I had my team or our team here at AudioEye, you know, look at what they've built and audit it. They don't know what they're doing. It's a sad truth. So be careful. Really make sure that whoever you're working with really knows their stuff.

 

Mike Paciello (25:34)

that they can develop and design for accessibility. And by accessibility, that means usability. Because it is possible to follow those guidelines that are out there. And just take something simple like making sure that an image has an alternative text associated with it, right? For a blind person who's not seeing the image but wants to know what it is. That's all. The WCAG requirements will often just say, put an alternative text.

 

Well, when you look at that image in the context of an entire interface, suddenly context is really crucial. So that image can have a lot of different meanings. So when I talk about accessibility, I talk about accessibility and usability. So especially we're talking about so much interaction, interactive forms and things like that. I can make the form accessible to a screen reader, but is it usable to the user? Does it make sense? to what they're filling out at that time.

 

Joe (26:35)

Yeah. And Mike, you preempted another one of my questions, which is, you know, when we did an AI episode this spring and one of the questions was there are a million and one vendors out there now pushing quote unquote AI solutions. Who knows how many of them are actually AI and how to judge that. But, you know, there are a lot of tech companies out there, just the marketing buzzwords thrown on and they call it a day. I understand this, you know, it's hard to give an unbiased answer on this coming from Civic Plus and audio I but what are your recommendations? What are the questions to actually? I hate to say test or vet, but how can the local government person? Feel good about their technology vendor actually being able to do this stuff?

 

David O'Reilly (27:43)

Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the great question, by the way, Joe, but I think if you look at the components that people need to fix, it kind of leads to those questions, right? How can I fix what I have today and get it compliant? How can I stay compliant? Right. And how can I look at what I have from yesteryear and get that compliant as well? And I think if you can, if you can kind of answer those and you can show you know, with, with the relevant, the, Pats are what they call us, how you tell whether something is compliant or not. you can show that as a vendor, then that's a great starting point. think having partners who have deep domain expertise in this as well is important, right? And, having, in our case, our partner, or Mike is part of, has people with disabilities on their teams, right? And people who are sometimes limited in terms of how they interact with information, and they actually carry out these audits, right? They carry out the remediation and help fix it. That gives you the kind of the, it goes beyond the corporate, yes, we have you compliance. It shows real meaningful investment in getting people there.

 

Mike Paciello (29:04)

Yeah, I think the relationship that we have, Civic Plus and AudioEye, is the kind of relationship that you're looking to build. So if you are a government organization and you're already invested with Civic Plus, you're in good shape because we're their accessibility partners, the other ones that are building the platform for you as an organization, you can be sure that you're going to be taken care of. AudioEye, we have a good, strong part of our staff, our individuals themselves with a variety of disabilities. And so while we really focus on our managed service side of it and the automation side of what we build and we do, that's primarily for scale, for speed. That's where our AI actually is injected today. But the other part of this is in fact what we do in terms of our team of individuals with disabilities and doing that testing. So it would be great if we could say that everything can be automated and we can make it usable and accessible. The fact is that's not true. Generally speaking, most automated technologies with or without AI, with or without, are probably getting 30, 40 percent level of accuracy at that level today. We're getting better, but it's going to take time. So we need need individuals as we have staff with disabilities to user screen readers, to user screen magnifiers, to test keyboard operability for an individual, say for example, who has to use an IR interface in order to interact with the software or with a website. That's what we've got folks with disabilities who are part of our entire engineering and accessibility life cycle.

 

Joe (30:57)

All right, anything we missed or I didn't cover or ask you want to bring up before we wrap up here?

 

Mike Paciello (31:03)

Well, listen, one thing you just did ask, because you brought in AI, and I kind of agree with you, is it really AI or is it machine learning? Either way, here's the point, two key points. One is the way that AI works is basically on a statistical average, right? Which means it's going for what they see or what it determines the average person where it will get the biggest, you know, in terms of biggest bang for its buck, right? in terms of making sure that something is implemented accurately or usable, which is all well and good if you're going for numbers. The problem with that, and I love what Yudhita Treviano, she's with the design center up in Toronto, OCAD, she has pointed out, most people with disabilities live outside that statistical average. So the AI, and this is the second point, is edging them out.

Mike Paciello (32:01)

It's really not accounting for what happens if I interact with an accessible, excuse me, with a web or a software application. So you need to keep that in mind. AI will help us scale. It's going to help us do things faster and better. But in terms of meeting the needs of users with disabilities, you need those users performing the tests and doing the analysis themselves.

 

Joe (32:27)

Dave, any final thoughts?

 

David O'Reilly (32:29)

I think for those folks listening, there are organizations out there, ours included, who are here to help. Don't panic. We're all after the same thing here. We want to make real impact, real difference in people's lives. So come to your partners, whether it's us or someone else, and the help is there. And the mission is a good one, so it's easy to put energy and enthusiasm behind it.

 

Joe (32:57)

All right, well, Dave, Mike, thanks for your time and all of your work helping local governments with accessibility compliance. Listeners can find the seven steps to meeting the DOJ's new web accessibility ruling on civicplus .com linked wherever you're listening as well. Or you can ask them, or it sounds like Mike, a question in person at the ICMA annual conference, Pittsburgh, September 21 through 25. Still time to register. We're expecting more than 5 ,000 local government professionals. for you to network and learn with. So we're all looking forward to that. Thanks again for your time, David Mike.

 

Mike Paciello (33:31)

Thanks Joe. Thanks Dave.

 

David O'Reilly (33:31)

Thank you.

 

 

 

Episode sponsored by

Guest Information

Dave O’Reilly, CivicPlus Chief Operating Officer

Mike Paciello, AudioEye Chief Accessibility Officer

Summary

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued a final ruling on website accessibility, requiring websites and mobile technology to be accessible to all users. The ruling includes specific timeframes for compliance based on population size and tax income. Local governments need to take immediate action to ensure compliance and avoid penalties. The first step is to establish a clear compliance plan and understand the accessibility standards. Local governments should conduct an audit of their digital presence and prioritize fixing the most frequently accessed pages. It is important to involve residents with disabilities in the feedback process and build core competency within the organization. Vendors should be carefully vetted to ensure they have deep domain expertise in accessibility.

Takeaways

The DOJ has issued a final ruling on website accessibility, requiring compliance with specific timeframes based on population size and tax income.

Local governments need to establish a clear compliance plan, conduct an audit of their digital presence, and prioritize fixing frequently accessed pages.

Residents with disabilities should be involved in the feedback process to ensure their needs are met.

Building core competency within the organization and vetting vendors with deep domain expertise is crucial for successful implementation.

Chapters

(Exact time stamps may be slightly different on the recording after the intro, music and some light editing.)

00:00 Introduction

02:44 Compliance Deadlines

08:20 The Role of Feedback and Resident Engagement

18:49 The Urgency of Compliance

22:16 Challenges and Vendor Selection

27:43 Ensuring Compliance and Building Competency

31:03 Conclusion

Resources

7 Steps to Meeting the DOJ's New Web Accessibility Ruling