ADA Extension Tips for Large Governments

Hi, my name is Lynn Wehrman. I’m the president and founder of Digital Accessibility by WeCo. This is a short presentation on ways that large government organizations can make the most of the additional time they now have to complete the ADA Title II web rule requirements due to an interim rule issued on April 20th that has extended the compliance deadline by one year to April 26th, 2027.

Many large organizations became fixated on remedying their websites during the previous compliance period. Your organization will be more successful overall if you can take this time to scale and decentralize your accessibility efforts. Decide who owns the web property, who signs off on changes, and who will enforce accessibility requirements. Embed accessibility into IT, communications, procurement, and legal. Create accessible templates not only for your website, but for forms, alerts, and documents that can be used agency-wide. And create an accessibility decision framework, understanding that you may have to craft a different one for third-party platforms and legacy systems.

Why is this important? Systematic good faith programs carry weight with the Department of Justice. Next, replace the crawl and patch approaches from your dashboards and checkers with manual audits delivered by human experts. Focus manual audits on high-impact services like benefits management, emergency information, payments, and the courts. This will resolve the false positives and negatives that are inevitable with software.

Including people with disabilities in final testing is essential. If you hire manual accessibility auditors with lived disability experience, you’ll get the value of two expertise in one package. This is important because the DOJ acknowledges that AI does not reliably remediate accessibility at scale. There is also a lot of legal risk tied to over-reliance on automated tools, particularly overlays.

Next, rank your systems by how much harm could occur if they were inaccessible, instead of by page count or how easily you can remedy them. Then document your logic about prioritization. This aligns with the DOJ’s civil rights principles. Considerations could include emergency communications, police, housing, healthcare, utilities, and voting information for starts.

Next, documents are a daunting prospect for large governments due to the sheer volume and nonstop rate of creation. Take this time to inventory which documents should be active and which should be archived. It’s time to let go of that “keep everything just in case” mentality. Redesign your workflow so that documents are made accessible at creation and PDFs are generated only from accessible files. This will help stem the flow of inaccessible documents to your website.

Consider removing access to PDF creation software, except by staff who are trained to author accessible documents. Also, consider which documents make more sense as web pages, a format that’s much easier to manage for accessibility.

Large governments have buying power. Leverage it by purchasing only from vendors vetted for accessibility and include accessibility requirements when you’re renewing their contracts. Update your RFP language to include WCAG 2.1 AA conformance standards, plus testing with people with disabilities. In your contracts, add requirements for vendors to remediate inaccessible deliverables and have them complete voluntary product accessibility templates or VPATs. Existing vendors should be able to show you the accessibility roadmaps they use in product creation. Don’t just take the marketing claims for ADA or WCAG compliance at face value. Purchasing accessibly fixes inaccessibility faster than any other remediation method.

The very people who break accessibility are the ones who will be most effective at fixing it. Why? Because they touch your websites, mobile apps, and documents more than anyone else. These include content developers, communications, and program staff. Use this time to give them role-based training. Show them what they need to do differently in their roles every day to make accessibility work. This includes more than content managers and developers — it needs to include decision-makers, too. Embed accessibility checks into CMS workflows and your QA processes.

Then, record-keeping is a great way to manage enforcement. This is an excellent time to create and maintain records of audits that have been completed, issues that have been remedied, and priorities set. Create an accessible feedback and response process for your community, too. This data will allow you to generate a continuity of effort report to be released monthly or perhaps quarterly. Your team is more apt to fix what they know about, and they get excited to fix issues when they see progress.

Accessibility is a series of steps. It is not a light switch that can be turned on or off, and an afternoon’s Google search won’t give your team all the answers. So stop looking for a silver bullet and invest in sustainable accessibility practices. This includes guidance from experts, understanding and adjusting your internal capacity, and developing processes that are repeatable. And most importantly, the success of your accessibility work needs to be determined by user experience, not by dashboards alone.

Thanks for joining us to strategize ways your organization can make the most of the ADA web rule extension deadline. To learn more about our company, WeCo, a company of digital professionals with disability lived experience, go to our website at theweco.com. We also invite you to join us on LinkedIn. Thank you.