Ep. 12 - The Do’s and Don’ts of DOJ Accessibility Audits

Typically, these audits can be triggered in a variety of ways, right? Do you have any insights on how yours was triggered and how the Department of Justice made initial contact with you? Yeah, we did. We wanted to know if there was a specific instance that we needed to address or deal with. And the response was basically that they've scheduled audits throughout the state and throughout the country. So we just kind of came up on the list. It was our turn to kind of be looked at. We were a little concerned that, you know, is there something we're not doing that someone can't access our stuff. Typical, random audit. Well, that's really interesting that it is totally random. How did you react when you first saw that? What was your initial feelings? Oh, it was definitely a little bit of panic, a little bit of panic, cause I wasn't sure I was going to be involved, and, you know, first of all, we thought, Did we let someone down? Is there something we're not doing we should be doing? You know It was a chance to learn how to advance our site to be a little more accessible to everybody. This podcast is for city communications teams and video professionals in government. We talk about expanding service delivery with video and streaming, media accessibility, gear, broadcast and streaming workflows, and more. It's all right here on the Government Video Podcast. Welcome to the Government Video Podcast, your essential resource and guide to video communications and technology. I'm your host, Dana Healy, and today we're going to be doing a deep dive into a Department of Justice accessibility audit. Basically going through the do's and don'ts on how one would prepare for something like that. I'm joined with Aaron Shemotian, the media coordinator of Salem School District in Salem, New Hampshire, and Dave Halpin, the Salem School District Communications and IT Project Manager. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having us. So for our viewers at home, we really want to outline the process that you went through and perhaps highlight some challenges you may or may not have experienced through that. Typically, these, uh, audits can be triggered in a variety of ways, right? Do you have any insights on how yours was triggered and how the Department of Justice made initial contact with you? Yeah, we did. Oh, we do, because we asked that. We wanted to know if there was a specific instance that we needed to address or deal with. Um, and the response was basically that they're, they, they've scheduled audits through, uh, random people. Throughout the state and throughout the country. So we just kind of came up on the list. It was our turn to kind of be looked at they're really doing this through the American with Disabilities Act sort of the Office of Consumer Rights, I believe was the the group that was auditing us so Um, you know, we, we came up on their schedule, so it wasn't anything, we were a little concerned that, you know, is there something we're not doing that, uh, that someone can't access our stuff. So, but, uh, typical, uh, random audit. Well, that's really interesting that it, it is totally random. How did you react when you first saw that? What was your initial feelings? Oh, it was definitely a little bit of panic, a little bit of panic, cause I wasn't sure I was going to be involved. Um, and, you know, first of all, we thought, you know, did, did we Did we let someone down? Is there something we're not doing we should be doing? Um, and it was mostly out of ignorance. We didn't really know what accessibility features were, um, important, what we're, what we should be doing necessarily. But so, you know, it was a chance to learn what, how to, how to advance our, our site to be a little more accessible to everybody. That's a really positive way of looking at it, uh, as a learning opportunity, uh, for you, like a gross area. It's a little bit of panic at first because we thought, oh, do we have to hire a company to come in and do this? Uh, you know, is this something we can do ourselves? And, uh, kind of that, we had an initial meeting that sort of worked all that out, and it wasn't a high pressure deal, and in fact, the whole thing took like a year, so it wasn't like, uh, that, you know, you have to have a timeline of you got to do this by this date or you're, you're in trouble kind of thing. It was sort of work, it was more of a working relationship with that office to kind of get us to what, one, to understand what we needed to do and then how to do it, so. Well, that's a lot less scary than what a lot of people would, uh, think, right? Yeah. I mean, once we got into it, it was okay. And it wasn't, it wasn't that overwhelming. There certainly was challenges, uh, along the way, but, um, you know, we had kind of pulled together and we got a team together here to kind of look at the different pieces that we have and, uh, address them one by one. So how did you initially prepare? You said you had kind of like a discovery meeting with, uh, the auditing body, um, Yeah. Yeah. What did that look like? So they, they have a, uh, a five page sheet of kind of, uh, you know, you're expected to meet the, um, uh, the web access, uh, accessibility. I forget the code. Accessibility guidelines. Yes. So, uh, and there's a 2. 2. So we, first we went and reviewed those, which are very extensive and like, wow, I'm not sure if we're going to do all these, but they had kind of, they gave us a document that kind of pointed out the particular things they were looking for and then what it would take for us to come into compliance with, uh, there. So that was, at least there was a working document that we could try and address specific items, uh, that they called out and then other things would come up along the way. So, of the content that you needed to, uh, provide to them, what kind of documentation did they ask for you to produce? So they pretty much put it on us. They said, here's your document, uh, you know, here's the thing, here's the requirements of it, and come back to us when you've made some, uh, changes to all these things. And there are a couple of initial meetings. It was what did this, you know, we went through what some of the, Requirements meant, uh, what did they mean by, you know, what's the contrast between a foreground and a background on the site? What does that ratio have to be? And how do we assess ourselves and make those changes? So they don't really work with you to say, here's what you need to do, A, B, C, D. They picked out some examples and then wait, we started with kind of what can we do from a global, uh, style perspective on our sites? The simple things that you start with, what are your fonts? Are the fonts on your website, uh, legible to people who have visual disabilities? And there's a, they provide a contrast ratio between, you know, black type on white background, and like red on blue isn't good because the contrast isn't there. So contrast of stuff on your site is one. Little things like, um, putting in alternative messages, uh, text for images for people who have those turned off or don't, are using screen readers that don't see, um, images. They don't want to lose, uh, some kind of, uh, communication, uh, element because it's wrapped in a graphic that they can't see. I mean the overall concept in general is you, If some, a parent who's using our services that has disabilities, either sight, visual, uh, visual or hearing, uh, or the, you know, they, they're trying to navigate our site without arms, right? They're using some kind of, uh, other navigational system. Can they get through our site and get the information, uh, that everybody else can get? So that's sort of where you start. applied the, you know, the ratios or you went and looked at it. And, um, So, you know, it's easy. Some of the stuff is easy. Some of it's more difficult. Um, you know, putting captions into a video. It's not an easy process. I mean, it doesn't always happen and it depends on the platform that you're using. So not only do we have to do our website that we control, but we, uh, you know, link off to different, uh, services that host some of our content as well. Cablecast being one of them. And it's like, what is the, how do we manipulate this to, uh, infuse accessibility into some third party? system that, uh, may not have it, right? So it's one is doing your own thing and then it's working with your partners to kind of get to a level that's acceptable. the initial process of gathering all this information and creating the updates, you mentioned that it took about a year, the whole process. We had about a four month deadline to submit our own assessment. So we would, uh, you know, doc, we had to do a documented, uh, What our problems were and how we fix them or how we plan to fix them at least. Uh, so that was a little bit of, uh, you know, that was a little tedious and going through the entire site and figuring out what, what was, uh, failed, uh, the accessibility standards and how do we going to correct it and then getting it corrected. So all those, that took about four or five months. Then there was a six month period where we were waiting to see, did we pass? Did we do enough? Was this good or not? Uh, then they got back to us and kind of said, here's the things that we Uh, some more stuff we had to do after our initial assessment. So is that the corrective action plan? So they got back to what your self assessment was and said like, okay, now you make these fixes and you have another four months. Is that what it looked like? Yes. Pretty much something like that. It's like, okay, yes, these are good. You did this. Uh, but we also discovered this and, uh, you know, a PDF documents, right? How do you, these aren't accessible when you create those, create a Word document, put it in a PDF, put it on your website. It needs to have certain things in it for accessibility. And on a future meeting, we kind of went over what. what it takes. And, you know, they pick an example and say, here's what you need to do on this. And we would express to them any concerns that, or troubles we had getting third parties to kind of get on board with the accessibility stuff as well. And what are their challenges? Um, and then, you know, there was happy mediums that were reached in certain cases. so that's really interesting. That's another question I had. You guys are a small shop. How did you prioritize? Those remediation efforts, and they were pretty open about like, okay, we understand that that seems like a little extra effort that you would have to do. Right. So we, you know, we did what we could do, what we knew. And so we took some time and kind of understood what accessibility is. And then how can we, you know, the easy stuff is this, you change a font color, for instance, on your site, you can do that across the site. Um, I mean, if you, if you had someone at your school who didn't know anything about all this stuff, it would be really challenging. Uh, you know, we're fortunate. We have a number of people who can, could weigh in and help, uh, Aaron and being one of them. Uh, I have a HTML coding background, so I kind of know a lot about how to manipulate things and get it into accessible territory. But you also have to work with, uh, the stakeholders in your, at our school. Like the food service pages, a lot of stuff needed to be updated there. So I had to get their cooperation, you know, it's working with them to change the way they're doing things. Um, they used to, you know, as you can imagine, like an elementary school likes to put out a calendar of the food for the month and it's really a PDF document with a bunch of artwork in it and everything's art. It's none of it's text. So that's based on face value. It's not accessible to someone who's not seeing images or Uh, can't read PDFs or something like that. So talking with them, working with them to kind of change the way they do business, that was probably the biggest challenge. You know, the coding stuff, okay, I can deal with that without impacting anybody else's business. But when, uh, other people at the school district have to change the way they're doing things, that's where it got challenging. Sure. Yeah, I could totally see that. Hi, Michelle here. We hope you're enjoying this episode of the Government Video Podcast I'm taking a short break from today's discussion to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by Cablecast Community Media. We're a cross platform video solution from Tightrope Media Systems. And despite our name, we help cities, towns, and other local media organizations get their video to viewers on all digital platforms, including cable. If your organization operates a cable channel, um, but we help you reach residents whenever and wherever they watch. Be it on your city's website, on mobile streaming apps, on over the top platforms like Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, or even on their mobile phone. And we even help you push your content live to social media. We've been helping small non commercial stations launch professional, affordable, and efficient video initiatives for over 25 years. And our customers love us because we have great customer support and we have fierce industry loyalty. So if your organization is in need of cross platform video automation and delivery for local coverage of city council meetings or other local events, reach out to our team and schedule a demo today. And if you do, be sure to mention that you heard about it here on the Government Video Podcast to receive a special discount. That's all for me for right now. Back to the episode. Can you talk a little bit about maybe tools that you use to bring your website into compliance with the WCAG 2.1 AA, uh, level standards? That was helpful. And, uh, there are some browser plugin or extension tools, um, that allow you to kind of take, they take your site and then you kind of click the button and it shows it. It breaks it down on screen for you and says these, these are some errors you've got for accessibility, for contrast, for size of type or, you know, link colors, you know, are the, are links obvious, uh, to everybody? Are they not kind of, they're not, they, they, they're underlined or not underlined kind of stuff like that. So, um, what is that? I forget. I'm sorry. I forget the name of the, there's a number of things you can do for saturation colors, you know, um, contrast separate. extensions you can put in your browser and then when you navigate to your site on the page you just click it and it gives you some information on accessibility elements on that page that you can address. The only problem I noticed though with those plugins was that when the Office of Accessibility would go through and you know, do a manual audit themselves, they would find other things that those plugins often wouldn't think of. Such, one of them was, um, she would Demonstrate to us and zoom in 200 percent on the page for somebody that has a hard time reading. And, um, usually those plugins might not catch those things. Uh, so it's as good as they are. They don't seem to get it all for sure. So it was really a combination of tools you need to apply. Yeah. Zooming in at 200 percent was something we always kind of forgot. I forgot to do all the time, but, and your navigation, everything changes when you zoom in that far on your website, you think it's all perfect. And then you zoom in and it's like, Oh my God, this stuff is, uh, You know, now it's all haywire on the screen. So keeping that in mind is a challenge as well. So it's a combination of things you really need to put. used to address it. So can you explain the, the zooming into 200 percent a little bit? Like, uh, were they looking for kind of optimization for that kind of level or that there was still context of what the whole website looked like? Right. So they put, they typically put themselves in the position of someone with a disability and this is like, okay, these people, because they can't see well enough, they're zooming in to 200 percent and that's how they navigate the web. How does this, is your site still navigate, navigatable? understandable, uh, and usable by that someone when it's zoomed in. Uh, for us, it was, um, you know, our navigation, we have drop down menus at the top of the navigation on the website. Those overlapped and, uh, you couldn't, they weren't readable at 200%, so we had to make some adjustments to kind of figure out how to, uh, get around that. It's just everything, the layout and the design sometimes cascades or changes in a way you didn't anticipate if you're zoomed in that far. Somebody might only use a keyboard and not use a mouse was one of them too. So like they say with those drop down menus, one of them didn't initially reclose itself automatically when you tabbed over the next one. So it was things like that that might not be caught by the plug in. Like he said, when they're putting themselves in the position of the person with a disability, they find those things. what, what did you see as some common mistakes that maybe the auditor brought to your attention? Like, this, we see this all the time, you know, and this is a common fix that maybe other people could do proactively. Some of the easy ones are, if you put an image on your site, you know, it needs an alternative text. That's part of the code or how you, when you upload the image, you can put some type in that describes what that photo is. Um, there's another, on the other hand, it's if the photo doesn't have any information for user, you don't put anything in. Those are the case where you do it. Provide information in the case where you don't because if you're going through a screen reader, and that's kind of the the basis I've used a lot to are tabbing through a site how do you what what happens when you do that and if you don't structure your Markup on your site in a way that a screen reader can just quickly tab through the highlights and the main points There's too many things that stops them They can't get through your page if there's too many things that interrupt them While they're trying to tab through your site or or navigate through with a screen reader So it's, that's one of them, you know, fonts, how, you know, everybody likes to make their sites as pretty as possible. A lot of graphic design and artists that, a lot of that is not accessible, um, unless you make some, uh, uh, Accommodations behind the scenes to make it accessible. So those are, that's really kind of the big things. Uh, contrast was huge. I mean, I've, I probably mentioned type here about five times, but that's the, we had that go through every page that we were looking at and seeing is this, and it's, if it's a headline type, it can be less contrast than small type. So all those little things play in, uh, And you, once you do it for a while, you get it, but, uh, and those, those applications that help point those out, um, you know, will, uh, will give you a key to what's that ratio, because you don't know what, what a ratio of text to background is for color contrast. So those are some of the common ones, uh, you know, videos, a lot of videos out there today and it's mostly you have to have closed captioning so that if you can't hear and you're watching a video, you don't know what's going on. You don't get the message. Uh, so you try and provide that, uh, closed captioning. That's a, you know, a challenge. Gotcha. So now that you've gone through this experience, will you have like an ongoing annual like, well, let's just double check, you know, let's make sure that we adhere to this. And what does that process look like? Do you think? Yeah, so we have the part of the audit. Was what are you going to do going forward? What is your plan of keeping this accessible beyond them looking at us? So we have a Accessibility guideline that we've published on our intranet that gives any if it was just me publishing stuff I you know, I wouldn't need so much that but we have we have a distributed content model where Everybody can put stuff on their food service site or their TV Guidance site or something like that. So it's, we needed a plan to educate them, give them a location where they can understand some of these elements that they might be putting on their site and how to make them accessible. And then basically there's going to be an annual, we committed to an annual update of reviewing our site again to go back through and make sure, you know, we didn't forget something or, uh, you know, someone came in who didn't understand or didn't follow the guidelines or whatever. So some remedial steps on an annual basis. That's awesome to hear that you, you have something ongoing that you're going to be able to, to do and it does, it sounds like it's manageable. It is and you, you build it in. Sure. The, the smart way is to build it into anything you put out there new and make sure you make it accessible while you're doing it. So as everybody can, you know, if the education gets out there and people understand what's accessible and what's not, I think our, we have some elementary, uh, Teachers that publish stuff and they, they like to make it elementary ish, you know, uh, fun colors, uh, you know, bright stuff and whatever, and that sometimes that gets into the inaccessible range. So it's kind of an education thing. It's, it's great, but to make it fun looking visually, but it also has to be able, everybody has to be able to access it. So say if our viewers or listeners get a audit notification, what would be your immediate recommendation to them once they receive that? You start learning, you know, start figuring out what accessibility is, what are the keys and doing, you know, the self evaluation, they're going to come and talk to you about it, but, and it's working with the auditor. I thought that that was, I thought that was the best part about it. It was a little scary at first and then. They were going to be draconian about, you're going to do this or you're, we're going to pull down your site or something, but it's not that they, they want you to do your best effort at making accessible and that's kind of how the process went. And I think if you're open. And you do your best effort, uh, then you're going to come to your route and find, uh, you know, you're going to work out the issues, things you can't do, you don't sweat, it's just be honest about it and tell them that, you know, I don't know how to do this, or I'm not sure how this partner isn't working with us and we can't do that. They don't expect schools specifically to go out and hire somebody to do this. So, uh, trying to make a burden on you. And, and to Dave's point, I mean, um, about the partners working with you or not. It's, it's. They look at other sites that might not be your main site that you link to on your site that you manage yourself. So we have one service that we kind of removed from use now at this point. Um, and looking at another one and then obviously Cablecast has been great to upgrade. Um, our media website, uh, to make it accessible. So it's, it's looking at tools. They've worked with, like you said before, the site that they use for lunch schedules. To see what was available there. And so it's, it's more than just the one site. It's every tool that the district's using. Yeah. It definitely sounds like a large workflow to take into consideration. So do you think people should wait until they get an, uh, audit notification or maybe this is something that people should start working towards in the present? You know, I, I think they should be aware of it and working towards it, uh, cause it's good practice, right? You want everybody to be able to access your content, whether you're a school or a business, uh, you know, you're communicating, you're putting messages out there. You want everybody to get those messages. Uh, it doesn't do you any good to exclude a certain segment of your population. So, um, it's something you think about all the time and then if you get an audit, then you're better prepared. That's great. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. This is very educational for our, our viewers and listeners on how they may prepare for their accessibility audit. And listening your experience that it, it was a positive experience. It was a learning experience and that the auditors have been collaborative is awesome and very hopeful. Um, so thank you again for joining us and to our viewers and listeners at home, please like, comment, subscribe, and share. Uh, get this information out there so other people can be educated on what accessibility looks like in technology. And I'm your host, Dana Healy, and thanks for listening and watching.