Ep. 8 - Web Content Accessibility Best Practices in Municipal Media

There is, a new ruling by the DOJ about, what the Title II entities need to be doing for their communications accessibility. And they need to be captioning all of their channels and their streams and their social media. In fact, if you caption one direction, you have to do all directions. And this brings to the point that we don't just need to be budgeting for the accessibility and for the captioning. We also need to start budgeting for audits that go over and confirm that everything is accessible. So what you're suggesting is that folks need to really start thinking seriously about being proactive rather than reactive, rather than waiting until someone say, sues you for not being compliant. Right. Um, yeah, and, and that's, that's the other thing that we've learned through the last couple months with this, DOJ ruling. The consumer complaints can actually come from anywhere. It could come from folks that don't live in your community. It can come from folks that are working for companies helping stations. It could come from organizations like the Alliance for Community Media on behalf of the organization. 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. Hello and welcome back to the Government Video Podcast. I'm Michelle Alimoradi and I'm your host this week. We're here today with a dear friend of mine, Daniell Krawczyk. Daniell and I have worked together in many capacities over the years in community media, government communications, and beyond at this point. Lately, he's been busy running his own company as the founder and CEO of Municipal Captioning, and he's working with organizations across the country on their video distribution and content accessibility needs. Welcome, Daniell thanks. Thank you, Michelle. Thanks. Happy to be here. Appreciate getting invited. Now, today we're going to talk about something that's never fun to think about, but is also very necessary, and that is audits. Yeah, um, that's a word that makes my chest tighten up a little bit, uh, even when we were breaking up the idea, I started wondering, do I really want to lead off with a stressful subject? Is that what I want to do when we're doing a podcast? But it does seem relevant. Yeah. So, so yeah, um, it's something that we've been talking a lot about, uh, over the last couple months because there is, a new ruling by the DOJ. About, what the Title II entities need to be doing for their, their communications, uh, accessibility. And they need to be captioning all of their, their channels and their streams and their social media. And all these different, paths. In fact, if you caption one direction, you have to do all directions. And this brings to the point that we don't just need to be budgeting for the accessibility and for the captioning. We also need to start budgeting for audits that go over and confirm that everything is accessible. And it's not just taking care of the problem, you know, when it's not solved yet, but taking care of the ongoing problem of of proving that it's solved, so that if you have a complaint, you have the documentation, and if there's anything new that has changed in the year, any new formats that you're streaming in or any new changes to the apps that you're providing content to, you're able to address it. Um, because there is honestly just so much change, the number of places that we stream, you know, now compared to two years ago or four years ago, it's, it's pretty dramatic. So what So what you're suggesting is that folks need to really start thinking. Seriously about being proactive rather than reactive, rather than waiting until someone say, sues you for not being compliant. Right. Um, yeah, and, and that's, that's the other thing that we've learned through the last couple months with this, DOJ ruling, is that, what we may have, read the, the language of a complaint from a consumer, a consumer complaint, to mean that maybe it had to be someone very specifically within your community who is a cable subscriber. To be consumer, uh, the consumer complaints can actually come from anywhere. It could come from folks that don't live in your community. It can come from folks that are working for companies helping stations. It could come from organizations like the Alliance for Community Media on behalf of the organization. So you don't, you don't have to have that thing that triggers, um, local action come from an individual viewer. The way I think a lot of folks have said, well, maybe no one's really watching who wants it with, who won't talk to us about it first. So you do have to kind of prepare. And then, again, once you've done what you've done, you have to prepare for the fact that you will at some point have to show, show that you've been doing it and, and show that you've covered all the different aspects. Have you been seeing that? Have you been seeing complaints come from outside of communities in the organizations that you're working with? So the main thing that really pushed all of this, big round of AI captioning about, six years ago when I started the company, uh, it was at a time where suddenly there were a couple different companies manufacturing things and starting to sell them. And even though six years ago, the products were not quite, um, fully baked in terms of how good the speech to text was. It was pretty rough overall, six years ago, compared to now where it's very accurate. But even though it was kind of rough, there were still a lot of systems being sold and they were all being sold in Florida. And it was because one law firm, had, somebody go city to city, turn on the cable channel in a hotel room, or open the live stream on their laptop or whatever, see that it's not captioned, and then file a complaint on behalf of that person, even though they're not themselves a citizen. So, uh, not that they're not a citizen, they're not a local citizen of that community that they're complaining about, because they use the same person and the same, Same firm did it for, uh, from what I understand, something like 20 or 30 or some amount of cities in Florida. So all, all the companies who are making products that we resell and integrate all had this big burst of customers all at the same time out of one law firm in Florida. And they only really targeted The city is around Florida, but there's, there's been more specifically individual complaints at places that are not just part of someone trying to spin up a bunch of, you know, legal action, but there's no reason that wouldn't happen. And it could come on behalf of Uh, disability advocate groups. It could come on behalf of lawyers who are just trying to make a buck. It could become on behalf of, uh, concerned citizens who feel like they have to, you know, complain to all the citizens around them. So, we are, we are seeing it little bits, but it's crazy how what we saw six years ago actually led three or four companies in the end to, to sell into this space and kind of create this market. So, Well, and let's be real. I think the majority of these organizations, and You can weigh in on what your experience has been. Majority of these organizations want to serve citizens, right, in the best way possible. And a lot of it comes down to capacity and cost and, quite frankly, clarity around what compliance even is, really, down to the letter. Yeah, that's for sure. And so that's where these audits really come into play. And as you mentioned, that will require its own budgeting, its own planning, to make sure that you have clarity around what the expectations are. But I, you don't think that we're really seeing folks that are not compliant because they don't care. Um, it's a lot of times because they don't understand or they're at capacity just doing what they're already doing now, right? That's, that's really the second one. So what do those folks do? Yeah. So it's, I mean, I think the biggest thing that you'll see at every operation in the municipal space is that folks are doing multiple jobs, that everybody there is doing multiple things and they're operating at capacity with, you always more that could be done. So you're right. I mean, when I, when I talk to folks about this, it's always, uh, trying to find ways to do it that are not going to increase their amount of ongoing work because it's the, just like nobody wants to add to their operations budget because that's money they have to pay for out of a very limited pool. And they'd rather usually take it out of a capital pool. Uh, folks would usually rather get some way of putting this in that doesn't, you know, involve a lot of ongoing effort. And honestly, learning about it and what they need to do and all the different options and comparing everything, digging into it on their own is probably more, more of the effort than anything else. So, The best thing they can do is, is, is to address it, whether it's them themselves putting in a thousand hours or, or working directly with, uh, companies that provide it or working with companies like ours that, that walk through different options or, or just loading up even what's built into Cablecast, whatever they use, they're adding to the accessibility. And then if they start down the pathway of getting an audit for this, they'll be able to figure out, okay, we have our core channel, but we're not actually getting everything that's going up on Twitter. Okay. Or we haven't been captioning everything that we're putting up on the city's Facebook page. Um, or we're good on these, but you know what, we do things up on LinkedIn and we didn't think about it, but we need to burn in the captions for LinkedIn. Because legally, you could patch, you know, nine of the holes in the wall, and if there's one more hole that isn't being addressed, then that's, that's an area that you could have a complaint come through. 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. It's interesting that you bring that up, because at this point, uh, there, there would be a requirement to have those feeds be compliant, assuming you are distributing on those platforms. Mm hmm. But there is no requirement to distribute on those platforms, correct? You're, you're, you're totally right. So, um, if you caption in one location, like your Granicus stream, if you're using Granicus, which a lot of folks use for like streaming meetings, then you're required to make sure that that video is also being captioned on your cable channel and on your YouTube stream and on your Twitter feed if you're streaming it there or whatever. But there is nothing saying you need to put it on these feeds or those feeds in the first place. I mean, put a video out and, and everyone's chosen different paths. Some cities are just for, you know, I think because of capacity, picking only one pathway, and they're only putting it, say, to YouTube, and nothing else. But then they might run into an issue where a little bit of copyrighted music plays on someone's phone, and then suddenly their channel's blocked. So, you know, then they might want to also have alternate paths. And it's crucial to make sure that you're addressing it everywhere that you're distributing content. And also, this falls into the next thing that I know you and I talked about here, which is archiving. Um, there's, there's actual legal requirements, not just for the archiving of your meetings, but if you're putting content out on social media as a municipality, that needs to be archived as well, there's services that do that, and there's, um, I'm sure there are ways to, To do it on your own, but it's something that starts to fall into the same thing as the accessibility audit is, uh, social media archiving audits and figuring out what is set up to be preserved and what's not currently being preserved. Is that a relatively new requirement, these social media archives? It's not, I would say kind of like in the same way captioning was required under, uh, ADA since the 90s, but because it wasn't in front of people in a way that they could handle, a lot of places just didn't address it. I think the social media archiving has been maybe a requirement for at least 10 years, but most folks have just not had the capacity to start to address it. Are you seeing people that are doing it and doing it well, the social media archives? I know a company that, that focuses on that, and I know they got acquired by another company that serves government. So I know there's at least that, and I know that they have at least one competitor because at one of the trade shows somebody described themselves as a competitor to them. But it's an area I'm kind of due to as we're, as we're moving into, um, mapping out everything that goes into accessibility audits. We're also trying to understand, uh, and, and see what options there are for tools to simplify archiving all the social media content because obviously we're going to need to archive that to prove that it was captioned. Right. What does that look like? Is that is that an archive that exists on the platform itself? Or is that something that people are putting, you know somewhere else on their website? What I've seen is when I've seen it sold commercially, it looks like something that uh, You would subscribe to and then it's being backed up by them in their archive the same way If you were to use a Dropbox type solution and you're paying to have things there. But, So it's really more there for in case of an audit. It's not something that we're just putting out there for the public to be able to sift through Exactly. The social media archive is because in the same way that cities gotta keep all the emails that were sent by people City employees, in case a lawsuit ever requires going back through and seeing what somebody said in their official work email, they have to keep record of everything that they've put out on social media in case that's ever required. I apologize. I should have found which case is used or which law is used to drive that. But I'll look that up for afterwards because, it is something that, you know, once you start solving problems, some of those problems overlap with other problems. So solving the accessibility problem and then documenting that you're making all of your content accessible and have been starts to overlap with needing to document that you've kept all your Twitter posts or LinkedIn posts or job postings. What about other archives? I mean, we've talked about social media, but we've also talked about how a lot of places are putting their meetings on, mmm, sure say, YouTube, and then they can be taken down and they have a little recourse. So what are we seeing in terms of archiving for just regular, you know, meeting videos? I'm glad you bring that up. The granddaddy, I'd say, of archives at this point is archive. org. And it's where people are getting the best, free permanent archive of what they have on their YouTube channel. So it's not like, oh, here's a one stop thing for everything you might need to archive all of your different platforms. But if you are a municipality or county or, or, or any, you know, water district that's, that's broadcasting meetings and you have a YouTube channel for it. Um, you should also actually have a corresponding, collection inside the Archives Community Media Collection. Uh, the person who, who runs that, John Hauser, has searched for all the city channels he can find, and sets them to auto archive so that when meetings are put up, it might take a week or two, but then they make their way to YouTube. And then if YouTube cuts off your, your channel for, you know, background music, uh, the videos for all of the past meetings can still be there. Or if YouTube ever did what Blipp TV did and just say, we don't care to keep your, your old content anymore. You know, you won't have to jump through hoops at that moment. So we've talked about the archiving. We've talked about the changing accessibility requirements. Um, summarizing our thoughts on audits. It seems like these requirements have been becoming more specific and also getting updated more frequently. Um, and you're shaking your head. Yeah, no, I agree with you there. It's more specific, especially since this, this ruling came out that very much specifies what it needs to match in terms of accessibility level, you know, WCAG 2. 1 or greater. Yeah. And it seems like, uh, we're getting much more specific deadlines for compliance we've seen before. So before we leave this topic, what is your suggestion in terms of how often an organization should think about conducting these audits? Yeah, again, everything is moving at a faster speed than it ever has before. We have new deadlines that, um, that are under this ruling. They have two years, and this is from April, so now we're already into that, but two years if they're over 50, 000 as a population, three years if they're under 50, 000 as a population. And I think that once you have it established, you're going to need an audit probably at least every two years, possibly every year to confirm that everything that you have done has been captioned and that whatever changes to your platforms, whether it be where your on demand content lives or the over the top platforms that you're providing people, right? So their TVs, that they remain compliant. Um, so. So, I would, I would say probably budgeting money to handle it every two years is probably the smart way. Or even every year if you want to be, you know, extra safe. Yeah. I think that, that sounds like a pretty safe plan. Well, thank you so much, Daniell. Oh, thank you. talking about this, uh, not super fun topic, but very, very necessary with us today. And I know we'll have you on again because you have a wealth of knowledge in other topics. So we'll be hearing from you again, but thank you so much for joining us today. And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the Government Video Podcast.