Episode 104: Digital Government & ADA Compliance
The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, is the federal legislation requiring equal access to jobs and public places for people with disabilities. It also applies to the public digital realm, like with government websites and apps -- and deadlines are coming up for local governments to get into compliance. The League has been putting out info to help municipalities understand and meet the federal requirements and has a hub on its website with resources and explanations. For this episode, we've put it into conversational form with an expert answering common questions and offering tips to understand the why, how and when.
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Transcript
A tech tip from VC three. Password theft has become big business for cyber criminals. And once they have a username and password, getting into your systems is often easy. That's where multi factor authentication, or MFA, makes a huge difference. By requiring a second step, like confirming a code on your phone, MFA stops 99.2% of account compromise attacks. Enabling MFA on email, financial systems, and other critical platforms is one of the simplest and most effective ways to prevent unauthorized access to your systems. It's easy, free, and a small change to your security settings that makes a huge impact. This tech tip from VC three. From the North Carolina League of Municipalities, this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns. Thanks for joining us. I'm Ben Brown from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Important topic on this episode. One we've put out a lot of communications and guidance on and something we're gonna talk about in a conversational way here on this podcast, and that's ADA requirements that your city or town government must be in compliance with when it comes to your website and in the info you make available online for the public. Again, this is required. There are deadlines coming up, the first of which is right around the corner. We'll explain that here. Bottom line for local governments, you've got to make your online materials ADA compliant. That's what we're gonna talk about today with an expert guest walking us through it. The ADA, as you probably know, is the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires accommodations for persons with disabilities of various kinds so people with disabilities can have the same opportunity to access what they need to access. For instance, ADA requirements with public buildings include wheelchair ramps. On television, you're probably familiar with closed captioning for the deaf or hard of hearing. Now the ADA went into law in 1990. It's a federal law, landmark moment for equal access, but it was notably before the rise of websites and mobile apps. And we have deadlines now to make local government websites and apps ADA compliant. This means information and experiences available on all public facing digital content provided by a municipality must be accessible. We're gonna get into a conversation about it in just a minute, but here are those important deadlines. Municipalities serving 50,000 or more residents must comply by 04/24/2026. That's right ahead. This April 24 for cities or towns serving 50,000 or more residents. Municipality serving less than 50,000 residents must be compliant by 04/26/2027. I'll say that again. If your city or town has 50,000 or more residents, your deadline is just ahead on April 24. If your city or town has less than 50,000 residents, your deadline for this is April twenty six of next year, 2027. So two deadlines we're looking at based on population. And even though the deadline is next year for the smaller size category, this is not something to wait on to get started with. Digital content affected by this rule includes the town's official website and department web pages as well as online forms and portals, newly posted documents like PDFs or Word files, along with photos, videos, and audio. All of that is affected by this requirement. Same thing goes for mobile apps that your city hall might have available for the public, like parking apps or recreation management tools. This compliance rule also applies to websites or platforms operated by third party vendors on the municipality's behalf. Even when a vendor manages the system, the municipality remains legally responsible for accessibility. So you've got to make sure your third party vendors are also compliant. We've been putting out communications about this for a while now, and we've also got a website to help you through it. I'll put a link on the screen right now. It's also in the notes with this episode. And check your inbox for recent additions of our league letter. That's our weekly newsletter, which has info about this as well. It'll really make sure that you're covered, this resource page that we have for you. On this episode, we're joined by Kevin Benson of v c three, an IT services vendor. You might have caught a recent webinar with Kevin on the subject. We teamed up with v c three to make sure that we're conveying this info thoroughly, the why, the how, because the deadlines are right in front of us. I think this conversation does a good job explaining and making real what these requirements are and why. So let this episode be something to enhance your familiarity with these requirements and deadlines ahead. We'll go to that conversation now. Hey. So we are joined by Kevin Benson of VC three. Maybe you could introduce yourself and just talk about what you do, and we'll, get to the subject of, ADA compliance and, government websites.
Yeah. Well, thanks, Ben. Thanks for the opportunity to be here to talk about ADA compliance. But specifically about me, my name is Kevin Benson. As Ben mentioned, I work for VC three, which is an IT managed services provider, headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina. So we provide IT services, cybersecurity, basically anything under the technology realm is is typically within our reach. Founded in 1994, operating out of 43 states and eight provinces in one territory. So Nice. We're excited to be here. Nice. Yeah. And the league has worked with you guys for a long time.
So we appreciate you coming on on this, this topic that we're getting a lot of questions about. So, this should be you know, we've done web webinars, and this is the kind of thing that, you know, we'll continue to to do the education thing on. But, I think it'd be fun to, you know, kinda maybe fun is a funny word, but to have a conversation and just kinda, you know, kinda dig into this with some of the common questions and maybe some of the uncommon points or, maybe lesser known things that people know to ask about. And with ADA compliance and websites, I I I think, you know so people generally kind of understand that concept of accessibility and, you know, why the Americans, with Disabilities Act exists. And so, you know, we we interact with it in various ways, you know, there's, you know, sidewalks, playgrounds, building access, things like that. But when it comes to the digital space in the online world and websites and apps and things like that, it might mean might need some explaining. What does accessibility mean in that context, you know, just generally speaking? And we can cover the specifics in a minute, but, but what what do we mean by accessibility when it comes to the digital space, like a like a website, for example?
Such a great question. And just to put things in perspective, accessibility has been around for a very long time. Obviously, we're familiar with those accessible physical things such as wheelchair ramps, as you mentioned. In the online or digital sense, accessibility generally means, websites and digital services should be accessible to those with disabilities, whether it's perception, understanding, inability to navigate, or just interacting with your website. So it's really just making sure that just like a wheelchair ramp makes that building accessible to somebody who has some kind of physical mobility issue, that the website can be navigated, can be understood by those individuals who may, have certain ailments, such as being vision impairment, hearing impairment, so on and so forth.
And depending on who you are and, you know, what part of government you work in, you you might have heard this topic, you know, or it might have come across your desk. You might have gotten some emails about it. The league has been sending out updates about this. Why is this an important topic right now, and what actions do we need to take?
Such a great question. So it's been something we've been striving for. Just accessibility is a good thing. Inclusiveness is a good thing. The Department of Justice just recently released some legislation, requiring that local government entities, cities, towns, villages, take their make their websites ADA compliant. So, now what's somewhat different than in the past where there's been guidance, there's actually been lawsuits against cities even without legislation, or regulation, that haven't been compliant. So right now, obviously, the the big push right now is because of the Department of Justice's regulation around compliance to ensure that, websites, digital content in general, is accessible.
So this is a federal thing that, you know, goes across the nation and not just North Carolina thing. What's what's a simple example of website accessibility?
Yeah. I can give you a few few simple examples. Probably the most obvious example that you may have interacted with is when you go to a web page and there's an image. So, if you have a vision impairment, you can't necessarily see the image, but you're relying on something to read what's on the web page for you, including the image. So just imagine that there's an image of a mayor cutting a ribbon at the newly opened park. Right? Without a description of that image, someone who has a vision impairment doesn't understand what that image is. The screen reader simply says there's an image on the screen. Now if the website editor who added the image was to simply describe the image as mayor cutting a ribbon at Riverside Park Playground, then that's exactly what the screen reader is going to read. So that's a very simple example. Right? But if you were to close your eyes and go to any web page and imagine what the experience would be if you couldn't see the content, That's a really, simple example.
And that's something I I think we've, we've maybe run across in the past, you know, on social media. Sometimes you will see, maybe on news websites and things like that, where there is, a description of what the image is, and and what it entails, maybe what the context is. What what are some examples of website accessibility that maybe aren't so obvious? What will come to mind then?
Yeah. So I'll give you a few examples. One big one in the, accessibility space is color contrast. And what do I mean when I say color contrast? If there's text on the web page that's against a background, then sometimes it's hard to read the text depending on the color of the background. So if people have low vision, they're not able to easily discern what the text is saying because it's somewhat washed out by the color of the background. Let me give you another example. Let's say there's a high, high wind advisory message you plan on posting to your web page. And green means everything's fine. You can burn your garbage outside. Red means there's high winds. Don't do that. If you're color blind, you may not be able to discern red from green. So if you're solely relying on color to indicate these high wind advisory levels, then it's not accessible to folks that have a color blindness. I will say this. People would say, well, obviously, if those folks can drive, you know, can they tell red the red light from the yellow light from the green light? Well, if you're color blind, you may be relying on the position of the lights, not the color. Top light means stop. Middle light means slow down. Bottom light means speed up. So in the real world sense, we've kind of accommodated for those kind of situations. So So we're just making sure that those situations obviously, there's there's some indicator other than color or maybe the colors are a little bit more, distinct to to drop that. Another example would be navigation. So I would I would imagine that most of us have a mouse or some kind of, mouse pad when you're navigating on a website. But a simple exercise that I would encourage anybody to do that is concerned about the accessibility of your website is turn off your mouse. Try to access your website with only a keyboard. Try to fill out a form by tabbing through the fields as opposed to clicking into the fields. Mhmm. And just try to understand how difficult it may or may not be. So those are some examples because we probably, haven't experienced those ourselves, but it's a great example. So color contrast is one that's often overlooked, the accessibility of forms, and not relying on keyboard to navigate is another thing that's or or a mouse, excuse me, is is often overlooked.
And, something that came to mind with, you know, the, the the visual aspect and there being some, some some words that may explain what what what's on the screen. Is is there, like, an audio component or something that reads that to you or or plays that description to you? Or
That's exactly right. So if you have a vision impairment, you may rely on what's called a screen reader. It's an assistive technology that's roughly built into most computers. It simply reads the web page to you. And so if you were to experience if you were to go to a web page and just close your eyes and and turn on one of these readers, you're probably gonna catch a few accessibility issues right out of the gate. The first is maybe an image isn't described, so you have no idea what the image to fix. The other would be maybe the screen reader that's reading the page is reading the navigation to you, telling you that, hey. This takes you to the public works page. This takes you to this page. And so if that navigation isn't structured in a way that the screen reader understands that it's navigation, it's just gonna read it just like normal text, which means it may repeat it on every page and not give you the the ability to skip the menu. Another thing to think about with screen readers are as simple as a link. Let's say you have a link on your website that says, click here to find out more details about the twenty twenty six fiscal year budget. If the only thing in that link that's clickable are the words, click here, then it's not accessible. And that's probably surprising to a lot of people because you can clearly see click here to do this. But let's say you couldn't see that and you're relying on a screen reader to tell you what the link is about. The screen reader is gonna simply say, there's a link on the page that says click here. And as someone with a some type of, disability, you have no idea where that link's going. So that's where screen readers come into play. They're very popular for people that have, vision impairment, and they really rely on these things. So it's really important to to think about accessibility in those terms.
And, you know, and and we're speaking in the context of of government websites and, you know, all the municipalities have them. We recognize that this is also a this is a newly issued regulation, and many municipalities, they have, you know, lots and lots of old legacy content on their websites. Are municipalities required to bring all existing content, including historical and archive material into compliance with the the new accessibility standards?
This is such a great question. It's actually a lot of questions we're getting from our clients. We have websites that have years and years, maybe decades of content. Right? So the question is, was this was this, was this particular scenario thought clear? And it was. So the Department of Justice Regulation recognizes this challenge. There's a lot of archive content. There's a lot of council meetings that are in PDF form that may not have adhered to ADA compliance ten years ago. So there's four criteria we need to be mindful of when we think about content that may be exempt from this regulation, and it must match all four of these criteria. One is the content must have been created prior to the regulation taking effect. So there's some different deadlines out there. So if you have a video, if you have a PDF that was created ten years ago, you don't necessarily have to go in and make that information ADA compliant. That's one of the criteria. The second criteria, and it must be all four, is that information is only kept for reference, research, or record keeping. The third criteria is it must be stored in a designated content area of your website. So if you have a web page that's listing out all the council meeting minutes for the last ten years, the most recent minutes that may have occurred after the regulation, that's not archived content. Right? That is after the regulation. But you could have an archive section that says archived meeting minutes, archived council meeting minutes. And as long as it's labeled clearly as archived content, then it's exempt from the accessibility standard. The last obvious, rule is the content shouldn't have been modified since it's been archived, and that's kind of obvious. If you're if you're editing archived content, it's not archived. It's actual, fresh content. So those four rules are important, but yes. So that's really important for a city, a town, a village who has historical data. You know, that necessarily that if it meets those criteria and you put it in a designated archival area of your website that's clearly identified as archived content, then, it's exempt from this regulation.
So, how does this regulation apply to digital documents and files published online like PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, tech technical drawings, maps? Are are these materials also subject to the same accessibility requirements, with websites?
That's a great question. And, yes, if that PDF is linked on your website providing meaningful information and not archived content, it should be accessible. So what does an accessible PDF mean? Right? It means, well, it has proper tagging so that if it is being read to the user, the same rules that would apply to the website apply. Right? We see a lot of situations where content may be, just kinda scanned and it's a flyer. You know? Some of that may not be legible to a computer system since it's scanned from an image. So you really have to think about accessibility. Spreadsheets should have headers. There should be structured data to the spreadsheet to help you navigate. We don't see a ton of spreadsheets on websites. It's mostly PDFs, but that's within that's within kind of the accessibility standard as well. I would make a recommendation that if you're conveying information in a PDF on your website that could easily just be content on the website, not a PDF, then you're gonna have more tools at your disposal to make that that content accessible. Adobe, Acrobat does have some tools built in to check accessibility. But if it can simply be in the page, so that flyer that you scan just to put on the website, if that could just be content on the website, it could just be a page, then that's gonna be probably a little bit easier for your content editors to make sure it's accessible than having to go back to Adobe and edit the PDF. So just just a just a tip there. But, yeah, PDFs, images, let's say you have a YouTube video on your website that's embedded, then it should have closed captioning. Right? So, let's say you're linking off to a third party website. Let's say you do online bill pay, but it's a link from your website. You don't actually manage that website. Mhmm. Well, you should be talking to your vendors, to to the to the people that you're using to provide those services to make sure they are compliant as well. So just because you link off to them doesn't absolve you of making sure that all these related things are accessible. You should put pressure, on your vendors to make sure that their content that they're providing under your organization, is accessible as well. It's not an unreasonable request to have a bill payment site that's accessible. You should push your vendor if it's not in house to make sure that that's the case.
So, these aren't merely just guidelines. You know, we're we're using the term regulation. And, I mean, are are there penalties for not com not being compliant or falling behind or, you know, it's, maybe from some perspectives, maybe difficult to imagine, you know, like, one day, you know, you don't have to comply with the regulation. The next day, everything's gotta be compliant. I mean, I I it may not work that way anyway, But, you know, are there penalties for missing deadlines? Or, you know, how can local governments be sure that they've got this right?
Yeah. So the penalty will typically come in the form as a legal risk. Right? So if you think of it in the traditional ADA sense, if there's not a wheelchair ramp to access or to have access to town hall, then you can imagine that resident may file a lawsuit. And it may, they may reference the Department of Justice, the original ADA requirements in the physical space. So the risk the big risk is, obviously, a citizen who is unable to register to vote or to pay their bill, files a lawsuit against your municipality and references this Department of Justice regulation. So, we have seen even before the regulation regulation has take place lawsuits against local government entities. Some of those have been settled. Some of, have have had time frames to address the issues. So it doesn't always constitute a monetary, settlement, but I would say just reputational, damage as well. You you want, you know, these services to be accessible. I would imagine most of it's unintentional. You know? You're you're, you know, this this is all new. Mhmm. But you could argue that this legislation came from the Department of Justice to prevent people from doing things intentionally as well. So I would say, yes. The penalty is, you know, just reputational damage, but potential lawsuits as well.
And so, you know, thinking about different sized towns, some towns are very small staffed or maybe, their their website is something that maybe has come from the outside in terms of the expertise.
Then you have, you know, Charlotte and Raleigh and, you know,
places that might have very large staffs and might be, maybe already up on a lot of this stuff. So what do you think are the most from what we've been talking about, what do you think are the most important takeaways right now just to to to get us going? Because, you know, sometimes, you know, you may under understand the issue, you may understand the why, but it's not always clear how to kinda get going with compliance and everything like that. What what do you think are some of the takeaways for everybody right now? Yeah. That's such a great question. Question. So the first thing is just kinda see where you stand today. Right?
Understand the rules. Understand the regulation. If you're listening to this podcast, thank you because this is very, very important. So, you know, understanding what's required. You know? It's very detailed in the reg in in the, like, in the regulation around, like, these are the expectations for an accessible website. So the first thing is just making you know, understanding where you're at today. There are tools out there that you can run against your website that will give you an ADA compliance score. You know, so that's that's really the first step is trying to understand kinda where you're at. I think the second step is and this is a fundamental thing to think about here is an ADA compliant website may not forever be an ADA compliant website. Meaning, it may be compliant on a Tuesday and noncompliant on a Friday. And the question is how in the world can that happen? Well, you have people who are adding content to the website. So if on Thursday someone adds a video without closed captioning or a PDF that's not accessible or doesn't properly describe an image, now that website, in its in its entirety, isn't ADA compliant. So I say that to say this. It is not a one time fix. It should be a continuous monitor something that's continually monitored continuously monitored, and the content editors of the website should take this into account when they're adding images, when they're adding documents, when they're linking off to websites. So if you haven't started thinking about this, now is the time. Okay? To put things in perspective, the Department of Justice's regulation around this for pop for cities, towns, and villages with populations 50,000 or more, the deadline is 04/24/2026. That is not far away from now. Right. And the and the question is why those you know, why why that threshold? Well, these are larger cities. They have more resources. They have a larger population to serve. So their their deadline is 04/24/2026. For any organization under 50,000, the deadline is 04/26/2027, over a year from now. K. So please do not wait until this time next year to think about this. Now is the time to start getting proactive, to start going through your website, running stands, bringing in help if you need it, to make sure that it's not a fire drill, next year this time. So, but yeah. So things to be to be mindful of is start preparing for it, understand the rules, and then making sure you train and you educate the people who have access to add content to your website that these are the things you should be doing to maintain accessibility.
Kevin, really appreciate this. You know, I I maybe I should ask, is there anything that I didn't ask that maybe has come to mind in the course of our conversation or any thoughts that have come up that maybe weren't represented in a question I've asked or, just just any other anything else that's come to, come to mind for you as we've been talking?
We we touched on a lot. I think, you know, we talk about this a lot with with, you know, different with different clients, different leagues. The thing that surprises a lot of people are if the website's not under your control, you kinda feel like, oh, not my problem. ADA is handled by the vendor. If you're linking off, let's say, like, I love that online bill pay example because a lot of cities don't host that park. Right? Right. So that site should be as just as accessible as your website even if it's not in your control. It is up to you to talk to your web vendor, to talk to utility vendor, and make sure that you're holding their feet to the fire as well because they are a representation of your city. And, you know, we've seen lawsuits in in the space, and it's a very heightened political space we live in in this world right now of the register ability to register for vote. Now you could imagine, if that site's not accessible, even if it's not hosted by you, but it's linked from your website, that one could one could say, well, that's intentional. And that's what we don't want. Right? We're gonna take we want you guys to take every effort you can to make sure that your content is accessible so you don't end up in these situations.
Kevin, really appreciate this. I mean, this has been really informative, and an issue that, you know, depending on maybe, where you are, the size of your town, the level of staff you have, you know, definitely different levels of preparedness for something like this coming on, especially, the the first deadline we're talking about. Even though, you know, we're we're talking about different, cities, different population thresholds, and things like that. I mean, yeah, it's coming up. And a year from now, you know, or, April, 2027, I mean, we don't a year goes by fast. It's not like a leisure runway. So
so yeah. It's it's great to know. There's a lot especially there's a lot to address. I'm just gonna say that. So, yeah, don't don't wait around. You know, get get ahead of it. Be proactive. And if you need help, bring in, you know, an expert as well. So
Kevin Benson of VC three. Thank you so much for joining us and explaining this to us. Thanks for
having me.
Alright. Big thanks to Kevin Benson for joining us on this one. A good conversational look at what's coming up with the ADA deadlines and what's required. And it's totally fair if you have follow-up questions or you wanna know more specifically maybe about a scenario with your town that or your website, maybe something that didn't get covered specifically on this episode. Remember, check our website. We set up a page specifically for this to help you in getting the clarity that you need to meet expectations. The web address is on the screen right now. If you're just listening to the audio version of this podcast, I'll have the link in the episode description. Or if you've got a pencil handy, I'll just say it. Www.nclm.org/member-services/ada-compliance. I'll say that again. Www.nclm.org/member-services/ada-compliance. Reach out to us if if there's anything more specific you're running into or you need some clarity on. Remember, this is federal. This is not just for North Carolina, these deadlines. One more time. If your city or town has 50,000 or more residents, your deadline is just ahead on April 24. If your city or town is less than 50,000 residents, your deadline for this is April twenty sixth of next year. Thank you for being with us on this episode of Municipal Equation. My name is Ben Brown. I'm with the North Carolina League of Municipalities. And we will see you on the next one.