Are states prepared for the digital accessibility deadline?

On April 24, states will be held to new accessibility standards for their websites. Some states are further along than others in being able to meet that deadline. Some states — including Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota and Texas — are ahead of the pack, said Marie Cohan, Texas’ statewide digital accessibility coordinator, while others are less prepared. But more states are jumping in, even without strong executive support or funding, said Jay Wyant, chief information accessibility officer of Minnesota: “In a lot of organizations, there have been a lot of people doing the work, the hard work, doing it without the organizational leadership.” And so the approaching deadline, he said, has presented an opportunity to do more.

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Transcript:

Marie Cohan
I think it’s all over the board. We we have the NASCIO group, and we also are in a multi-state collaborative, and we’ve been bringing new states in quite a bit over the last year. We have states that are very well defined, like Texas and Minnesota, Colorado, Maryland. And then we’ve got states much further west that are, you know, just starting out trying to develop a policy statewide, you know, doing the review for Title II to meet the new rule and everything. So I think you’ve got a nice spectrum of people that are just now starting to jump into this about some of the things we’re going to talk about. And then you’ve got much more mature states.

Colin Wood
Right. What do you what do you see, Jay?

Jay Wyant
This Is Jay. I agree with Marie. I think we have a wide spectrum. I would also say that I see in the last year or so, we’ve seen a lot of organizations jump in more. The Title II rule is really generating awareness from leadership from the organizations that they need to do something about it. I will say, though, in a lot of organizations, there have been a lot of people doing the work, the hard work, doing it without the organizational leadership. So this has been their opportunity for leadership and say, Oh, wait, we did actually support this function there. So there’s been work going on. People have been creating accessible websites. They’ve been working with the vendors, especially web vendors, getting things done, but they’ve been doing it on a shoestring. So this has been enabling them to actually start driving it to more positive effects. So even the organizations that are maybe just jumping in now, they’re not necessarily starting from zero.

Colin Wood
Right, right. Yeah, I’ve heard some of that, and it’s kind of an interesting parallel to things you’ve heard in cybersecurity for a long time, where, you know, the work isn’t necessarily getting done until some big catastrophe happens, and then suddenly, or you know, there’s some deadline or something has to get done, and then suddenly, everyone’s scrambling to do it. But even then, as you mentioned, the funding isn’t always available, and how to get it done is something of a question. So I want to segue into that: What does effective policy look like? I think a good place to get us there is maybe you guys could talk a little bit about how this working group started. So, I think, if I remember right, Marie, you said this began last January, January 2025, and then how did your work proceed?

Marie Cohan
So it started in January. Actually, Jay is the lead chair. NASCIO reached out to him and asked if we wanted to put this IT working group together. And the catalyst to that was digital accessibility showed up for the very first time on the CIO top 10 priority list that NASCIO does a survey every year, and it came in 10th on the top 10 list. So that was very exciting for us. It’s never been on the list before. This year it moved up to number six. So that’s what created the it working group last year.

Colin Wood
Right, so, how did you get started, Jay, with organizing and tackling this, what I gather to be a pretty sprawling issue that has a lot of different dimensions to it?

Jay Wyant
Well, this is Jay. I mean people, you know, a lot of people in accessibility, myself, Marie and others, have been what I call stirring the pot. We’ve been raising awareness. We’ve been working with other leaders. I was working with NASCIO on accessibility 10 years ago, on several projects. So NASCIO has known about accessibility, been aware of it, and you just have to keep stirring the pot until something happens, and that’s what happened when it came up in the top 10 two years ago, and now in sixth in the top 10 this year. And so we’ve been more about constantly reminding people we need to work on this. We need to work on this. And people are now taking note and taking advantage of the resources that …

Jay Wyant
So that’s why when NASCIO said hey, how about getting a working group together, there was already a good cohort of people, including, because. For the last, I’d say, six or seven years, a group of statewide leaders have been meeting every month, thanks to folks from Maine and other states who been taking the initiative to help organize it, we’ve been meeting every month and talking about these things. So when NASCIO said, can you lead a work group? Not a problem. We have to pull together four or five people to be a committee and pull together the topic and present to it and get it all done very quickly.

Colin Wood
Right. And the report that NASCIO put out goes on a month by month basis of the I don’t know if this is actually what your group was looking at each month, or that’s actually how you organized it. So we don’t have to go through every month, but start walking us through some of that work. In the end, what does effective policy look like, and how does, as a state, how do you get there?

Marie Cohan
Jay, do you want me to go first? Or you want to go first? Sure.

Jay Wyant
I’ll also say that an effective policy basically, is based on, I would say, both organizational and civic values. I mean, we’ve always been monitoring as government. You can’t choose your customer. You have to serve everyone, and so you can’t just make a policy out of whole cloth. You had to have that value to start with. And then you ideally point to either a statute or standard that you got either an accessibility standard or you got a statute that say you have to do this certain thing. And that’s why Title II was a fantastic opportunity to drive policy, then after that made the actual policy high level. It was … responsible for what to the caliber for what, and then use that to drive the process and your procedure. If you get too much in the weeds on the policy people are going to have a hard time with it.

Colin Wood
Right. Do you agree with that, Marie?

Marie Cohan
I do. You know, I just had this conversation this week that because we’re going through rule review right now in the State of Texas, and you know, folks want to give input, and they want to pull, pull in a lot of detail, but Jay’s right, it does make it more complex. Statutes are typically written very broad, and then supporting rules are a little bit more detailed, but they’re still fairly broad and specific, you know, and that just helps us as things shift, the statute and the rules can keep up with, you know, especially technology, the shifts that go on there.

The NACSIO report is actually a great guide for developing an accessibility program. It was designed with each month having a different topic to help anyone who’s trying to mature their accessibility program across the state. And so if you have a policy at the statewide level, hopefully you’re consistently applying it across the state. That’s going to make it the most effective, is you develop the policy, you let everybody know the policy exists, and then you try to do consistent application across the state. And that’s what we’re seeing, you know, in more mature states, like I said, we’ve got a lot of more mature states that have been in the collaborative and then the newer states that are coming in. You know, it’s starting piecemeal here and there, in different agencies that are taking the initiative and working its way up, but ideally it starts at the top and then works its way down.

Jay Wyant
This is Jay. I would add to that, there’s a lot of great resources out there on how to make things accessible, whether it’s websites, applications, PDFs, things like that. So we focus less on the best practices, on how to make things accessible, and, like Marie said, more on the organizational strategy. So you want, and there’s also lots of resources there about strategic development, strategic management, and we’re not trying to reinvent anything there either. We’re combining the value of SB subject matter experts in running, in order, an organization working with accessibility in mind, in what were the what are the possible roadblocks? What are the possible obstacles? How to best deal with them, how to best get people unified together, and also who needs to be engaged? What kind of engagement do they need to have? We focused on things that were relatively unique to what makes accessibility work as a practice in an organization, and specifically a government organization, was our focus. And then we pointed people to well, okay, now you start getting that into place. How do you actually build accessibility as a skill set for the different groups and different people within the organization?

Colin Wood
Right. That’s really interesting, because that’s another parallel with cybersecurity. No one is necessarily in a state government going to develop some novel… maybe they will, but for the most part, it’s a matter of following what’s already known in terms of cybersecurity and and just putting the work in, following the standards that NIST or whoever else has developed, not not, there’s not necessarily any big mystery of whether or not people should have two factor authentication or not, things like that. So it sounds like in the world of accessibility, you you have a lot of kind of no brainers like that, where you just have to, you have to have the institutional will and then actually follow through on it.

Jay Wyant
Yeah, this is Jay, I’m going to comment that ever since I got started in working with accessibility, you’re consistently pointing to security and accessibility being very similar on what I call risk management. Organizational risk management enterprises, if you will, you’re not going to be 100% cyber secure. You can’t, you’re constantly changing the next thing that coming up. And the same thing with accessibility, while accessibility itself is a definable, measurable, testable thing, if you will, to be fully accessible, is a grail that’s very difficult to reach, especially with the increased use of SaaS services, where they’re constantly updating. It’s not like you could get your update …, plug it in, validate it and then launch it. This is happening constantly, so you’re trying to manage the risk. How much risk are you exposing the organization too by taking on buying applications that may not be fully accessible? And how can you minimize that?

Colin Wood
One part of this that you know you can control, maybe what’s going on in your organization, but it can be more difficult to control what vendors and what the market does, and vendors play a big role in this big shift to accessible technology. What should people know about accessibility as it relates to procurement and technology acquisition? We could start with you Marie.

Marie Cohan
Marie, yeah, thanks, Colin, so the biggest thing with procurement acquisition is to be proactive, right? So check it for accessibility at the front end. If you if you have a solicitation, make sure it’s in your language, what’s your requirements, that policy we just talked about, add it to your solicitation language so the expectation is there. You know, have the documentation that’s required. So if we’re looking at products, we want to see accessibility conformance reports. We want to know that the product was actually tested against those WCAG standards. If it’s a service like development services, we want to ask more questions, get more detail around how their developers are trained. What kind of tools do they use for development? And then, you know, we have another document we use that was sponsored by NASCIO 10 years ago, called the policy driven adoption for accessibility. And it’s just to test the organization’s knowledge of accessibility maturity with accessibility, so we ask questions in there for that specific responding vendor. Now, you mentioned vendors. Yeah, the vendors are kind of all over the board. I hear stories from other states where, you know, they have challenges. For the State of Texas, where I see the biggest challenge is with our higher education. They have really unique challenges in their procurement, especially when you start getting into the medical schools, they’re buying medical technology. Some of it is exempt. Some of it’s not. They have a tremendous amount of volume. So we find that there’s a lot of issues there with vendors complying, because it might be a niche application, and there’s just not a big market for it. At the statewide level, for agencies, we work really closely with our vendors. It is a true partnership. And so we try to educate our vendors. We make sure that they have the information they need. We, you know, I’m hosting vendor education series this year for the first time so that I can have that one on one time with our vendors, because they want to win that business, right? They want to do business with public sector. You know, that’s what it is. It’s business. We’re all trying to try to do what we need to do. So create a partnership there. They bring us accessible products, like Jay always says, the burden of accessibility is on the vendors. The burden of compliance is on public sector. So it is a true partnership.

Colin Wood
Anything to add there, Jay, with regard to procurement?

Jay Wyant
Sure, there’s a couple of small items. First of all, … We need to be able to trust them, that they understand accessibility, that they value accessibility, and that they build it into what they do. And and that’s all the processing that Marie talked about, the accessibility performance report, the PDAA, and the other question, or to try to find out, how much can you trust? How much are you putting forth on your end, what we need from you? And right now, the trust level is fairly low for a lot of vendors, they’re still learning. They’re still trying to get their arms around us, and we need them to work harder in order to do a better job, because we’re completely dependent on them when we buy the product. So that’s the other thing, we’re getting better vendors and their ability and willingness to invest in adaptability on their end.

Colin Wood
Right, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how, you know, maybe from April, this April to the April next year, how things evolve after the, you know, going up to the next deadline. So one topic I wanted to so we didn’t get to everything in the report, and that was that was not the intention. The report is out there. I encourage anyone interested in this topic to definitely seek that out. But I wanted to take a step back and look at the bigger picture for a moment. Outside of this DOJ deadline, why does digital accessibility matter? Why, why should people care generally, if they’re working in public service?

Jay Wyant
Well, if I could start with that digital accessibility, or usually the practice of digital accessibility, and even more so, involving people with disabilities, as you think about, design and build technology, makes for better technology. Technology not only operates better, it’s also more sustainable. It will last longer. It will be will require less future assistance and future remediation down the road, because it works better from the start. Here’s a little secret. A lot of the accessibility succcess criteria and web content accessibility guidelines that we all follow are based in or rooted in core basic html5, nothing more than that. And so if you follow good accessibility best practices, engage in like a human-centered design way or potential users, including people with disability, you will have better technology. So right there, why not do it that way? Why not make it right?

Colin Wood
How about you, Marie, what do you think about why digital accessibility is important?

Marie Cohan
I love this question because the lens just can zoom in, like, like Jay said, right down to the technology website. Think about search engine optimization. Now we need to start thinking about artificial intelligence optimization. So as AI bots are touching your website, the better accessible websites we can put together, the the better accessibility in them. It’s going to optimize that AI search that’s coming through our websites. But if you zoom out, there’s a bigger picture here, because we’re talking about people. We’re talking about the public, the residents in our states, they don’t have a choice, right? They come to government because that’s what’s there, that’s the services that they have to go to. So it doesn’t have to mean that it’s a bad experience for them. We want to have that be a good experience. We want to be efficient. We want it to be a cost savings for the state. In some cases, it can be even a revenue generator. So I talk about this a lot. When we make sure our digital government services are accessible to everyone, you think about the people that are starting their own business that have a disability, because a lot of them have employment issues, and so they’ll start their own business, they’ll go to the state, they’ll open that business up, pay a fee for that. They may be paying sales tax. They may be paying in Texas, we have a franchise tax or unemployment tax. And you see where I’m going with this. It’s generating revenue. It’s an economic growth for the state, and all of it starts with digital websites, or digital accessible websites, accessible applications, accessible forms on our websites. Think about, you know, Texas, we just had a massive flood last summer. It was tragic, and a lot of people with disabilities were trapped or did not have the information timely that they needed. So when we have those digital services that we can push out to all residents and keep them informed and let them know where they can go, where the nearest places that has a generator so they can plug in their medical devices or something, that’s why we do this. We want to make sure we’re not leaving any of our residents behind. We want to make sure they’re all being served. We want it to be a good experience for them, because they don’t have a choice. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a bad experience. And we want to look at the economic benefit: saving money for the state, if we do it efficiently, if we’re consistent in the application, that’s a cost savings for the state. It could potentially be a revenue generator for the state as well.

Jay Wyant
This is Jay. I’d like to add that in government we’re not in the business of picking winners and losers. Again, like I said before, you should serve everyone and then also remind you all that people with disability in general are the most overeducated and underemployed people in our population. So if we make things accessible and usable to everyone, especially people with disability, you will, like Marie said, see an increase in the ability to contribute to their ability and with what like Marie say, now generate revenue. you’re now generating more active group of people in our society.