{"id":73082,"date":"2025-10-07T16:20:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T20:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/?p=73082"},"modified":"2025-10-07T16:28:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T20:28:37","slug":"government-web-accessibility-deadline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/government-web-accessibility-deadline\/","title":{"rendered":"Eyeing accessibility deadline, states root out ancient web issues"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The charms of the 1990s-era internet, with its animated gifs, labyrinthine navigation and blinding color schemes, have mostly been traded in for standards-based templates and a more centralized and trustworthy group of online services. But lamentable design holdovers from a less regulated and much smaller web have led governments to finally finish cleaning up their sites, particularly as they look ahead to next year\u2019s federal accessibility deadline. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arizona Chief Information Officer J.R. Sloan said his state last week celebrated the conclusion of a six-month initiative to identify the most egregious accessibility snarls on the state\u2019s main websites, but also to educate the state government\u2019s content creators on web standards so that repeated clean-up efforts won\u2019t be necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We \u201creally [wanted] to make it something sustainable,\u201d Sloan said. \u201cWe included a lot of training, as well as explaining the toolsets to the people involved and teaching everybody how to fish<\/em> as we\u2019re putting new content on the sites, making sure it\u2019s done in an accessible way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sloan laughed at the scope of the problem unearthed by the initiative: 400,000 fixes spotted by software that scanned for flaws in formatting and design that could make it difficult for users with any number of disabilities to find information or access services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arizona\u2019s project was chiefly driven by an April 2026 deadline<\/a> advanced by the Department of Justice, but Sloan said it was also viewed as a chance to roll out a consistent new \u201clook and feel\u201d across the state\u2019s sites. Agencies are given some leeway to express their identities, by selecting from pre-approved themes and color schemes. But the unbridled individuality of an internet that gave the world sites like the original MapQuest and The Hamster Dance<\/a> is mostly<\/a> a relic on the modern internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A series of 15-minute tutorials, created by Sloan\u2019s agency, chronicled on YouTube, covers common accessibility issues as exciting as not using paragraph HTML elements in place of header elements and ensuring that sound files are accompanied by transcripts. \u201cWe limit our use of formatting on text to only when it\u2019s simply only there for visual appeal and isn\u2019t actually intended to communicate any type of meaning,\u201d a presenter explains in one video<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most technologists appreciate standards, and some even love them, but numerous officials have told this publication that they did not relish taking on the project of fixing their websites. Correcting HTML formatting and double-checking metadata is a slog, and much of the work, though \u201cnot rocket science,\u201d Sloan said, can\u2019t be automated. In Arizona, he said, the \u201clong pole\u201d of the project has been fixing PDFs, the mostly static text documents that are difficult to reliably convert to more accessible formats. (Arizona isn\u2019t done fixing all its web accessibility issues, but Sloan said the state is on schedule to meet the April deadline.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A project led by the civic tech nonprofit Code for America this year provided<\/a> the Georgia state government and Salt Lake City with tools for scanning their websites for accessibility issues. But, as in Arizona, that software serves more as an organizational tool than an AI-propelled silver bullet \u2014 people are still needed to implement any recommended changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arizona was one of numerous states that drew on a group convened by the National Association of State CIOs, co-chaired by officials in Texas and Minnesota, to share best practices and ensure that states don\u2019t make any mistakes during their cleanups that could require a retracing of steps. Meredith Ward, NASCIO\u2019s deputy executive director, said one topic covered by the group was ensuring that accessibility is included in states\u2019 procurement processes \u2014 buying software that generates new, inaccessible content could set a state back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an email, Ward wrote that accessibility is a \u201cvery important\u201d issue for state CIOs and increasingly so since it climbed onto the group\u2019s annual priorities list<\/a> for the first time last year. She also pointed to statistics showing that a growing share of people \u2014 between 20% and 38%, depending on the source \u2014 have at least one disability, from poor eyesight to cognitive disabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite interest by state technology officials to ensure their services are uniformly accessible, they don\u2019t always have the resources. Ward shared data from NASCIO\u2019s upcoming annual survey showing that while 70% of state CIOs reported that improving accessibility is one of their directives, only 46% have funding to support accessibility work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond excluding users, failing to meet accessibility standards could also prove costly for states. In a separate report<\/a> NASCIO published last month, the group warned that lawsuits filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise. It counted 2,250 lawsuits in 2019, rising to 4,000 last year, with penalties to offenders rising as high as $350,000, not counting remediation costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NASCIO plans to continue supporting states ahead of the deadline, Ward said, including by releasing a checklist for vendors next week at its annual conference in Denver, hosting webinars and \u201cworking sessions\u201d for its members in the fall and early next year, and publishing a report on accessibility and procurement before the end of the year, hopefully in an accessible format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One state official said his goal isn’t only to remove inaccessible content, but retrain staff so that old design mistakes don’t need to be revisited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":73083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20648],"tags":[234,381,3973,5550,5571,25838,25880],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[4696],"class_list":["post-73082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-services","tag-nascio","tag-arizona","tag-state-government","tag-accessibility","tag-j-r-sloan","tag-doj","tag-deadline","author-colin-wood"],"yoast_head":"\nEyeing accessibility deadline, 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