IT Accessibility Planning Guide

TAP Monthly Updates

June

Software Updates:

• Additional Grackle licenses are now open to all executive branch agencies again!

• TAP will not be renewing our Otter.ai licenses and the service through TAP is being decommissioned on Sept. 30, 2024. Agencies should reach out to their IT Director to help find a solution that works for your agency’s needs.

• OIT continues to make progress with website and application prioritization, testing and remediation, which are all part of our overall Accessibility Implementation Project. View the Application Manual Testing Guide to learn more about the testing process for OIT-owned and managed applications.

Aira Expands to Colorado’s State Parks

As we work to fulfill the Governor’s vision of a Colorado for All, our state parks just became more accessible to those who are blind or have low vision.

In 2023, OIT and the Governor’s Office partnered with Aira to connect those who are blind or have low vision with a live visual assistant when navigating state-operated buildings and digital services. Since then, more than 2,000 people have been using the Aira Explorer mobile application on their smartphones to navigate the Colorado State Capitol and other state buildings, university campuses, and state websites and applications. The 24/7 service is free for up to 30 minutes per session. 

In a joint press release, Colorado Parks & Wildlife and OIT announced that Aira is now also available at all 42 state parks, providing access to visual information, such as signs, kiosks, buildings and more. This video demonstrates how Theresa Montano and Chelsea Cook, both from OIT’s Technology Accessibility Program (TAP) team, use Aira to explore Chatfield State Park. Read more about using Aira in Colorado’s great outdoors.

Reach out to OIT_Accessibility@state.co.us if your agency would like to partner with TAP on promoting Aira as an accommodation tool! Check out the Aira Media Kit.

Check out Theresa's interviews with local media Denver 7 and the Colorado Sun as she talks up Aira as an awesome accommodation tool. 

Rules

It’s compliance time! We can take pride in the loads of work state agencies have done preparing for this day. In our last few days before the July 1 deadline, there are just a couple of steps to double-check to ensure we are ready to provide equitable service to individuals with disabilities.

1. Check your accessibility statements. Make sure your statement is in a conspicuous place so people can easily find out how to request assistance and that you offer at least two different contact options.

2. Check your accommodation processes. Make sure that the right people have the knowledge and tools to respond effectively when a request for assistance, accommodation or modification comes in.

3. Check your planning and documentation. Make sure that you have current documentation describing your accessibility processes, decision-making, planning, and activities.

With these in place, we can face July 1 with confidence. And more importantly, we can continue to make accessibility part of our daily work.

Checklist Resources

• Accessibility Planning and Documentation Review and Approval

  • TAP created Preparing for July 1 Compliance with Technology Accessibility, which is a talking points document with guidance for engaging executive leadership in the final approval of accessibility planning documentation.

• Accessibility Statements

  • All agency applications should have an accessibility statement linked from them. This must be completed no later than June 30, 2024, for the agency to comply with state statutes. Please refer to your Product Director or IT Director with any questions.

• Phase 2 OIT application testing efforts update:

  • OIT is in the process of selecting accessibility testing vendors and continuing accessibility testing for Phase I applications, and has begun developing Statements of Work (SOWs)  for Phase II applications.

  • Refer to the OIT Accessibility Application Manual Testing process for more information.

• The OIT Enterprise Accessibility Vendor Pricing and Services List has been updated with remediation, training and multimedia services and one new vendor. 

• Agency accessibility adoption progress

  • The executive branches have successfully surpassed TAP’s goal of 80% average completion of the checklists! This is a tremendous accomplishment for the state and a huge leap towards creating a Colorado for All.

  • Reaching the 80% milestone essentially gets us to the optimize phase and sets us on the path to full compliance with the state accessibility standards by helping us provide evidence of due diligence.

Building Awareness and Empathy Through Interactive Engagement

TAP has revamped the Empathy Lab’s experiential learning site and is pleased to introduce the Digital Accessibility Workshop. The new Workshop includes interactive exercises across eight different topics that show how people with disabilities experience webpages, forms, colors, multimedia and more. Some of the exercises are intentionally inaccessible to help you gain a deeper understanding that not everybody experiences technology like you do! We highly recommend you take the time to go through the Workshop. As an added bonus, if your agency uses the SOC Learns Training Portal, you can enter your time spent in the Workshop as External Training.

Reminder:

Agency accommodations need to be included on all applications that support each agency's services. Regardless of who manages an application, each agency must be able to provide support to customers who need an accommodation. Please work with your vendors and OIT as applicable.

May

On May 16 at the Global Accessibility Awareness Day open office hours, Governor Polis  recorded a video message about the importance of making state services accessible. A panel of Empathy Lab Community Steering Committee (CSC) members presented their lived experiences in a powerful discussion that was recorded to be shared with agency teams.

New Accessibility Vendors Available

OIT has a new set of enterprise agreement contracts with a number of accessibility vendors to provide additional resources for services in accessibility remediation, training and multimedia services. These new vendors are under a cooperative agreement contract so any state of Colorado government entity (state and local government) can utilize these contracts.

Agencies do not need to request insurance or W-9 documentation and can work directly with the vendors as they choose; no need to go through OIT to work with them. However, it is recommended that state agencies continue to partner with their OIT IT Director and TAP consultant to help with any guidance and support needs.

Learn more about these new vendors and services provided in our OIT Enterprise Agreements List (contracts are linked for each vendor) and OIT Enterprise Vendor Pricing and Services List (identified as “Cooperative”).

Rules Compliance Speaker Series

There are two more sessions to go! Each week we take a deeper look at a topic of interest for complying with the rules. You can continue to join live for the remaining sessions of the Rules Compliance Speaker Series for state agencies through mid-June. The presentation slides and recordings are also available shortly after each session.

Topics include a general overview on complying with the rules, insights on the HB24-1454 Grace Period Bill, prioritizing, testing and remediation of products, accommodations and accessibility statements, procurement guidance, and more.

The links to join a session, add an event to your calendar and catch the recordings afterwards can all be found on the IT Accessibility Planning Guide Rules page.

Checklist Resources

OIT is requesting agencies achieve at least an 80% completion on their plans (also called checklists) by July 1, 2024 (Completion Dashboard - Confidential work product of the Governor, not for public release) to help ensure compliance with the accessibility rules.

Be sure to schedule time with your accessibility consultant to review your IT Accessibility Adoption Checklist.

Digital Accessibility Workshop

In November of 2023, the Empathy Lab launched as a fun and interactive way to experience what people with certain disabilities - including dyslexia and color blindness - experience when websites are not accessible. After roughly six months of having the experimental site live, we are ready to improve the user experience based on your feedback and give the site a new name!

On June 10, the Empathy Lab’s Digital Accessibility Workshop (formerly known as the experiential learning site) will have updates and enhancements in place. Updates coming on June 10 include:

• New and refreshed exercises covering eight different topics.

• Rebranded topics that tie to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) checkpoints and POUR principles (perceivable, operable, understandable and robust).

• Less time required! More of an at-your-own pace approach, and less commitment required by visitors.

• Lived Experiences showcase featuring stories from Community Steering Committee (CSC) members.

• Improved plain language on each page.

• The site will be open to anyone, including all Colorado state agencies and the general public.

• A “Centering Empathy: Stories from Coloradans with Diverse Lived Experiences” video is coming soon! 

April

OIT Accessibility Implementation Project: applications testing

• OIT project update: OIT and agency partners are selecting vendors for application testing. Testing is scheduled to begin on the first group of applications at the end of April. Once testing is complete, a report with remediation recommendations will be shared with agency stakeholders.

• Project Questions: Questions about accessibility testing and remediation of agency applications should be directed to your agency IT director.

Accessibility training update

• Training for vendors or contractors: Whether a vendor is providing a product or a service, the state expectation is that the vendor organization has operationalized accessibility to be able to support their government partners’ compliance requirements. TAP will keep you posted on guidance that will be added for vendors/contractors but for now, you can refer vendors and contractors to the Vendor Accessibility Checklist.

• Access Academy Licenses: The TAP team is thrilled by the number of folks that are actively engaged with the course offerings in Access Academy! However, we are currently at capacity for training licenses and will not be able to enroll additional learners into Access Academy at this time. The TAP team will keep agencies posted as licenses become available and we resume our enrollment process. In addition, we need to remove users who are not actively engaged in the courses. We will be sending out an email to folks that have zero activity in the Access Academy courses since 2023 (or early 2024), giving them five business days to engage with the course content in order to keep their license. We will run another "zero activity" report on Friday, April 19 at 5 p.m. and will remove anyone on that list from Access Academy.

Accessibility announcements and resources

Overlays: 

After researching, reviewing and discussing the nature and issues of accessibility overlays with the disability community, accessibility community, vendor community and others, here is the current stance and guidance from the TAP team:

Accessibility overlay tools can be valuable for assisting people who have a variety of disabilities. They can also be used as a great accommodation tool when a website is not yet fully accessible and when specific issues are not yet addressed. However, overlay tools:

• Should not create any accessibility issues in the website such as interference with assistive technology or limit those with visual or cognitive disabilities capabilities to access all content and functionality on the site.

• Should be tested and/or a demo should be provided to show where the product meets or does not meet accessibility. It is also recommended that a compliance report be provided to indicate where the product is or is not in compliance with WCAG guidelines.

• Should be combined with other means to meet compliance including manual testing, regularly monitoring, and operationalization of accessibility within the organization.

• Should not be used as the sole means of meeting compliance and removing barriers for people with disabilities.

Additionally, we recommend that if a particular website uses some form of automation to address accessibility issues, it needs to enable the end user to do all of the following:

• Be made aware that an automated accessibility remediation solution is operating.

• Determine when an automated accessibility solution is operating and when it is not.

• Activate or deactivate an automated accessibility solution as needed.

• Configure the automated accessibility solution to meet specific disability requirements (e.g., screen-reader mode or contrast adjustment) using fully accessible controls.

• Contact the provider of the accessibility automation remediation tool.

Local government accessibility support: 

For those of you getting accessibility questions from local government partners, the TAP team doesn’t have the resources to provide one-on-one support but we have put together some resources for those organizations that we encourage you to share: Accessibility Planning for Government Organizations (Google Slides)

Change management resources:

• Change Management Communications Presentation (Google Slides)

• Sample Change Management Communications Plan (Google Sheets)

Tyler Colorado March update:

• Tyler Colorado March Accessibility Open Hours Update (PDF)

Rules Compliance Speaker Series:

We’re bringing the rules to you! Now that the adopted rules are available, OIT offers multiple opportunities for you to learn about the rules and advance accessibility efforts. Don’t worry, recordings will be available if you miss a session.

For state agencies, we’re offering a weekly deep dive into different topics with the Rules Speaker Series. These sessions are open to all state agency employees and we encourage anyone interested to attend!

You may also join the “Complying with the Technology Accessibility Statutes and Rules” online session on May 10 at 10 a.m. This event is targeted to local governments and special districts. Registration on Zoom.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in any of these presentations, please send a request to oit_accessibility@state.co.us at least a week in advance of the event.