Progress, Not Panic: A Practical Approach to Your Title II Deadline

[00:00:00] Amber Hinds: I, as I think many of you know, am Amber Hinds. I’m the CEO of Equalize Digital, and I’m here today with Chris, who will be co-presenting with me. We’re going to dive right in. We will be trying to watch the chat but if you have questions you want us to answer, please put those in the Q&A.

They are a lot easier for us to find.

[00:00:25] About Equalize Digital

[00:00:25] Chris Hinds: Yes. Please make good use of that Q&A feature. My name is Chris Hinds. I’m the COO at Equalize Digital, and I handle a lot of our early stage conversations with various organizations who are looking to get started with accessibility or take that right next step with accessibility, whatever that step may be.

And as far as who are we more broadly, we are Equalize Digital. We provide tailored solutions, including accessibility audits, remediation, user testing, and WordPress software built specifically to help teams measure and manage their accessibility with confidence. Our solutions and our work have touched 10-plus million websites globally between our services and our software, and we work with a very, yes, that is three verys, broad variety of organizations, from globally recognized names, like some of the names you see here in the very traditional logo grid that you see around the web.

But also with small district-level organizations in public sector, Main Street businesses, and even individual consultants and freelancers. We really do not discriminate as far as who we work with and the type of organization they are, and we would love to talk to you if you feel like you need accessibility help.

And with that, I’ll let Amber take it away with our agenda.

[00:01:45] Today’s Agenda

[00:01:45] Amber Hinds: So what we’re going to talk about today, we are going to do a very brief ADA Title II requirement overview, just to set the foundation. I know a lot of you all are more advanced or maybe work in government or higher ed, and so you don’t need that.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to spend a bunch of time on this, but we want to make sure that everyone here has just a basic underlying understanding of what we’re going to be talking about when we talk about the ADA. And then we’re going to talk through five specific steps knowing what you have, prioritizing planning, preventing new problems, remediation roadmapping, measuring and communicating progress, and then we will end with sort of a summary action plan and some takeaways The slides are available.

We will throw this link in the chat as well. If you go to equalizedigital.com/progress-not-panic, that URL redirects to a very long and convoluted Google Slides link so you can view and access these slides while we are presenting .

[00:02:57] ADA Title II Overview

[00:02:57] Chris Hinds: All right, so as Amber alluded to, we’re going to make this quick. So this is a basic overview of ADA Title II requirements.

It’s not in-depth because we’re assuming by now most of you attending will already at least know some of this or know where to fill in any gaps in your knowledge. But we’re going to cover who it applies to, what it applies to, the exceptions, what actually qualifies as an exception, excuse me, and the deadlines.

So first up, the who and the what. So Title II applies to all public entities at the state and local level, regardless of size. That’s state-level departments, agencies, regional authorities, cities, towns, counties, municipalities, public schools, colleges and universities, public transit agencies, utilities and emergency services, and courts, voting locations, public healthcare facilities, and yes, libraries.

Most have to communicate effectively with people, and this includes having accessible websites. All web content, conventional electronic documents, and mobile apps must comply with all, with WCAG 2.1 level A and level AA success criteria per the April 2024 rule released by the US DOJ. As far as the types of content that has to conform, that is going to include code or markup that defines the content structure on your webpages, its presentation and interactions with assistive technology or regular interactions.

Text, images, sound, videos, controls, and animations on those websites and webpages also this applies to, and social media posts and documents, including PDFs, DOC or DOCX files, presentation files, and spreadsheets. Exceptions for this include archived web content, preexisting conventional electronic documents, unless such documents are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in that public entity’s services, programs, or activities.

Content posted by a third party where the third party is not posting due to contractual licensing or other arrangements with a public entity, and individualized documents that are password-protected, and finally, preexisting social media posts. And finally, that definition of archived web content, super important to know.

Archived web content means web content that meets all of the following four criteria. One, it was created before the date the public entity was required to comply. So that’s either going to be April 2027 or April 2028. Two, it’s retained exclusively for reference, research, or recordkeeping. Three, it is not altered or updated after the date of archival.

And four, it is organized and stored in a dedicated area or areas clearly identified as being archived. The updated deadlines based on entity type are April 26th, 2027 for populations of 50,000 or more. So if you’re serving that population or more, that’s your deadline. For populations lower than 50,000 or special district governments, it is April 26th, 2028.

And we have a link there in the slide deck, which we also linked the slides in the chat to that interim Justice Department rule that set those deadlines. And now I’m going to hand off to Amber.

[00:06:21] Amber Hinds: I promise we will not go that fast through the whole presentation, but we want to make sure that we had enough time.

Also, we’re not attorneys, and we don’t work for the Justice Department, so we can’t give you super detailed answers about is this legal or not, but what that information Chris shared is the baseline that all came from the ada.gov website and the Justice Department website. So I do recommend following those links if you want to learn more, and we’ll do our best to answer any questions related to it from a non-legal standpoint at the end if there are more.

[00:06:52] Step 1: Know What You Have

[00:06:52] Amber Hinds: So basically, what we’re looking at today is having a journey. How do you get from where you are now to fully complying, having everything WCAG 2.1 AA conformant by your deadline, which may be less than a year away if you are a larger organization that serves a larger public. And the first step is, of course, knowing what you have.

So you have to create what I call an accessibility inventory, and this usually consists of three different things. First, you have to identify all websites, subdomains, and web applications. We’ll also group in there, Chris mentioned that this applied to social media. We’re not going to talk a ton about social media today but that would also fall under.

Basically, any web properties that your organization is responsible for or that represent your organization need to be identified. Then you have to, within each of those properties inventory pages, documents, and any sort of third-party integration so that you have a full understanding of what content exists on those properties.

[00:08:07] Google Worksheet Explaination

[00:08:07] Amber Hinds: And then you have to identify content owners and responsible departments. I have a link to an example Google Sheet… in the slides, and this is something that you can copy. It has three different tabs. I’ll talk through them as we go through the slides, but this is based on what we use and I’ll talk about some of the ways that you could use this if you have not already set this up.

What you want to do though is go to File, Make copy, put it wherever you want in your own Google Drive, and then you should have a version that you can edit. So that is what you want to do first with this link, and we’ll come back to it for a little bit more information so the first thing I want to talk about is finding all web properties.

[00:09:01] Finding All Web Properties

[00:09:01] Amber Hinds: If you are a small organization, like maybe you just work at the public library you have one website and that might be all you have to worry about. If you work at a university, I’m sure you’re familiar with the problem that I’m about to talk about, which is that you may not even know how many websites your organization owns.

So what do you do if you don’t know that answer and you don’t know how you fill in this first tab, which is all of the different websites that may exist for your organization? The first thing you need to do is, one, review domain registrations and DNS records. Find out who at your organization actually can log in to view these things.

They’re going to be able to help point you in that way. I would also check with any department heads or key personnel and ask them, “Are you aware of other websites you’ve created?” Because sometimes there may be like a marketing website or a research website that was created on a totally different domain that you didn’t even know about.

And so for that reason, you might need to start asking people, “What other domains do we have? What other websites?” And then there are some kind of handy tools, and I have an example of one that I use sometimes. It’s crt, . And I have an an example up here that just shows what a query looks like, where you can do crt.sh/?q=austintexas.gov,

and this is important, and exclude=expired. It also has a group of none, but that’s less important. You could replace this with your own domain. And what this does is it actually will tell you, here are all of the SSL certificates that have been issued for domains that are still active and live. They’re not expired certificates, which is a pretty handy little tool because now I can see, okay I’ve got austintexas.gov.

I’ve also got… There’s a data website. There’s whatever this ctecc sba .austin, right? So this is a good way to maybe start to say, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of websites that all exist at these domains.” Here’s another one that’s on a totally different domain, but it’s connected in some way, but it’s at palmereventcenter.com, right?

So this is a handy tool, and it’s totally public and free. Another one that is also handy is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. You can do 500 URLs for free. It’s not… You’re not going to be able to do unless you have a very small website. You probably can’t use that at the free level, but you could pay for one year.

It’s a European tool, so it’s euros. It’s 199 per year to remove that limit. And this is another one that could just go out and crawl, and then it, you can export domain or subdomain lists from it as well so what we do is we use one of these tools, and then we start to fill out this first tab where we say, okay, first we just need…

The first step is get a list of all of these domains. Where are they? What are they? Then we want to just summarize what is the purpose. So I have example.gov. Oh, this is the main website, library.example.gov. This is my public library. Payments.vendor-example.com, this is where people pay their utility bill.

Y2Kprep.example.gov this was a community information website for Y2K, right? Then we talk about, okay, now we know what these websites are, who manages them. We list this out. It might be a team, it might be an individual person. We want to put in some sort of contact email because we want to know who is the primary person that if I need to talk to about this website, who owns it, who’s responsible for it, who do I need to email?

And then for each one, we want to decide on an action and then start tracking progress. And the actions that we typically look at, everything starts with needs review, and then our actions are either we have to audit and remediate it because it has to be conformant. If it is a total vendor website, so for example, that utility payments portal Maybe I could audit it.

I probably can’t remediate it. So my first thing is maybe I’m just going to request an Accessibility Conformance Report from them and ask them, “Have you audited this? How accessible is it? What problems are you aware of?” Then we might also have an option of replace. So we might go look at something and say, “Hey, we still need this,” but I can tell immediately, like maybe I just run a browser extension to test it and it’s got hundreds of issues, or I can see all the colors are bad , right?

And I also know the content isn’t super great. Maybe we replace it. Then we also have this, wonderful example, which we’ll talk more about a lot, but deleting is a great option. Y2Kprep.example.gov, we probably don’t need to maintain that website anymore. We could just take it off the internet, and I don’t know if anybody would be

N- nostalgia might be sad, but the history of what we provide to our citizens, most citizens are probably not going there. So you want to just go through and create an additional, like what is the action that we have to take? And then from there, you can start tracking progress, and we move these through phases where it’s either not applicable because it’s totally removed, or it’s at, in a not started state, then it goes to audit in progress, remediation in progress, and then ideally you move into a complete state.

[00:14:53] Assess Web Pages

[00:14:53] Amber Hinds: So that’s how we look at and assess at the domain level. And then what … After we have all of our web properties, we have to start assessing the content within that, and it’s very similar. We have to review all content and determine what actions are needed, and then we have to identify content owners vendors, and tricky content.

[00:15:18] Getting Content Out of WordPress into CSVs

[00:15:18] Amber Hinds: And there’s a couple of helpful tools that I’m going to tell you about. And yes, I did skip some text on the screen, but I’m going to come back to that in just a second. So in our spreadsheet here, we have a website content tab, and this content planner is similar. We have this set up because we do most of our remediation work is in WordPress land, and I use a couple of different tools to be able to create this, and then I’ll collaborate with our clients to have them help me assess the content and figure out what the plan is.

The tool that I like the most is a paid tool. So I’m going to tell you about a paid tool and a free tool. WP All Export is a paid tool. I’m not associated with it at all. At the time that I bought it several years ago, they had a lifetime license. I haven’t looked at their pricing today, so I don’t know if they still do.

It is so handy. Th- they also have an import version. But basically you can choose any content. Let me just go real quick and be like, I’m going to export any content. I could choose by post type. So I could say my board meetings, I gotta export all those. My documents post type, my pages, my posts. I could also export taxonomies.

So I could say, “Hey, I need to export all of my categories just so I can get a list of all of those categories and go through them and figure out do we actually need all these categories and all these URLs that are public for all these categories.” Or any other custom taxonomy that you have. And basically what I do with this is I build it out to have the data that matches my sheet.

So this has the post ID, the title, the permalink, the status. That means is it a published post? Is it a draft post? Is it private? This is really important because this goes into our prioritization, which we’ll talk about later. If you just export content from WordPress without looking at your status, then you might get a bunch of drafts mixed in there that they’re old drafts that have a ton of accessibility problems.

Nobody was planning to publish them, but they were afraid to hit delete. So you want to know what status the post has. I’ll always do the author email. Author email does not 100% guarantee that is the person who’s responsible for maintaining the content. However, it is a good place to start. So we’ll export that, and then there’s two hidden fields here, edac_summary_pass_tests and edac, E-D-A-C, _summary_errors, and edac_summary_warnings.

These map to Accessibility Checker, so if you happen to have Accessibility Checker, then it would pull data from Accessibility Checker. And this allows you to just download it as a CSV file. Again, it’s a paid tool. A free option, which is also linked in the slides, is a plugin called Export All URLs.

This won’t get you everything as far as custom taxonomies But it will get you all of your custom post types. And basically what you can do is I’ll make sure I select all types, and then under the export fields I’ll have post ID, title, URL, status. You can if you want say categories and tags.

All this will do is add a field that tells you what category and tag. You could then manipulate the data to get it down into the same column, like pull it out in that way. Then I’ll usually get the author, and then under content I want the post type because this is helpful for me to know where it is.

Default it’s going to say published. I don’t want that. I want, I usually want all, because that’ll give us future scheduled as well. And it will include that in the status. And I’m just going to display this here, but it’ll download a CSV or you can see what this would then look like on this demo website where it gives me the ID, title, URL, status, author, post type.

And then basically what I do is I go into this and I’ll we’ll just go file, import, and I’m going to upload an example. Default is going to say create a new spreadsheet, but what I actually want to do is append to the current sheet and click import data. And this puts it, it puts it below my table, which is fine.

I just delete this row. And if you’re not familiar with tables in Google Sheets, I like them ’cause they have a lot of extra features that are nicer, and it gives you different views. When you add something at the bottom, it’s going to not import… It’s not going to have every row included in the table initially.

So up at the top of the table, there’s a table menu, and you can adjust your table range. And instead of ending on row two, I’m just going to say P53. I think that’ll get all of my posts. So now they’re all in the table. And then what I can do that’s handy is I could potentially go drag all these down or individually assess.

[00:20:36] What to Assess with Your Content

[00:20:36] Amber Hinds: So I… This is the part that I skipped, which is what are some of the things that I assess on content. So we’ll typically fill in whatever sort of post type it is, because that’s helpful for grouping and views later. We’ll look at whether it’s public, and this isn’t always a yes or no. Sometimes it’s logged-in users only, right?

Or with a password. So you have to assess that. Anything that is super public is obviously way higher priority than something that only a smaller group can see. And then the actions that we have here is similar. Audit/remediate, Replace, Request ACR, if I look at a page and the only thing that’s on it is an iframe from a vendor, for example.

Delete. We have move to archive, and this is where that archiving comes in. We’ll usually give things a priority, and sometimes the priority comes from… I have a column over here where you could potentially… And you can do mapping, you can have AI help you with this, but you could pull in traffic last 90 days.

And we’ll talk more about prioritization later. But basically we want to go through and figure out what are our critical high, medium, and low pages from both an audit and a remediation standpoint. And then our status, and this is the journey that a page moves through, is it starts with needing an audit, unless we say, “Oh, we’re going to delete this,” or, “We’re going to move it to the archive,” and then we can either make it NA or just mark it as moved to, to archive.

But then basically it’s going to get audited. It’s going to need an audit. We’re going to schedule an audit. And then once an audit has happened, it can get a couple of different states. It can get open issues related to a vendor or open issues that are internal. Or you could just say, “Hey, there were no problems on this page.

It’s perfectly accessible,” and then you mark it verified accessible. Once all of the open issues are resolved, then it gets a retest status, and then it either goes from retest to, yes, it’s accessible now, to, nope, we have to put it back in open issues because something wasn’t totally done.

At, at a point where you start going through these and manually looking at pages, this is where we have a checkbox for include vendor embeds. This is another thing that AI or doing even like a search on your database if you have developer-level skills, because just searching for an iframe is a really good indicator.

So if you find that the content includes an iframe, then right away I would just check this box and be like, “Okay, there’s going to be something on this page that I cannot control. I can’t fix the code in an iframe. I’m going to have to figure out the iframe source and have the person who owns the source fix that.”

And then I would always say any notes, the kinds of notes that we’ll put here would be things that we notice when we’re looking at it that maybe an automated tool won’t be able to tell us very easily. So for example, if we’re looking at a page and we know that it has an infographic. If the infographic has alt text, a lot of scanners aren’t going to say anything about it.

But if the alt text might not be correct, the infographic might fail color contrast or it might have text that just it’s … The way it’s made, it’s horrible on mobile or on Zoom and not really readable and not responsive. And so w- I might just note, okay, has infographic. This needs to be looked back through.

Or anything that has custom functionality like search and filters, things like that, that we’re saying, okay, this might help us figure out that we have to prioritize this for a manual audit above and beyond the plain paragraphs and headings that we can trust an automated checker is doing a better job of assessing.

[00:24:31] Assessing Documents

[00:24:31] Amber Hinds: So that is how I use this website content tab And then you do something very similar for documents. What I’ll say, if you have a WordPress website, is don’t start with your media library. You may have hundreds or thousands of documents in your media library, but just because they’re in your media library, it doesn’t mean that they’re actually being served to anyone.

So you can use an accessibility checker export that is a setting if you have Accessibility Checker, or there are other tools. Grackle Docs, I think, has a tool that can crawl and just look for all of your PDFs or other documents. Screaming Frog would also be able to do this.

You can have it crawl all of your links and say, “I only want links with extensions that end in .pdf or .doc or .docx.” And basically find all the documents that you’re actually sharing and linking to. And then you want to put those in a spreadsheet, and that’s what we have here. This example row that I have on the documents tab, this is pulled from a Accessibility Checker export of issues, which there’s a lot.

But if we look at… Let me see if I can just find the… the link to PDF. We don’t need all of this information because it’s going to have like severity and WCAG level and all that kind of stuff. But what we’ll do is we’ll pull just some specific content, post title, post URL. And then the affected code snippet, I use regex to fill in the visible link text and the actual URL to the document in the spreadsheet.

You can look at this if you inspect the spreadsheet and actually find what that formula is. But basically it pulls this data from the affected code, which just makes it easier to assess. And then we do something very similar where we have a status. Default is unknown, and then it’s either an accessible document or it’s not accessible, and then it’s a plan.

So it either starts with needing planning, and then again, we’re either keeping it and it’s done, keeping it, it needs auditing/remediation. We might decide we’re going to rebuild this as a webpage, remove or delete, or move to the archive. And I did see the question about archive, and we can talk about that in just a little bit, and I’d be happy to show a couple examples. So that’s my first initial, I have to just figure out what content I have, how important it is and who owns it.

[00:27:14] Prioritization Planning

[00:27:14] Amber Hinds: And that then starts to build my plan. But now I have this plan, how do I actually prioritize things? Once you have your plan, you’re going to, you’re going to do a variety of things to come up with accessibility issues. You want to use some sort of automated tool because it’s going to save you so much time.

You don’t want to only manually test. So some sort of automated tool, whether it’s ours or a browser extension, or there are other SaaS softwares that you can use. And then you’re going to have specific pages, as I mentioned, that you’re going to go through and be like, “This needs a manual audit,” and

someone’s going to manually audit it, and then you’re going to have all these issues. So where do you start? So the way I look at this is I want to evaluate issues based on four things. The first one is impact. So does the issue prevent someone from accessing information or completing a very important task?

So this could be a form that is missing labels. It could be a broken navigation menu. It could be an inaccessible PDF document that has really important instructions about how to renew your driver’s license, right? And there’s no webpage with the information. It’s only on this inaccessible PDF whatever that might be.

So it’s is this issue a blocker that is going to stop someone? But then we also have this other factor of reach. So how many pages or users are affected? This is where I mentioned public pages versus password-protected pages. If it’s password-protected, you know maybe a more limited group might have access to it.

That might make it lower priority than something that is just available to anyone on the internet. Also this is where looking at your Google Analytics traffic can be helpful because you could have a bunch of sliders on some really old blog posts that the slider carousel has empty buttons for the pagination, so they don’t say something like, “Go to slide two, go to slide three.”

They’re empty buttons. But they’re on blog posts from 2023, and you can look at your Google Analytics traffic and you are like, “No one is visiting them.” And so that’s really… Normally we say, “An empty button without a label, that’s a critical failure.” But then we add this layer of nobody even goes to this page.

It’s not a critical failure, right? There are other pages that have more critical failures. And then is the issue part of an essential public service or high-traffic user journey? So again, on that same thing. And then the other way I would start to evaluate issues is can your team fix it, or does it require a vendor?

[00:30:17] ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial)

[00:30:17] Amber Hinds: And I’m going to loop back for a second to this section where I was talking about reviewing content and determining what actions are needed. There is an acronym that I like to use, which is called ROT, R-O-T, and it stands for redundant, outdated, or trivial. And this is content that it is not necessary.

It is very old email newsletters or blog posts that you know nobody is reading. Maybe it’s event calendar events from 10 years ago. These are all things that are outdated. They’re not timely anymore, or maybe they’re duplicated. So you have the event calendar post, and then you also have the blog post where you recapped the event after it happened.

Maybe you don’t need the event calendar because you have the blog post already that shares that information. And then trivial is similar. It’s like content that’s not super important to anyone. Maybe somebody thought that it would be helpful, or it’s related to a service that you don’t offer anymore and you don’t, you aren’t legally required to keep it.

All of that, the best way to handle it is to delete it. People get afraid of this, and they’re like, “No, we can’t delete anything.” They’re like… Or, “It’ll cause broken links,” or, “It’s bad for SEO.” If people are not visiting that content anyway, you can tell in Google Analytics, no one has been there for six months or a year or multiple years.

Deleting it is not going to hurt your SEO. It is not going to hurt the public because the public is not going there. So that is always the best place to start, is delete ROT. And then you say, “Okay, maybe this is content that we really do have to keep because we’re required by law to have it on our website,” our board meeting minutes, for example.

[00:32:08] Moving Content into an Archive

[00:32:08] Amber Hinds: But they are in PDFs that are not accessible, and making seven years worth of agendas and minutes in PDFs accessible is a huge undertaking that we’re not sure if it’s valuable. This is why that exception for archived web content exists. It was created before your compliance deadline You have to keep it public, but spending your time or your resources on remediating it doesn’t make sense.

You can move it into an archive, and then from your archive, you can then have a message that says, “Okay, if you want to have a version of this, contact us, and we will make it accessible.” So that’s what that move it to an archive is. And then, of course, that key content is stuff that you have to remediate.

Someone asked, “What’s an example of that?” Highland has a pretty big example of theirs. This is a community college in Illinois. They use our ArchiveWP plugin, which we’re not going to go into detail here, but we’re happy to answer questions about. But basically, it builds an easy process to move things.

It creates 301 redirects, even though I’ll tell you most of the time these things don’t have to be redirected. It allows people to filter and find content but it does have a very clear, right– It has to be in a specific, clearly designated location. That is one of the requirements under the ADA. So it has a notice, and it says, “Hey, if you need this in a different format…”

I’m going to click on one of these I’ve never seen before right? Okay, y-you can contact us, and we can give you these. But obviously, supervisory meeting feedback process from fiscal year ’21 as a PDF probably didn’t make sense for them to remediate, so they moved it into their archive. So this is an example of what one can look like.

[00:34:15] Top Priorities

[00:34:15] Amber Hinds: So once you’ve gone through and you’ve evaluated all of your content, then you want to start looking at your top priorities. I generally recommend focusing efforts in this order. One, start with global elements, header, footer, navigation menu: things that are on multiple pages that will help clear out a lot of noise.

Then those, what we talked about, critical blockers. And the way you want to look at pages is start with kind of bottom of the funnel up, pages where conversions happen, forms, signups, anything like that going back up, and high-traffic pages. But remember, you want to prioritize by accessibility, impact, and scale.

So like on this website, they have 17 empty buttons on four pages, but if those are pages no one goes to, I wouldn’t call that critical. … Now, it might be a really easy fix, so it’d be like, “Okay, yeah, let’s just fix it.” But it might not be as critical as something that is high, like insufficient color contrast, and is on 418 pages, right?

So you don’t necessarily just want to go based on the severity that is being reported by an automated tool.

[00:35:32] Example Prioritization

[00:35:32] Amber Hinds: I have a couple of examples of prioritization. So for example, if the issue is inaccessible utility payment form, I would call that critical. And why? Because it blocks an essential service. A keyboard-inaccessible navigation that is used site-wide, critical.

That basically affects people’s ability to move throughout the entire website , so that’s number one. I would always fix your navigation before doing anything else. Missing form labels on permit applications. This is high. Now, it could be a critical failure for some people, but the reason why we might call this high instead of critical, depending upon your organization, is that yes, it creates barriers to complete an important task, but it might not be used by a lot of people.

So if you have a different form that also has problems that is used by almost everyone I would fix that one first before fixing this one. Low-contrast text in a shared theme component, that’s high. Potentially impacts all or most pages. Empty alternative text is one that I think is interesting because you see this in lawsuits a lot, where they say, “There’s no alternative text.”

And and I think it’s something that’s cited a lot in accessibility webinars because it’s easy for people to understand. You have to have something that describes the image. But if you have a lot of images with empty alternative text, that is actually what I would consider kind of a low priority, and especially if they’re on blog posts or not on your critical service pages.

And most public websites don’t have a lot of images on their critical pages . They tend to have them more in blog posts. So I wouldn’t just go by, “Oh, there’s a lot of these,” and I understand this is a problem for blind people. Yes, they do have to be fixed, but as for, as far as priority, this is probably a lower priority because text content and structural fixes are typically going to have a much bigger impact, and blog posts probably have lower traffic.

So overall, the benefit from spending a lot of time writing alternative text on these images is much lower than the benefit of doing other work like fixing headings or making links more meaningful or making sure all of your buttons function. So the last thing I want to talk about before I hand it back over to Chris for a minute is preventing new problems.

[00:37:58] Preventing New Problems

[00:37:58] Amber Hinds: And this is a pause, which is you’ve started this plan. We haven’t started remediating yet, but I want to talk about preventing new problems before you’re done remediating, and why is that? The reason why is because you really want to stop the creation of new problems. The cheapest and easiest way to achieve accessibility is to stop adding new problems , right?

You don’t want to be fighting against a curve. So the three things that I would tell you to do if you have not already done this is, one, build proactive accessibility into your workflows rather than relying on reactive remediation. So wherever people are working, if that’s in WordPress, you could use a plugin like our Accessibility Checker.

There are tools for Drupal that do this. Joomla has some. You can use … If you can’t get it into the CMS, then you could use something that reports somewhere else, but I’ll tell you, you want to have it where people are working. If you have devs on your team, make sure that they have accessibility linting set up on their code base.

Where people are working, they need to get alerted to problems so that they can see them and fix them. Then you need to train people on how to use the tools and what the accessibility best practices are so they know what to do, and then you create a “you touch it, you fix it” policy. So if I have to go to a page to update a link to a document that is new for this month, and I see in Accessibility Checker that there’s also some headings out of order, and somewhere else on the page there’s an image that’s missing alternative text, before I can publish my changing the link to the updated resource, I also need to fix all of those other problems that exist on the page.

So if you touch a page, you should be making it, or at least the parts of it that you as a content author or a developer, if you’re a developer working on a page, can control.

[00:40:06] Build a Culture of Accessibility

[00:40:06] Amber Hinds: And then overall, I recommend trying to build a culture of accessibility. This usually is done by identifying one or more internal champions, somebody who can own and be really responsible for accessibility and help promote it. This is a person who’s always going to ask, “Did you ask the vendor for an ACR before selecting the tool?”

When someone says, “Hey, we’re going to start using this tool.” This is the person who is going to say, “Hey, have we tested this manually with a keyboard before we make a new webpage live?” Somebody who can really own that. And but then it can’t just be one person’s job. So you want to create required training for all staff on accessibility, at least annually.

Accessibility should be part of everyone’s job, and here’s a really great example why. The type of responsibility and the type of training may be different. You may have a receptionist who answers the phone who never works on the website, but that person needs to know when I get a phone call and someone says, “I can’t do X, Y, Z on the website because it doesn’t work for me,” yes, they could just help them and say, “Oh, okay, I’ll take your credit card over the phone.”

Great. That solves that one person’s problem, but if they don’t know who to escalate that to, how to report the problem, then it will never get fixed moving forward. So everyone who could potentially interact with a customer or your web content or who makes decisions about things like branding and design , everyone has to return accessibility on a regular basis.

Then you want to make sure you publish a public accessibility commitment or statement if you don’t already have one. Create an accessibility reporting process for identified issues, as I mentioned. Make sure you include people with disabilities, this is really important, and plan multiple regularly scheduled reporting periods per year.

I’m going to hand back over to Chris so he can talk a little bit about some roadmapping things.

[00:42:09] Remediation Roadmapping

[00:42:09] Chris Hinds: Yeah. So how do we map all this out? I’m going to show you how we do it including what categories to divide the work into, how to identify total available capacity, where you can save money and stretch that budget, and why the work has to be actionable and people have to be accountable. So first we’re going to talk about dividing things into categories.

[00:42:34] Divide Work into Manageable Categories

[00:42:34] Chris Hinds: So before you do anything, as Amber mentioned a couple times, clear out that ROT. As a reminder, that’s the redundant, outdated, or trivial content. We’ve seen public sector websites that are, and I’m not exaggerating here, 50% ROT or more. So this can save you a lot of time if you clear it out. Then we categorize what’s left, and these categories are specific to how the remediation work gets done.

So first there’s content, so that’s headings, link text, image alternative text, and content structure. And these are things that you can generally fix by editing text or images in your website’s content editing system, whatever that is. These are usually fairly easy to fix. Then there’s design. So that’s your color contrast, focus indicators, and responsive layouts, so how the interface adapts to different screen sizes.

These are style settings in your website’s admin panel at times, whether they’re global settings or on individual pages or elements. Sometimes it strays a bit into development, but generally, with a few exceptions, either a super user or a webmaster-type person can work on these. Then there’s development fixes.

So these are keyboard interactions, accessible names, custom components, dynamic content, and really just think of this as what’s in the actual code. So it requires deep technical know-how and domain-specific knowledge of how your particular website works. So a developer, preferably one that is familiar with your specific CMS, and some basic accessibility knowledge is going to be who you want to direct at this category.

And then we have documents. So those are PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, alternate HTML formats of those things. So these might be things like your board minutes, your agendas, your budgets, other public notices or records, and they’re usually in a doc, not on a webpage, and typically they require specialized domain knowledge to correct, either an in-house or an external specialist.

And then vendor-specific issues. So these are plugins, third-party platforms, iFrames, payment systems, subdomain things that live outside your website. And it is, and I’m using air quotes here for our listening audience, but it’s, quote, their problem, but it’s still also, quotes again, your problem in the eyes of the law, right?

So you’re directing this to someone else and you’re going to be submitting tickets or complaints, following up frequently, and either replacing that vendor eventually if they don’t act on it, or accepting their fixes and validating them. Next, we need to talk capacity. So let’s assume we’ve categorized the work.

[00:45:12] Determine Available Capacity

[00:45:12] Chris Hinds: We know the type of each task that a particular issue falls under. Now we need to determine the capacity. So this is going to look different for every organization, and some of you here may have really large multi-talented teams, plenty of technical knowledge and spare capacity, but very little excess funding.

Others here may have a very tiny team that’s spread super thin with too much work to do, but maybe there’s a bit of excess budget that you need to invest wisely. So how different issues get brought into various capacity points is really going to be specific to you depending on your particular situation.

But here are the questions that you would generally need to ask. So around people, it’s going to be who can work on this? What skills do they have? How much time can they realistically dedicate during a particular period, whether that’s weekly or monthly? And it’s going to sound a little weird, but having an inventory of your actual team members and their individual capabilities, and an estimate of their spare weekly or monthly capacity is actually going to really help you.

Because you can map that to the work categories and see where you have too much or not enough capacity, and then you can basically divide things up appropriately based on people’s capabilities and capacity. But as Amber mentioned previously, do not put all of this on one person. It’s not going to go well, trust me.

Next is budget. So the questions we’re asking here are what funding is available across remediation training tools, outside assistance? You probably start with a big number and then start to split it up. But here’s the thing I don’t work in public sector but I talk a lot to public sector people in my day-to-day, and other than rumors of a few grants swirling around, I’m pretty sure nobody here on this call today has gotten additional funding for this work without having to write a big, long application.

So it would really be disingenuous of me to sit here and say that I don’t care how you do it, just find the money, right? So that’s not what I’m going to tell you. But what I will tell you is that finding some funding somewhere to help you make progress is a very good idea, and the most impactful two areas to invest in long-term are tools and training.

In short-term, the most impactful areas to invest in are still tools, but getting a specialist who can help with that short-term demand is also incredibly important. On the technical side again, we’re asking questions about what can your internal team fix? What requires a developer, a vendor, or a specialist?

And this ties back to that people inventory and their capabilities that I talked about before. So if you have a doc accessibility specialist on staff, that’s actually huge. I saw someone in the chat said, “So many PDFs,” and it’s really true. There’s a lot that you have to work on here.

Or, if you have a skilled developer, that’s also really good, especially if they have a rudimentary understanding of accessibility. As far as prioritization goes we’re asking, what other projects, deadlines, or responsibilities could impact our ability to work on this, right?

What’s competing for space on our calendars, so to speak? And again, it would be disingenuous of me to sit here and say, “I don’t care what your other priorities are, this should be your biggest one.” I don’t know your organizations all that well, I don’t know what you’re working on an individual basis.

But what I will tell you is that this should be a priority, and it should probably make it on your top three if you’re looking at the April 2027 deadline. And the good news is, based on Amber’s survey, it seems like a lot of you are already working on this. So that’s really good. Give yourselves a pat on the back.

But the most important thing here to, to do here with the prioritization is to map out all your other priorities and slot this in in a continuous or a repetitive sort of way. So make sure it has regular touch points, not just one long sprint. And then opportunities. So we’re asking questions about, can these improvements be incorporated into other things we’re going to be working on, whether that’s a redesign or maintenance or content updates we were already planning.

So if you’re already going to be working on something and you can fold accessibility into that project so that it is saving you time on the just dedicated accessibility project, that’s a really good idea. So you can see some of the things mentioned here, redesigns, maintenance, content updates. Definitely try to work those things in.

[00:49:15] Working Within Budget Constraints

[00:49:15] Chris Hinds: As far as budget constraints go, the first advice that we would have is find a vendor who can both audit and remediate.

It’s significantly more expensive to have a auditing vendor and then a remediation vendor and trying to get the two to work together with you in the middle kind of playing project manager. So I know that’s a, a very normal way of doing things, right? We find multiple specialized vendors.

We get them to work in kind of a waterfall fashion, one after the other, to get a bigger body of work completed. That works really well for things like bridges and buildings and roads and that kind of thing. But in the technology world, that is probably the most expensive and slow way of doing things.

And I had a a story to tell you here, but I’m going to skip it, and maybe we’ll circle back in the interest of time. So our next bullet here is replacing or simplifying things if it would be faster and cheaper than remediating. So if you are using WordPress, for example, the beauty of that system is that if you’re using a theme or block library or builder that has a ton of baked-in accessibility issues, it can actually be way faster and more stable, and therefore cheaper to just strip that out and replace it with equivalent components, so different builder different particular solution, whether that’s a form builder or something else.

And I’ve seen it cut potential remediation time by a lot in projects that we do, and it’s actually funny because bad accessibility is usually an indicator of other bad things like lack of security, bad performance, et cetera. So cutting out the inaccessible things can usually lead to gains in other areas.

And it’s just a general indicator of quality across the board when you’re stripping out inaccessible solutions and replacing them with accessible ones. And the final one is to avoid investing heavily in fixing content that can be legitimately removed or archived. Again, ROT, right? Anything redundant, outdated, or trivial, archive it if you need to retain it for historical record-keeping or research purposes.

But if you can just delete it, that’s even better.

[00:51:28] Actinable Work, Accountable People

[00:51:28] Chris Hinds: And then the final set of recommendations here is just keeping work actionable and people accountable. So issue lists will definitely take a different shape and have different locations across the team. So your dev team is probably going to be tracking their stuff in something like GitHub.

Your content team might use a spreadsheet. Your governance team might use some specialized platform for document handling and record keeping. But every single issue, regardless of its location, in our opinion, needs to, number one, have an owner. So this should be a real human person. You can call them, you can email them, and if they work with you in a physical location, you can pop into their office or their cubicle.

This sounds obvious, but if nobody owns an issue, then none of the rest of these bullet points here actually matter, like the priority, the target date, the status, or the verification, because the work probably isn’t getting done if it doesn’t have an owner. Next up is the priority level. So as Amber pointed out with multiple examples, not every accessibility issue actually is an emergency or actually is critical.

A random image on a blog post, for example, missing alt text does not have the same priority as a primary navigation menu that can’t be used with a keyboard. Those are two very different levels of severity. And then we need a target date. So that’s the accountability piece. We need a deadline, whether it’s for a vendor, an external specialist, an in-house team member.

The work needs a realistic but real deadline, and the one doing the work needs to understand their deadline and be able to report on it. And then we need a visible status. So each team or person may track the issue differently in different systems, but for each item, we need to have a loose awareness of status that you have insight into.

And I would argue, at the very least, you should know whether it’s not started, in progress, blocked, verifying, or done. These are going to be a little bit different based on the team and have different steps. But again, that spreadsheet that we put together for you should be helpful. And then finally, verification.

So having that initial audit on file definitely is good, but it isn’t really proof that something is accessible if you just have an initial audit or a list of findings. And having a note from a vendor or a team member that reads, “I fixed it,” check, right? Again, that isn’t necessarily proof either, but it’s better than the audit.

The gold standard, at least in our opinion, of proving that something’s been fixed is if that verification has be done, has been done by someone other than the person responsible for fixing the issue. So that could be an in-house verification step or an external vendor or some kind of specialist. But having that additional step of verification I think is super important.

[00:54:02] Metrics Worth Tracking

[00:54:02] Chris Hinds: As far as what’s worth tracking there are some things that are definitely worth keeping track of. So one, the number of critical and high impact barriers that actually got resolved. Having a running list of that is super great. The percentage of key user journeys that were tested and remediated.

And for the, those unfamiliar, the user journey is basically, the start to end of a process, what a user goes through, whether they’re, reporting potholes on your streets or they’re submitting a billing question on your utility portal, whatever it might be. As far as additional items numbers of shared components fixed.

So you go- have a component library that you’re working with that you build your websites out of sharing how many of those were fixed. Number of inaccessible documents remediated or replaced. Number of staff trained, actually super important for preventing things long term. Number of accessibility issues introduced over time.

This is actually something that Accessibility Checker can help with, that over time tracking. And changes in requests for help for website users, more of that qualitative side. The reality is that these are going to get tracked through a variety of systems because different groups will be responsible for this work.

But having a central doc that links out to each of these tracking and keeps some high-level statistics is super helpful. And also, this is really something that with careful instructions and validation, et cetera, an AI model could help you aggregate this data and present it in a narrative written form or help summarize it for you.

Just like I said, be sure to validate it, make sure it has guardrails, there’s no PII in there. Follow those best practices.

[00:55:33] Reports Without Misleading Metrics

[00:55:33] Chris Hinds: And then not having misleading metrics or incomplete metrics. So automated scores and issue counts from an automated testing tool, even ours, do not tell the whole story.

You need to have manual testing on an ongoing basis. It’s definitely required. And user testing and real user experiences that are recorded and documented should be included in your regular reporting. An audit definitely isn’t enough, and a, having a paper trail that’s showing the issues were actually fixed is much, much better.

Keep that documented evidence on file, and having an ongoing monitoring plan that includes manual testing in its process is also a great approach once a site has broadly achieved conformance. All right Amber, you want to wrap us up here? So we are…

[00:56:20] Amber Hinds: yeah, we are flying through, and I appreciate everyone hanging out with us as we try and give you lots of information.

[00:56:27] 6-Week Accessibility Action Plan

[00:56:27] Amber Hinds: So how I want to wrap this up is with an example of, I’m calling this a six-week accessibility action plan, but what I’d like you to think about is this is a plan that you could do between now and the end of the year, which is so much closer than we think it is once you throw in holidays. So the way I look at this is week one is inventory.

Figure out what websites you have, what key services are being used, what technology, and who is responsible for them. Week two is when you start refining the scope. Review the webpages and documents, and identify what content can be removed or archived so that you get down to, okay, these, this is the actual content that matters, that has to be fixed.

And then weeks three to four is the actual assessment of that in-scope content. Now, maybe you need three weeks instead of two weeks because this is going to be a combination of automated scanning and conducting targeted manual testing on important user journeys with things like screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnifiers, maybe voice control.

Maybe you have user testing as well. So doing that assessment. Then we go to week five where you actually prioritize. So now you have your list of issues. You’re going to start identifying what are the highest impact barriers, assigning owners, and setting target dates. And then week six is when you actually start that action.

So begin remediation, establish any sort of publishing safeguards if you have not already, getting the, the linting or the accessibility checking set up, and schedule recurring progress reviews with the goal then of between when January starts and your deadline, you are actually conformant on all of these things that you’ve identified over the past six weeks.

[00:58:18] How Equalize Digital Can Help

[00:58:18] Chris Hinds: All right. So here’s how we can help. On the service side, we can provide accessibility auditing. That’s that complete testing of a sample very deeply against WCAG and giving you those findings back. We can do user testing. So this is more like a focus group with users with disabilities where we give you that qualitative feedback.

Can they perform certain tasks based on our prompts? Can they complete certain user journeys? What trips them up, and what would make things better for them? We can do remediation of WordPress websites. So if your team has a, capacity limitation or just a capability limitation, we can actually step in and fix issues for you directly on your WordPress websites using a proven workflow that keeps things stable and secure for you and gives you frequent touch points so that you understand exactly what’s changing, how, and why.

Then we have custom training. So this is thinking more long-term, but can we get your team leveled up in their accessibility knowledge so that they, at the very least, are not introducing new issues that push the goalpost or the finish line for this work further and further out as you’re trying to fix things.

And then online courses. So we do have on-demand online courses that teach screen reader testing as well as a course on basically, advocating for accessibility within organizations. If you’re running up against that, we have both of those things to help you build some in-house expertise and knowledge.

And then on the software side, we have Accessibility Checker, which provides continuous automated scanning and reporting directly inside of WordPress to help teams manag- measure and manage accessibility at scale. We have ArchiveWP, which is our content archival process that Amber very slightly previewed on the Highland Community College website.

You can check that out on our website. And then we just launched the pro version of this plugin yesterday, but there is a free version available as well if you want to check it out, and that is BoardScribe. It is all about helping you get those accessible public sector documents, notices, and events up on your website in an accessible format and making sure that people can get to the information they need to get to as far as what you are publicly required to report.

And all of this software and courses, you can use coupon code SW261A11Y to get 20% off through November 5th, 2026. So we would welcome you to take advantage of that. And with that, can we actually answer questions? Because it’s 1:05. Are we able to do that?

[01:00:51] Q&A

[01:00:51] Amber Hinds: I think we have 15-minute buffer with our captioning agent. So yeah, let me pull these up and we can see what we can power through as far as questions.

[01:01:02] Chris Hinds: Yeah. So Patrick asks about when to use alt equals blank .

[01:01:09] Amber Hinds: So there, there’s someone I follow called Adrian Roselli, and he published not too long ago a article that was basically like, “No image is decorative.”

And these days I think that is pretty true. If you have a photo, there’s almost no instances when you don’t want to have some sort of description for the image. We’re not really using in the same way horizontal lines that are a JPEG like we used to do a long time ago. But that, that kind of thing, like a literal decorative accent, is when you would have alt=”” blank.

I will advocate for in WordPress now you can actually mark a checkbox to say, “I have proactively determined this is decorative and does not need to be described to screen reader users.” And what that does is it adds role=none. But you could put, if you’re coding these, role=none or role=presentation in addition.

That’s not necessarily for the screen reader. The screen reader will ignore it if it has empty alt text. But it helps a lot of the automated testing tools not create noise for you because they say, “Oh, you did this on purpose. We won’t tell you. You should go fix it.” So that is a, a handy thing that got added to WordPress very recently.

But if the image has text on it, it 100% is not decorative. And most photos probably are not, too. They add something. There’s a reason why you chose them.

[01:02:35] Chris Hinds: Okay. We may have to call in a ringer to come rescue us on this one, but maybe Amber knows our top three developer linting tools. If not, I see a certain name in the audience- Yeah

who I could-

Yeah …

[01:02:44] Amber Hinds: yell. So on our GitHub we have CodeRabbit and something else added. Hopefully… I don’t know who’s here. I d- I haven’t looked at the attendees.

[01:02:55] Chris Hinds: William. William Patton is here.

[01:02:57] Amber Hinds: William. Our senior web developer. Yeah. William can maybe type in the chat what d- what we have.

CodeRabbit is super handy in that it will review and give you feedback on PRs. Axe Linter, if you’re… It doesn’t work for PHP, but if you’re doing straight HTML or JavaScript, Axe Linter can also do this on PRs and provide feedback. And you can even set it up where it blocks so that you can’t merge code in without accessibility.

There’s some stuff that is available for VS Code if you use that locally on your IDE that will also give some accessibility feedback as well.

[01:03:32] Chris Hinds: Great. And then Gina asks, “We are looking for an accessible email newsletter platform. Do you have any suggestions for platforms?”

[01:03:42] Amber Hinds: So I don’t have any suggestions about the accessibility of the platforms themselves, only because I have literally never looked.

But I do think this highlights a point, which is that the ADA Title II requirements, while it does emphasize the need to be accessible to the public, there are rules that require you as a public entity to be accessible to your employees also. I think most email platforms are capable of creating accessible email newsletters if you follow those same best practices, adding alt text, choosing colors appropriately, using headings in the right order, that sort of thing.

But unfortunately I can’t answer the question on if they themselves are accessible.

[01:04:21] Chris Hinds: Yeah. I will mention, not that it’s an official endorsement, but Equalize Digital uses ActiveCampaign to send out its newsletters, and I know that Active-

[01:04:30] Amber Hinds: I hate ActiveCampaign.

[01:04:33] Chris Hinds: Yeah. I know. But- But we are able to configure the newsletters with a bit of work-

to meet best practices. It takes some work though so- Yeah … your mileage may vary.

[01:04:42] Amber Hinds: You know what I would say, too? Hold on. I do want to say something. Yeah. We very intentionally decided not to put a lot of images in our email newsletters. Yeah, that’s true. If people are on our email newsletter, you know this.

It’s like headings and it’s lists. We actually use semantic lists ’cause we talked to some screen reader users and we’re like, “What do you want?” And for the most part it… if you’re an e-commerce company, I understand why you’re putting images in your email, ’cause that’s what’s going to make somebody click and go buy, looking at the thing, right?

But for public sector and even this, like I see a lot with public libraries, where they’re creating these incredibly complex graphics in Canva, often, and then sticking them in and it’s got all the text on the image. That does not work very well, and I would advocate as much as possible minimize the images and just send text in your emails.

It’s going to work for everyone better.

[01:05:35] Chris Hinds: All right. And an anonymous attendee asks, “For small teams with limited resources, how do you recommend balancing accessibility, workflow, and improvements with competing priorities, especially when additional budget approval can take months?”

[01:05:48] Amber Hinds: Do you want to answer that one?

[01:05:50] Chris Hinds: Yeah. I m- I think I alluded to this a bit in the presentation, and I totally understand that it’s a challenging situation, right? Because what I’ve heard time and again is that really no additional funding was just given when these requirements were announced. I think that this is … This work is more about finding the most impactful ways that your time and your dollars can be leveraged whatever amount you can dedicate towards this.

And if you’re looking at what is most … the, what is the most valuable use of my time, let’s say I have across my team 10 or 15 hours a month, and I have maybe $5,000 over the next six months that I could scrounge together. Finding the most impactful ways to leverage that time and those dollars is going to be the most effective thing to do.

And the, the unhelpful answer is I can’t tell you exactly what to do with that 15 hours a month or that $5,000 without having done the initial work of doing the inventory and following the planning steps that Amber outlined with the, I believe, mostly free tools. So I think that is really step one, is you need to understand the to- the totality of the problem you’re trying to wrap your arms around, and then you can try to figure out what is the most bang-for-my-buck thing I can do, either in-house or with my dollars or both, that gets me the furthest along this road to WCAG conformance.

Because the faster and further you can go with the limited resources you have, the better.

[01:07:18] Amber Hinds: Yeah …

[01:07:19] Chris Hinds: Do you have anything to add there?

[01:07:19] Amber Hinds: Let me add. Yeah, I was just going to add that I think it’s really important to keep in mind that it’s not all or nothing. So before the deadline got extended by a year with only a week’s notice, we were talking to organizations that hadn’t started at all, and they were freaking out.

And I think there were some that knew far in advance that they were not going to be able to reach the deadline, and so they just did nothing. They were paralyzed. And there are 100% things if you have a typical CMS website that isn’t all coded by a developer, that you could go fix even as a non-accessibility specialist, non-technical person.

Like changing the heading levels, rewriting your links to make sure you’re not just linking the word here, right? Or learn more. All of those things can make a difference. Now, you might not be able to fix your broken navigation so you might have to push that out until you have the budget to hire a developer.

But there is definitely a lot on the content side that can be done. And then once you get the developer to come in, you’ll have already positioned the website content to be prepared for those bigger, more technical fixes .

[01:08:30] Chris Hinds: All right. Maybe we can try to do this in our last minute here. So how do you educate the organization who knows there’s a law and want to make their digital platform accessible, but can’t decide or move?

That’s a tough one.

[01:08:44] Amber Hinds: In a minute. So you’re selling accessibility course. It’s more geared toward agencies, but I think there is some stuff in there. I will say talking … Having them talk to peers. So if you’re a public library, like other public libraries, or if you are a community college going to like a community college conference or something like that, if there’s different groups like WP Campus for higher ed, like going and talking in there, they might have techniques that work really well for your type of organization, and there might be other people who can offer specific advice.

I will say like some people are very motivated by fear. It’s why the horrible overlays get lots of business because fear can motivate people to spend money even on tools that won’t actually do anything. But sometimes it is like let’s fix this because we don’t want to lose our ability to get federal student aid.”

Or whatever that thing is grants from our state that are paying our budget and giving us all a job. Sometimes that is what you have to do. If you can tie it to KPIs or show there is some data out there that fixing accessibility will help improve conversions or search engine ranking bringing more traffic to the website.

If you can show real people who would benefit. So students or people you know from the public who visit your organization all the time or who you serve that have disabilities, maybe ask them would they be willing to come in and do a panel discussion for your organization. And then it puts a face on it, and that makes it a lot harder to say, “I don’t want to spend money on this.”

When it’s an abstract concept, it’s easier to say, “I don’t want to do this.” But when you’re literally saying, “I don’t want to give access to Joe and Susie”- Now it feels a little more real, right?

I don’t know if you would add anything, Chris.

[01:10:50] Chris Hinds: No, I honestly think that’s a great thing to close on.

So maybe with that we can wrap this up. Thank you all so much for being here. The recording will be live on Equalize Digital in the next few days. This will also be going out on our podcast feed, accessibilitycraft.com if you want to check that out, where we talk about accessibility topics. And you can find all of the links to all of the tools and all of the services in Amber’s slide deck.

We would love to talk to you. I would love to talk to you about any of this more if you would like to reach out to us via our contact form. If you need someone to workshop ideas or talk through priorities, I am more than happy to be that guy for you and help you take the next right step. No matter where you are on this journey, no matter what box you ticked on Amber’s survey, let’s have a conversation if you’re interested.

View the presentation on Google Slides or access a plain text version below.

Quick link to the Google Sheet shown in the video: Example accessibility inventory (Google Sheet)

Progress, Not Panic: A Practical Approach to Your Title II Deadline

Presented by Amber Hinds & Chris Hinds

October 2026

Who We Are

Equalize Digital provides tailored solutions, including accessibility auditing, remediation, user testing, and WordPress software designed to help teams measure and manage their accessibility with confidence.

Our solutions have helped directly improve accessibility outcomes on 10+ million websites globally.

Some organizations we work with:
NASA, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Woo, Liquid Web, Mint Mobile, Colorado State University, Aspen, Tinley Park Public Library, ICC Sydney, and Trinchero Family Wine and Spirits.

Agenda

• ADA Title II requirements (brief)
• Step 1: Know what you have
• Step 2: Prioritization planning
• Step 3: Preventing new problems
• Step 4: Remediation roadmapping
• Step 5: Measure and communicate progress
• Action plan and takeaways

Slides link:

EqualizeDigital.com/progress-not-panic

ADA Title II Requirements

Who and What

• Title II applies to all public entities at the state and local levels, regardless of size:
  • State departments, agencies, and regional authorities
  • Cities, towns, counties, and municipalities
  • Public schools, colleges, and universities
  • Public transit agencies, utilities, and emergency services
  • Courts, voting locations, public healthcare facilities, libraries
• Must communicate effectively with people – this includes having accessible websites.
• All web content, conventional electronic documents, and mobile apps must comply with all WCAG 2.1 Level A and Level AA success criteria. (April 2024 Rule)

Content That Must Conform

• Code or markup that defines the content’s structure, presentation, and interactions
• Text, images, sounds, videos, controls, and animations on websites/webpages
• Social media posts
• Documents including PDFs, DOC/DOCX, presentation files, and spreadsheets

Exceptions

1. Archived web content
2. Pre-existing conventional electronic documents, unless such documents are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in the public entity’s services, programs, or activities
3. Content posted by a third party where the third party is not posting due to contractual, licensing, or other arrangements with a public entity
4. Individualized documents that are password-protected
5. Pre-existing social media posts

Definition of “Archived Web Content”

Archived web content means web content that meets all of the following:

1. Was created before the date the public entity is required to comply.
2. Is retained exclusively for reference, research, or recordkeeping.
3. Is not altered or updated after the date of archiving.
4. Is organized and stored in a dedicated area or areas clearly identified as being archived.

Updated Deadlines

Entity Type	Conformance Deadline
Population of 50,000 or More	April 26, 2027
Population of Fewer than 50,000 or Special District Governments	April 26, 2028

April 20, 2026 Justice Department Rule

Step 1: Know What You Have

Create an Accessibility Inventory

• Identify all websites, subdomains, and web applications.
• Inventory pages, documents, and third-party integrations.
• Identify content owners and responsible departments.

Example accessibility inventory (Google Sheet)

Finding All Web Properties

What if you don’t know how many websites your organization owns?

• Review domain registrations and DNS records.
• Check with department heads or key personnel.
• Crt.sh – search for SSL certificates by domain:
  https://crt.sh/?q=austintexas.gov&exclude=expired&group=none
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider – 500 URLs free; £199/year to remove the limit

Assess Web Pages

• Review all content and determine what actions are needed:
  • Is it ROT (redundant, outdated, or trivial)? Delete!
  • Do you need it for historical reference only? Archive!
  • Is it key content? Audit/Remediate
• Identify content owners, vendors, or tricky content.
• Helpful tools:
  • WP All Export
  • Export All URLs

Assess Documents

• Cut down on the noise: don’t start with your media library!
• Use Accessibility Checker’s Export add-on or a similar tool to find PDFs/docs that you’re actually sharing/linking to.
  • Export issues to a spreadsheet and use regex to extract the link text and file URL from the code snippet.
• Ask yourself not just “do we need it” but also, “does it have to be a PDF/Doc?”

Step 2: Prioritization Planning

Evaluate Issues Based on…

• Impact: Does the issue prevent someone from accessing information or completing a task?
• Reach: How many pages or users are affected?
• Importance: Is the issue part of an essential public service or high-traffic user journey?
• Ownership: Can your team fix it, or does it require a vendor?

Top Priorities

Focus efforts in this order:

1. Global elements
2. Critical blockers
3. Pages where conversions happen (bottom of the funnel, up)
4. High-traffic pages

Prioritize by accessibility impact and scale, not simply by the number of issues/severity in scanner reports.

Example Prioritization

Issue	Priority	Why
Inaccessible utility payment form	Critical	Blocks an essential service
Keyboard-inaccessible navigation used sitewide	Critical	Affects access throughout the website
Missing form labels on permit applications	High	Creates barriers to completing important tasks, but used by fewer people
Low-contrast text in a shared theme component	High	Potentially impacts all or most pages
Empty alt text on blog post images	Low	May be less informative; text content/structural fixes may have bigger impact; lower traffic content

Step 3: Preventing New Problems

Do This Now

Make a plan early on to stop the creation of new problems.

The cheapest and easiest way to achieve accessibility is to stop adding new problems.

1. Build proactive accessibility into workflows, rather than relying on reactive remediation, by adding a tool like Accessibility Checker into your CMS or accessibility linting into your code base.
2. Train content creators on accessibility best practices and how to use available tools.
3. Create a “you touch it, you fix it” policy.

Build a Culture of Accessibility

• Identify one or more internal champions.
• Create required training for all staff on accessibility, at least annually. Accessibility should be part of everyone’s job.
• Publish a public accessibility commitment or statement.
• Create an accessibility reporting process for identified issues.
• Include people with disabilities.
• Plan multiple, regularly scheduled reporting periods per year.

Step 4: Remediation Roadmapping

Divide Work into Manageable Categories

• Content fixes: Headings, link text, image alternative text, and content structure.
• Design fixes: Color contrast, focus indicators, and responsive layouts.
• Development fixes: Keyboard interactions, accessible names, custom components, and dynamic content.
• Document remediation: PDFs, Word documents, and alternative HTML formats.
• Vendor issues: Plugins, third-party forms, payment systems, and embedded applications.

Determine Available Capacity

• People: Who can work on accessibility? What skills do they have, and how much time can they realistically dedicate?
• Budget: What funding is available for remediation, training, tools, and outside assistance?
• Technical Resources: What can your internal team fix? What requires a developer, vendor, or accessibility specialist?
• Competing Priorities: What other projects, deadlines, and responsibilities will affect your team’s availability?
• Opportunities: Can accessibility improvements be incorporated into planned redesigns, maintenance, content updates, or existing contracts?

Working Within Budget Constraints

• Find a vendor who can both audit and remediate — it’s significantly more expensive and slower to have separate vendors for auditing and remediation.
• Replace or simplify if it would be faster/cheaper than remediation. For example:
  • Switching a WordPress plugin or even theme can be faster than fixing an existing plugin or theme with many problems.
  • Replace complex components with a simpler design.
• Avoid investing heavily in fixing content that can legitimately be removed or archived.

Actionable Work, Accountable People

How work is planned and tracked will be different for every organization.

What’s important is that every issue has:

• Owner
• Priority
• Target fix date
• Visible status
• Remediation verification process

Step 5: Measure and Communicate Progress

Metrics Worth Tracking

• Number of critical and high-impact barriers resolved.
• Percentage of key user journeys tested and remediated.
• Number of shared components fixed.
• Number of inaccessible documents remediated or replaced.
• Number of staff trained.
• Number of new accessibility issues introduced over time.
• Changes in requests for help from website users.

Reports Without Misleading Metrics

Automated scores and issue counts don’t tell the whole story.

• Manual testing on an ongoing basis is required.
• User testing and real user experiences should be included in regular reports.

Measure the removal of barriers, not just the completion of tasks.

Action Plan and Takeaways

Your 6-Week Accessibility Action Plan

Week 1: Inventory. Identify your websites, key services, technology, and responsible people.

Week 2: Refine scope. Review web pages and documents to identify what content can be removed or archived.

Week 3-4: Assess. Run automated scans and conduct targeted manual testing on important user journeys.

Week 5: Prioritize. Identify your highest-impact barriers and assign owners and target dates.

Week 6: Act. Begin remediation, establish publishing safeguards, and schedule recurring progress reviews.

Equalize Digital Can Help

Accessibility Services

• Auditing
• User testing
• WordPress remediation
• Custom training
• Online courses

WordPress Software

• Accessibility Checker
• ArchiveWP
• BoardScribe

20% off software and courses

Coupon code: SW261A11Y
Valid through Nov. 5, 2026.