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Priorities Podcast
Are states prepared for the digital accessibility deadline?
00:22:52
On April 24, states will be held to new accessibi…
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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to State Scoop's Priorities podcast. I'm Colin Wood, State Scoop's editor in chief. In anticipation of a deadline next month for states to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities, I interviewed two state digital accessibility officials, Marie Cohan, statewide digital accessibility coordinator for Texas, and Jay Wyant, chief information accessibility officer of Minnesota. We'll get to that in a moment, but first, here's what's happening this week. In recognition of the many creative and sometimes offline modes of influence employed by the nation's adversaries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul last week promoted Colin Ahern, formerly the state's chief cyber officer, to serve as its first director of security and intelligence. Ahern said he'll help protect the state from a doctrine of attack adopted by the nation's adversaries that he described as all of the above, all the time. Kansas governor Laura Kelly last week announced that state officials have reached an agreement with the Department of Agriculture resolving a months long dispute over access to sensitive food assistance data. Kelly said the deal ensures Kansan's personal information, including Social Security numbers, will not be shared with foreign governments. And after being named Nebraska's interim chief information security officer last month, Bryce Bailey last week lost his interim status and will serve as the state's top cybersecurity official for the foreseeable future. Bailey said he wants to take cybersecurity to the next level, a goal that includes bolstering the state's cyber workforce, changing cybersecurity's image, and amassing enough data to demonstrate to government policymakers that cyber programs like the federal, state and local Cybersecurity Grant program are worth keeping. For this week's episode, I interviewed Marie Cohan and Jay Wyant through the national association of State Chief Information Officers. They recently led a group that published a report examining the challenges states face in meeting an upcoming accessibility deadline set by the federal government. Each state, Marie said, is at a different level of maturity when it comes to its ability to meet the deadline.
- [02:15]
B
So I think it's all over the board. We have the NASIO group and we also are in a multi state collaborative and we've been bringing new states in quite a bit over the last year. We have states that are very well defined like Texas and Minnesota, Colorado, Maryland, and then we've got states much further west that are just starting out trying to develop a policy statewide, doing the review for Title two to meet the new rule and everything. So I think you've got a nice spectrum of people that are just now starting to jump into this about some of the things we're going to talk about. And then you've got much more mature states.
- [02:51]
A
Right. What do you. What do you see, Jay?
- [02:54]
C
This is Jay. I agree with Marie. I think we have a wide spectrum. I would also say that I see in the last year or so, we've seen a lot of organizations jump in more the Title II rule, really generating awareness on leadership between the organizations that they need to do something about it. I will say, though, in a lot of organizations, there haven't been a lot of people doing the work, the hard work, doing it without their organizational leadership. So this hasn't been their opportunity for the leadership to say, oh, wait, we did actually fund it, support this function, this. So there's been work going on. People have been creating accessible websites, They've been working with the vendors, especially work vendors, to get things done, but they've been doing it on a shoestring. And so this has been enabling them to actually start driving it to more positive effects. So even the organizations that are maybe just jumping in now, they're not necessarily starting from zero.
- [03:59]
A
Right? Right. Yeah, I've heard some of that. And it's kind of an interesting parallel to things you've heard in cybersecurity for a long time where the work isn't necessarily getting done until some big catastrophe happens, and then suddenly there's some deadline or something has to get done, and then suddenly everyone's scrambling to do it. But even then, as you mentioned, the funding isn't always available, and how to get it done is something of a question. So I want to segue into that. What does effective policy look like? I think a good place to. To get us there is maybe you guys could talk a little bit about how this working group started. So I think if I remember right, Marie, you said this began last January, January 2025. And then how did your work proceed?
- [04:52]
B
So it started in January, actually. Jay is the lead chair. Nasio reached out to him and asked if we wanted to put this IT working group together. And. And the catalyst to that was Digital Accessibility showed up for the very first time on the CIO top 10 priority list that Nasio does a survey every year, and it came in 10th on the top 10 list. So that was very exciting for us. It's never been on the list before. This year it moved up to number six. So that's what created the IT working group last year.
- [05:23]
A
Right. So how did you get started, Jay, with organizing and tackling this, what I gather to be a Pretty sprawling issue that has a lot of different dimensions to it.
- [05:35]
C
Well, this is yay. I mean, people, you know, a lot of people in accessibility, myself, Marie and others have been what I call stirring the park. We've been raising awareness, we've been working with other leaders. You know, I was working with masscio on accessibility 10 years ago on several projects. So now you've known about adaptability, been aware of it, and you just have to keep stirring the pot until something happens. And that's what happened when it came up in the top 10 two years ago, and now it's six out of top 10 this year. And so it's been more about constantly reminding people, we need to work on this, we need to work on this. And people are now taking notice and taking advantage of the resources that been developed. Until then. Then I wanted to follow up on you, how to pull it together. So that's why when Natio was saying, hey, how about let's get into the working group together, it was already a good cohort of people, including because for the last, I say, six or seven years, a group of statewide leaders have been meeting every month, thanks to folks from Maine and other states who've been taking demistitudes to help organize it. So we're meeting every month and talking about these things. So when Nasio said, can you lead a work group? Not a problem. We have to pull together four or five people to be a committee and pull together the topic and presenters and get it all done very quickly.
- [07:06]
A
Right. And the report that Nasio put out goes on a month by month basis of the. I don't know if this is actually what your group was looking at each month or that's actually how you organize it. So we don't have to go through every month, but start walking us through some of that work. In the end, what does effective policy look like and how does as a state, how do you get there?
- [07:31]
C
Sure. Well, I mean, I'll just say that an effective policy basically is based on, I would say, both organizational and civic values. I mean, we've always said the mantra is as government, you can't choose a customer. You have to serve everyone. And so you can't just make a policy out of bull clock. You have to have that value to start with. And then you ideally point to either a statute or standard that you got either an adaptability standard or you got a statute that says you have to do a certain thing. And that's what Title II is, a fantastic opportunity to drive policy. Then after that, make the actual policy, high level responsive or what to the caliber of what and then use that to drive your processes and your procedure. If you get too much of the weed on the policy, people are just going to have a hard time with it.
- [08:27]
A
Right. Do you agree with that, Maria?
- [08:30]
B
I do. You know, I just had this conversation this week that because we're going through rural review right now in the state of Texas and you know, folks want to give input and they want to pull in a lot of detail. But Jay's right, it does make it more complex. Statutes are typically written very broad and then supporting rules are a little bit more detailed, but they're still fairly broad and specific, you know, and that just helps us as things shift, the statute and the rules can keep up with, you know, the especially technology, the shifts that go on there Right now.
- [09:08]
A
As you walked through month by month and looked at the various facets of this, what were some of the best practices that you identified for digital accessibility in states?
- [09:20]
B
The NASA report is actually a great guide for developing accessibility program. It was designed with each month having a different topic to help anyone who's trying to mature their accessibility program across the state. And so if you have a policy at the statewide level, hopefully you're consistently applying it across the state that's going to make it the most effective is you develop the policy, you let everybody know the policy exists and then you try to do consistent application across the state. And that's what we're seeing, you know, in more mature states, like I said, we've got a lot of more mature states that have been in the collaborative and then the newer states that are coming in, you know, it's starting piecemeal here and there in different agencies that are taking the initiative and working its way up. But ideally it starts at the top and then works its way down.
- [10:12]
C
This is Jay, I would add to that there's a lot of great resources out there on how to make things accessible, whether it's website, application, PDFs, things like that. So we focus less on the best practices of how to make things accessible and like Marie said, more on the organizational strategy. So it was. And there's also lots of resources there about strategic development, strategic management, or even trying to reinvent anything there. Either we were combining the value of SPE subject matter experts and running an organization or a team with accessibility in mind in what were the what are the possible roadblocks, what are the possible obstacles, how to best deal with them, how to best get people unified together and also who needs to Be engaged. What kind of engagement do they need to have to be focused on things that were relatively unique to what makes accessibility work as a practice in an organization and specifically the government organization. So that was our focus and then we pointed people to, well, okay, now do you start getting that into place? How do you actually build adaptability as a skill set for the different groups and different people within the organization?
- [11:39]
A
Right. That's really interesting because that's another parallel with cybersecurity. No one is necessarily in a state government going to develop some novel. Maybe they will, but for the most part it's a matter of following what's already known in terms of cybersecurity and just putting the work in following the standards that NIST or whoever else has developed. There's not necessarily any big mystery of whether or not people should have two factor authentication or not, things like that. It sounds like in the world of accessibility you have a lot of kind of no brainers like that where you just have to, you have to have the institutional will and then actually follow through on it.
- [12:28]
C
Yeah, this is yay. I have a comment that ever since I got started in working with adaptability, you consistently point to the security and accessibility are very similar. Both of what I call risk management, organizational risk management enterprises, if you will. You are not going to be 100% cybersecurity. You just can't. You're constantly changing the next thing that's coming up. And the same thing with adaptability. While accessibility itself is a definable, measurable, testable thing, if you will, to be fully accessible is a grail that's very difficult to reach, especially with the use, with the increased use of SaaS services where they're constantly updating. It's not like you could get your update, sneak on that orbit, plug it in, validate it, and then launch it. This is happening constantly. So you're trying to manage the risk. How much risk are you exposing the organization to by taking on or buying applications that may not be fully accessible? And how can you minimize that?
- [13:38]
A
Well, one part of this that you can control maybe what's going on in your organization, but it can be more difficult to control what vendors and what the market does. And vendors play a big role in this big shift to accessible technology. What should people know about accessibility as it relates to procurement and technology acquisition? We could start with you, Marie.
- [14:04]
B
So the biggest thing with procurement acquisition is to be proactive, right? So check it for accessibility at the front end. If you have a solicitation, make sure it's in your language, what your requirements, that policy we just talked about, add it to your solicitation language. So the expectation is there, you know, have the documentation that's required. So if we're looking at products, we want to see accessibility conformance reports, we want to know that the product was actually tested against those WCAG standards. If it's a service like development services, we want to ask more questions, get more detail around how their developers are trained, what kind of tools do they use for development. And then, you know, we have another document we use that was sponsored by Nasio 10 years ago called the Policy Driven Adoption for Accessibility. And it's just to test the organization's knowledge of accessibility maturity with accessibility. So we ask questions in there for that specific responding vendor. Now, you mentioned vendors. Yeah, the vendors are kind of all over the board. I hear stories from other states where, you know, they have challenges. For the state of Texas, where I see the biggest challenges is with our higher education, they have really unique challenges in their procurement, especially when you start getting into the medical schools. They're buying medical technology. Some of it is exempt, some of it's not. They have a tremendous amount of volume. So we find that there's a lot of issues there with vendors complying because it might be a niche application and there's just not a big market for it at the statewide level for agencies, we work really closely with our vendors. It is a true partnership. And so we, we try to educate our vendors. We make sure that they have the information they need. We, you know, I, I'm hosting vendor education series this year for the first time so that I can have that one on one time with our vendors because they want to win that business, right? They want to do business with public sector. You know, that's what it is. It's business. We're all trying to do what we need to do. So create a partnership there. They bring us accessible products. Like Jay always says, the burden of accessibility is on the vendors. The burden of compliance is on public sector. So it is a true partnership.
- [16:16]
A
All right, Anything to add there, Jay? With regard to procurement?
- [16:20]
C
Sure. There's a couple of small items. First of all, a lot of it boils down to is our inventors are our partners. We need to be able to trust them, that they understand accessibility, that they value accessibility, and that they build it into what they do. And that's all the processes that Marie talked about. The accessibility Performance report, the pdaa and the other questions are to try to find out how much can we trust you how much are you putting forth on your end what we need from you? And right now the trust level is fairly low for a lot of vendors. They're still learning, they're still trying to get their arms around it and we need them to work harder in order to do a better job because we're completely dependent on them when we buy the product from them. So that's the biggest thing, getting better vendors for us and their ability and the willingness to invest in adaptability on their end.
- [17:28]
A
Right. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how maybe from April this April to the April next year, how things evolve after the going up to the next deadline. Get it to everything in the report. And that was, that was not the intention. The report is out there. I encourage anyone interested in this topic to definitely seek that out. But I wanted to take a step back and look at the bigger picture for a moment outside of this DOJ deadline. Why does digital accessibility matter? Why? Why should people care generally if they're working in public service?
- [18:03]
C
Well, if I can start with that digital accessibility, or usually the practice of digital accessibility and even more so involving people with disabilities, as you think about, design and build technology, make for better technology. Your technology not only operates better, it's also more sustainable. It will last longer. It will require future fixed and future remediation down the road because it will work better from the start. Here's a little secret. A lot of de accessibility success criteria in web content accessibility guidelines that we all follow are based in or rooted In Core Basic HTML5, nothing more than that. And so if you follow good accessibility best practices, engage in like a human centered design way, all potential users, including people with disabilities, you will have better technology. So right there, why not do it that way? Why not make it right?
- [19:19]
A
Right? How about you Marie? What do you think about why digital accessibility is important?
- [19:25]
B
So I love this question because the lens just can zoom in like Jay said, right down to the technology website. Think about search engine optimization. Now we need to start thinking about artificial intelligence optimization. So as AI bots are touching your websites, the better accessible websites we can put together, the better accessibility in them. It's going to optimize that AI search that's coming through our websites. But if you zoom out, there's a bigger picture here because we're talking about people, we're talking about the public, the residents in our states, they don't have a choice, right? They come to government because that's what's there, that, that's the services that they have to go to. So it doesn't have to mean that it's a bad experience for them. We want to have that be a good experience, want to be efficient. We want it to be a cost savings for the state. In some cases it can be even a revenue generator. So I talk about this a lot. Um, when we make sure digital government services are accessible to everyone, you think about the people that are starting their own business that have a disability because a lot of them have employment issues. And so they'll start their own business, they'll go to the state, they'll, they'll open that business up, pay a fee for that. They may be paying sales tax, they may be paying. In Texas we have a franchise tax or unemployment tax. And you see where I'm going with this. It's generating revenue. It's an economic growth for the state. And all of it starts with digital websites or digital accessible websites, accessible applications, accessible forms on our websites. Think about, you know, Texas, we just had a massive flood last summer. It was tragic. And a lot of people with disabilities were trapped or did not have the information timely that they needed. So when we have those digital services that we can push out to all residents and keep them informed and let them know where they can go, where the nearest places that has a generator so they can plug in their medical devices or something. That's why we do this. We want to make sure we're not leaving any of our residents behind. We want to make sure they're all being served. We want it to be a good experience for them because they don't have a choice. But that doesn't mean it has to be a bad experience. And we want to look at the economic benefit, saving money for the state. If we do it efficiently, if we're consistent in the application, that's a cost savings for the state. It could potentially be a revenue generator for the state as well.
- [21:51]
C
Right Victor? Yeh. I'd like to ask you that in government we're not in the business of picking winners and losers. Again, like I said before, we should serve everyone. And then also remind you all that people with disabilities in general are the most over educated and underemployed people in our population. So if we made things accessible and usable, if you want a special people with disability, you will, like Marie, see an increase in their ability to contribute to their ability. And like Marie said, you're now generating revenue. You're now generating a more active group of people in orthoscience.
- [22:36]
A
Thanks to Marie Cohan and Jay Wyant for sharing their work. That's it for this episode. The Priorities Podcast is a production of Scoop News group in Washington, D.C. production work is done by Adam Butler and Carlin Fisher. I'm Colin Wood. Thanks for listening.