Learn more about how CivicPlus approaches compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

CivicPlus Responsibility  

Build 

Our websites are built to be compliant with ADA (Section 508) and WCAG 2.0 A and AA levels. This means that when your website launches, we guarantee that we deliver you a site that meets these levels. Our website content and design teams train to deliver accessible websites. We use the four WCAG principles to build our content and designs:

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

Train

We know that websites always change, which is why we go a step further. Our trainers use CivicPlus best practices to teach your staff to keep your content and design elements accessible and up-to-date with the latest ADA and WCAG standards. This might mean that they teach staff to include alternative text when they upload pictures or teach a webmaster to write content with a screen reader in mind.

Code-Based Updates and Rollouts

We ensure that any new accessibility regulations that require code changes are done automatically for you. Our code changes are done quarterly with no additional effort required on your part.

On-Going Education

Regulations are updated at least annually by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that publishes the WCAG guidelines, and intermittently by the U.S. legislative system, which updates the Section 508 regulations. Our product team closely follows these regulations and provides regular updates to clients via our CivicPlus website, blog articles, webinars, and other publications. We also update our own CivicPlus best practices to ensure that we continue to build sites that are up-to-date with the latest compliance regulations.

Client Responsibility

Although we deliver a compliant website, as well as training and ongoing education, we know that even the best sites need an occasional check.

Accessibility Checklist

At regular intervals, it is a best practice to use a CivicPlus-provided checklist to review your site’s design and content. For items that you feel fall outside of our recommended compliance levels, you can either have your staff correct or ask CivicPlus for assistance. Your Customer Success Manager is trained to assist you in these areas.  

Best Practices

We encourage you to establish a member of your team as your internal best practices expert. CivicPlus will provide you with tools and resources, which your team can use to review and build new pages. We feel that it works best when your team takes personal responsibility and accountability for your web pages. 

Ongoing Scans

While these are not entirely necessary to keep your site up-to-date, it is a best practice to occasionally scan your site to check ongoing compliance. You can find information about other tools on our Compliance Tools and Resources page.

You can also learn more about our AudioEye partnership, which solves issues of accessibility and enhances the user experience for the broadest audience possible, all in service of a transformation of how the world experiences digital content.

Zero Errors 

There are no error-free sites. It’s a fluid measurement and different scan tools produce different results - there’s a lot that’s open to interpretation. The most important thing you can do is to show an ongoing good-faith effort to keep your content compliant. To learn more about what you can do, please view our tools and resources.

Questions 

If you have any further questions about ADA Compliance, please contact your Customer Success Manager.