CivicPlus ADA Compliance Approach

 

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 highly compliant with ADA (Section 508) and WCAG 2.0 A and AA levels. Our website content and design teams train to deliver accessible websites; this means that your website is designed with the aforementioned accessibility guidelines in mind. 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 help teach your staff ways 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. It is imperative that your team stay informed and learned on the topic of accessibility. It’s encouraged to introduce internal processes to help enforce that accessibility best practices and guidelines are followed as individuals at your municipality continuously update your website. This will help your website to stay highly compliant over time.

 

Code-Based Updates and Rollouts

Monsido and AudioEye both regularly analyze CivicEngage websites and provide reports and recommendations of any accessibility changes that could be made in the root code of the software by our CivicPlus development team. Any such changes are made regularly without the additional effort required on your part and are announced to clients in the product release notes.

 

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.

 

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Customer Responsibility

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

 

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. 

 

Website Updates and Ongoing Accessibility

CivicPlus starts your website highly compliant and proves tools to help with ongoing compliance, but it’s imperative your teams keep your website highly compliant over time as website changes are made, and we are here to help you! The most common accessibility issues we see are created over time by clients as they modify and customize their websites without following ADA best practices. Because of this, CivicPlus product and development teams regularly analyze if there are changes that can be made in the Content Management System to help remind and guide client users to utilize accessibility best practices, which are extensively built out throughout the system today. However, in the end, there is only so much we can do and there are also circumstantial situations and guidelines, so content editors have the ultimate say and decision on how they modify the website with the onus to follow ADA standards. For example, clients can put custom HTML widgets on their websites with any code they choose. CivicPlus is here to support you in your journey to stay compliant and implement accessibility best practices and processes amongst your teams that have a hand in your website management. Please reach out to CivicPlus if you have questions or need assistance.

 

Accessibility Checklist

At regular intervals, it is a best practice to use a CivicPlus-provided checklist to review your site’s design and content and make any necessary adjustments. Reach out to CivicPlus if you have questions or need assistance.

 

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 Monsido Accessibility product which scans your website and provides detailed reports on your website’s accessibility. You can explore AudioEye, our partner product, which automatically remediates accessibility issues 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.

 

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Questions 

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

 

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