By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
How is our state’s accessibility law playing out? Part 1
If you spend your days immersed in politics, things don’t really sneak up on you; you watch a bill work its way through the process, then get signed, then get enacted. If you have other things occupying your attention, say you have kids and a family and a mortgage, bills can sometimes be a surprise.
The 10 cent bag fee is a great example. Despite lots of news coverage, you didn’t see a lot of fuss about it in the public square until the bag fees were enacted, until Wal-Mart said they were just going to stop putting bags out altogether.
HB21-1110 is like those bag fees, though perhaps it won’t intersect with as many lives as grocery bags do. It’s one of those laws that, if you watched the legislature and knew the lingo, you’d know what it meant, but if you didn’t you might never have known much about it.
In part 1 of the two part look today, I want to talk mainly policy. In part 2, I want to look at how this is playing out in my own life and also in the smaller, rural governments around me.
If you’ve not heard the term, accessibility refers to ways of designing and operating things so that anyone, regardless of disability, can use and benefit from them. It might be something like making sure there are curb ramps at every intersection so that someone in a wheel chair can get from sidewalk to sidewalk.
It can also mean things like making sure a computer presentation has features so that someone who is blind and using a screen reader (a device that reads the content on a computer screen) can interact fully with it. To be specific, you as the author of a presentation might have to click on any picture you embed and make sure to add so-called “alternate text” to the image so that a screen reader passing over that image would enunciate the text and offer the blind person a description of the image. Or, if you’re putting a video up, you’d need to offer captions for the deaf and hearing impaired.
If you want to read up more on the topic, a Wikipedia explainer is linked first below. For specifics related to the legislation we’re about to discuss, see the heading “Disability, information technology (IT) and telecommunications”.
HB21-1110 (linked second below) is a law that requires any governmental entity in Colorado to have its online materials and websites meet accessibility standards. The enforcement mechanisms are both state fines levied on the agencies and court action (the bill defines a failure to make things accessible as discrimination, opening up these governments to lawsuits for same).
Per the bill, the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (basically the statewide IT department–linked third below) was tasked with defining accessibility standards and then writing regulations.
I recall a fair bit of concern, as this bill was working its way through the process, concern backed up by talking to my local officials and my state senator Byron Pelton, about how this was going to play out in smaller districts and for small government agencies. Small wonder. There are hundreds of government agencies across this state, many with small budgets and peopled with varying levels of technological sophistication.
The sponsors were, from what I’ve been told, pretty unswerving in their insistence on things playing out as their law had it. So, pass the law did without much in the way of modification or acknowledgement of how it would play out in the far-flung areas of this state.
Reality didn’t take long to come knocking. HB21-1110 had set the deadline for compliance to be at the start of fiscal year 2024 (7/1/2024), and by 2023 it was readily apparent that it wasn’t going to happen. Reasons for not meeting the deadline were probably as varied as the hundreds of governmental entities around the state, but 2024 wasn’t going to make it.
Enter SB23-244 (linked fourth below). This bill, among other things, extended the deadline for compliance with accessibility standards through fiscal year 2025/26.
SB23-244 provided a reprieve for many agencies around the state. A reprieve which allows agencies like the community college where I work,** the City of Sterling, and Logan County a chance to begin (what I can tell you from personal experience is) a monumental task with less fear of trouble.
What would a good law be without tasking some state governmental body with actually deciding on rules? As such, the Office of Information Technology, was on the job and made all the detailed decisions about definitions of accessibility, exceptions, etc.
The fifth link below is to the Office of Information Technology’s page on accessibility and the sixth link is to their rules regarding accessibility and what standards governments must meet. There’s a lot of boilerplate there that those who’ve read rulemaking documents will recognize, but the main points for most laypeople are attached as screenshots 1 – 4.
They cover the actual requirements, a statement that all government websites must have prominently displayed, exceptions to the rules, and cases where a public entity doesn’t need to abide by the rules due to things like financial hardship, etc.
In part 2 today, we’ll look at how this plays out in my own experience, and for a couple small local governments where I live; we’ll focus less on policy and more on how that policy plays out in reality.
**A quick note: I want to make it clear that any opinions written here are my own and do not represent any official position by the Colorado Community College System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb21-1110
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb23-244
https://oit.colorado.gov/accessibility-law
How is our state’s accessibility law playing out? Part 2
This is part two of a two part series today on how our state’s accessibility law is playing out. You can probably do okay reading this post without having read part 1, but for full context, I’d recommend stopping and going back to part 1 if you’ve not read it yet.
Part 1 had the legal background and policy details; in part 2 I want to touch on what accessibility looks like in practice both for myself and the smaller governmental units near me.
In talking to both someone at the City of Sterling and also Logan County Commissioner Brownell, I was interested to note that their experiences and perspectives largely echoed mine with regard to accessibility and to making websites accessible.**
They, like me, want things on the internet to be available to (and accessible) by all. For me personally, as a teacher, this is doubly important. I don’t care who you are or what kinds of talents/difficulties you bring to my class, if you’re willing to work, I want to make absolutely sure you have all you need to succeed.
This might mean some extra work on my end. I’ve had to help parents who lost a sitter figure out ways to work around my class schedule, I’ve had to spend extra time outside of class with some students, and I’ve had to (post-accessibility training years back) spend extra time and attention in preparing lesson plans, PowerPoints, class websites, and the like.
The extension provided by the 2023 state senate bill, moving the deadline to make government websites accessible from 2024 to 2026 was helpful, but the process began for me about the same time as the original 2021 law. I don’t remember the exact date but I think it was around that time that we started training for accessibility of class materials (if not necessarily class websites). After doing those trainings and bringing new class materials up to the standard, I promptly forgot about a lot of the accessibility work.
I don’t know where people at the City of Sterling or Logan County were were in terms of background, but I do know that concerns about meeting the state’s deadline, as well as cost, were already being forwarded from Logan County folks to the 2021 bill’s sponsor via Senator Byron Pelton as the 2021 bill was being debated. It’s not a stretch to imagine this being the case for many smaller governmental entities around the state.
In talking with folks at Logan County and City of Sterling, I found that they, like my college and myself, are just now starting to catch up with the website-related accessibility requirements. They, again, just like my college have largely handed over this work to contractors that fixed the website and, at least in the case of the city, have offered a protection plan to indemnify them should someone sue.
I didn’t get the city’s bids and contracts in time for this to go to press (I will update when and if I get them–the CORA was delayed by the holiday), but I did get the bids and contract for Logan County. The first link below is to a shared folder listing various proposals Logan County received to make their websites accessible as well as the invoice for the contractor they eventually went with (Civic Plus).
Looking over that invoice you can see that Civic Plus charged a start up (one time) cost of about $44k and wants a yearly renewal of about $13k. To put these numbers in perspective, the start up cost is about 0.3% of the total 2025 expenditures for the county per their 2026 proposed budget (linked second below) or about 17% of the total amount spent on information technology in the 2025 budget.
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
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