Date: January 13, 2025
In the fourth quarter of 2024, SIPA continued to make progress towards making all digital resources accessible in accordance with legislative requirements.
In November 2024, SIPA hired a full-time digital accessibility specialist to lead ongoing accessibility efforts within the organization and to ultimately provide support to our customers. This role will be focused on improving access to SIPA’s digital assets and the Colorado.gov Drupal CMS platform.
Evaluation
Colorado.gov CMS Platform
SIPA has begun a comprehensive accessibility evaluation of the Colorado.gov CMS platform at the component level. This evaluation involves reviewing all previously reported issues to determine what is a CMS issue as opposed to issues with individual customer websites.
Methods for identifying issues include usage of automated tools, manual testing with JAWS and NVDA screen readers, and listening to feedback from CMS customers in meetings such as the OIT TAP Team’s Office Hours meetings, the Statewide Accessibility Coordinator Group Chat, and CMS Power User Group meetings sponsored by the portal integrator (NIC Colorado, LLC).
The CMS platform evaluation will involve reviewing previous helpdesk tickets submitted to the portal integrator by both SIPA and other CMS customers, as well as establishing a process for tracking progress via emailed issue status notifications.
During this evaluation, specific emphasis is placed on classifying issues as being either WCAG failures (citing specific success criteria), UI/UX enhancements, or code-quality issues. This level of classification will ultimately help the portal integrator to better prioritize CMS issues that will have the greatest effect on accessibility and usability.
Inventory of SIPA Assets
SIPA’s digital accessibility specialist has begun creating a new inventory of existing digital assets that aggregates multiple existing inventories and catalogs digital assets in a more comprehensive way, including:
- Previously reported website issues
- Public facing documents
- Webforms on the SIPA public website
- SIPA YouTube videos
- SIPA’s Technology portfolio
The purpose of creating this inventory is to have a more detailed understanding of the types and volumes of digital assets that SIPA currently owns as well as to help in prioritizing remediation efforts.
Future versions of this inventory will be expanded to include:
- Social media posts
- Intranet pages
- Internal documents
- Archived legacy documents
YouTube Videos
SIPA has identified the need to create high-quality and accurate captions for its archive of YouTube videos, which are currently utilizing automated subtitles generated by the YouTube platform. SIPA’s digital accessibility specialist has acquired specialized software and located training resources for purposes developing this skillset internally.
SIPA’s plan is to provide captions for all new webinars prior to posting on YouTube and the SIPA website. Existing video content has been inventoried and will be captioned as time and resources permit.
SIPA 2025 User Conference
SIPA has begun reviewing and evaluating physical spaces for next year’s SIPA User Conference. Our plan for the 2025 conference is to provide an inclusive and accessible experience for all conference attendees, presenters, and participants. We plan to continue evaluating additional locations during January and February.
Communications and Support
Planning and Prioritization
SIPA’s digital accessibility specialist has begun work on creating an accessibility communications plan and a prioritized list of accessibility initiatives. These documents currently exist in a working draft bullet-point format, which provides enough information for functional planning and prioritization while also allowing SIPA’s limited resources to be directed toward remediation of digital assets in the immediate-term.
Remediation of Digital Assets
Remediation of several public-facing digital assets has been completed, including:
- Board meeting minutes on the SIPA website
- SIPA Annual reports for 2023 and 2024
- Master slide deck
- Work order templates
- Customer presentations for sales and marketing team members
- Agency letterhead
- Webforms on the public SIPA website
Training
An evaluation of accessibility capabilities across the SIPA team has been conducted by SIPA’s digital accessibility specialist through meetings with staff members and a review of previous accessibility training that has been delivered.
SIPA’s digital accessibility specialist has met with several accessibility training providers to evaluate the availability of products and services. Potential training options from multiple providers have been examined for the potential effectiveness of each option. With the content and approval of SIPA leadership, SIPA’s digital accessibility specialist will work towards developing an internal training program for employees. The development of training content has begun and is currently in the initial stages.
Governance
SIPA has published a revised and updated website accessibility statement with a greater focus on providing accessible accommodations.