158: The ADA Deadline Is Here & Your Board Meeting Docs Are a Problem, Maine Root Blueberry Soda

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In this episode of Accessibility Craft, the team dives into the high-stakes world of digital accessibility compliance as the ADA deadline for state and local governments rapidly approaches. With the April 24th cutoff looming for larger jurisdictions, the discussion centers on the massive challenge of remediating public documents, specifically public meeting agendas and minutes. They explore how traditional PDF workflows often create barriers for users with disabilities as the norm and not the exception, and discuss why some are choosing to pull information offline rather than face the complexities of remediation.

While navigating these choppy waters, the crew samples the Maine Root Blueberry Soda, a naturally flavored, caffeine-free treat that makes them long for the neon-colored sugar-laden beverages of their childhood.

Discussion Outline

  • The “Craft” Segment: A tasting and review of Maine Root Blueberry Soda, including Chris struggling to open a “twist off” cap and a trip down memory lane regarding old-school “Hugs” juices.
  • The ADA Countdown: An analysis of the impending compliance deadlines for government entities and the potential for legislative changes or delays.
  • The Problem with PDFs: Why the collection and display of open meeting minutes and agendas are a major source of accessibility failures, from ambiguous link text to broken tables.
  • A Better Way to Manage Data: How using WordPress Custom Post Types and structured tables can replace messy, manual PDF lists. And we weigh whether our internal solution for clients should be made available for the public.
  • The Cain County Controversy: A look at how some organizations are responding to the deadline by moving inaccessible public documents behind Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
  • The Role of Automation: Why manual human remediation might be impossible for large document backlogs and how AI and automation are becoming essential tools for compliance in this area.

Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.

Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.

Links & Resources Mentioned

Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.

Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible.

To learn more about us, you can visit our website.

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Transcript

Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.

Grab a drink, the show starts now!

Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.

Chris: Hey, everybody.

Amber: And Steve.

Steve Jones: How’s it going.

Amber: And we are so excited to be here for episode number 158 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast. If you want show notes and a full transcript, you can find those if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/158. We start every episode with a beverage. That’s the craft part of Accessibility Craft. What are we drinking today, Chris?

Today’s Beverge

Chris: We are taking a short hiatus from alcoholic beverages here. So we are trying Maine Root Blueberry Soda. So Maine Root for the uninitiated is a natural, minimally processed soda producer. Kind of like a, I don’t know, like Jones Soda Co, or Spindrift, or other ones like it. And they produce interesting naturally flavored sodas.

They have some classic stuff like Colas and root beers, but I think they’re based up on the, in the Atlantic you know, Northeast and they do a blueberry flavor, which…

Amber: So it is spelled M-A-I-N-E.

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: Which makes me think…

Chris: yes.

Amber: It comes from the state of Maine.

Chris: You would think that.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: Is that false?

Chris: Oh, I don’t know.

Amber: They’re big enough now that it might not actually be made there.

Chris: They say made in USA on the bottle, so you know, it’s made here somewhere. But they did not say product of Maine anywhere.

Amber: You know what I do appreciate about this? So the ingredients are carbonated pure water as opposed to dirty water, I guess.

Steve Jones: It’s pure.

Amber: Trade, certified organic cane sugar, blueberry juice. There’s no like natural flavoring where you’re like, what is that? And it’s actual blueberry juice in the blueberry soda, which surprised me.

Steve Jones: Imagine that.

Amber: And it’s a beautiful, like Equalize Digital blue. I’m not wearing the right…

Chris: And I’m looking around my desk right now because I thought these were twist offs and they are not twist offs.

Steve Jones: You just have to be manly.

Chris: I guess so.

Steve Jones: No, you gotta do it by hand.

Amber: I don’t have to rip my hand open.

Chris: Mine’s not going. I also did a little test.

Amber: There we go…

Chris: All right, we’re gonna have to put a cut in here while I go get a bottle opener.

Steve Jones: Oh, look at that. I did it by hand. Now my hand hurts.

Amber: We shouldn’t cut it. We should just leave this part of Chris walking away.

Steve Jones: That’s right.

Amber: Talk about how every time I use this, I think of Drew Jaynes who works at GoDaddy. He and I co-organized Word Camp Denver, and this was one of the organizer gifts that he gave us. I feel like I’ve talked about that on a podcast episode before, but always kind of nice to go down memory lane.

Steve Jones: Special keepsake.

Chris: There we go.

Steve Jones: He’s back.

Amber: He found the other WordPress bottle opener. We had a good conversation. You should not edit this.

Steve Jones: Sometimes I can’t find a bottle opener when we need one. And you know what I use our can opener as a bottle opener on the back of it.

Chris: There you go. Smells very blueberry. Smells like a blueberry muffin.

Amber: Mm-hmm. You’re right, it really does. It smells like muffin.

Steve Jones: Wow.

Chris: That’s pleasant.

Amber: Steve’s eyes got so wide after he drank that. I wanna know why. I’m gonna take a sip and you can explain why.

Steve Jones: It’s this, it’s this pure organic cane sugar. It’s very sweet.

Amber: It has blueberry juice in it, but it is definitely a soda, or a pop for us midwesterners.

Steve Jones: Pop, yep.

Amber: But it’s not like a carbonated juice. It’s got lots of sugar.

Chris: Woo. That is sweet.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Chris: Yep.

Steve Jones: Yes.

Amber: Have they tried it yet, Steve?

Steve Jones: No, it was kind of, it was kind of stuck in the back of the fridge. I had to dig for it. I was, and I don’t think they’ve caught onto it sometimes. Sometimes they dig into the drinks. Before I was like, you gotta save me one. Like for the podcast.

Chris: I kind of feel like this is prime territory for a float. Like vanilla ice cream with this would probably be absolutely killer.

Amber: I will say it probably doesn’t pass the Steve test of will you drink it all day because there’s not any caffeine in it. It does say caffeine free.

Steve Jones: Yeah, it’s not gonna fly. Work does not get done without caffeine.

Amber: But aside from that where are you guys landing, on the thumbs up, thumbs in the middle, thumbs down, would you buy it again, scale.

Chris: It’s a little bit situational, right? But I’ll go thumbs up. Because of having nice ingredients and being real and I think it has a good flavor. I could see myself having it again, but I’m more likely to hand this to a kid than I am to drink it myself.

These days at least, but maybe as a very occasional treat when I feel like spiking my blood sugar to ridiculous levels, I’ll I’ll crack one open.

Steve Jones: I mean, I’m kind of the same, but I will say this, I think it tastes great and I think it’s fun. Like I feel like a kid drinking it. And so I think it definitely would suit kids well, like Chris said, I like tea with no sweeteners in it, I like dry wine. It’s not really my deal, but I think it’s fun. I feel fun drinking it, and I think the kids are gonna devour the rest of these.

Amber: Yeah, I think I’m with all of you. That’s like a tentative one thumb up, which is you would buy it for your family, but you might not actually drink it yourself.

Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Amber: I don’t really drink pop anyway, even the diet, like I don’t, I just don’t. But it is kind of fun. And I will say flavor-wise, I was trying to think how would I rate this on a scale of like orange, grape, and now I’ve been introduced to blueberry. I kind of think I like orange a little more ’cause it kind of has a little bit of layered flavor. I don’t know in a way, but I think I like this better than, I like grape.

Steve Jones: I agree. I’ve never been a big, grape fan myself. I don’t know if you guys had those, but like those, they’re called Hugs. These little like jugs of like sugary juice that you drink as a kid. They’re like little plastic bottles with a, like a cellophane top or whatever they..

Amber: Like a peel-off thing?

Steve Jones: Yeah, like a tinfoil thing.

You, you rip off the top and you drink it and it’s it comes in like orange and red and blue and grape and maybe green, I don’t remember. My brothers would always steal like the red and the blue and all that. And I’d ended up with in my lunch bag, it’d be like I orange or a grape. And it is always Ugh, I’m gonna drink it, but I’m disappointed,

Chris: I remember the ones that were like opaque, plastic, and it was like a a plastic tab that you twisted to rip open. It, it kind of had a weird shape. They had the same neon colors, you know, it wasn’t like a fruit flavor. The flavor was red, you know, or green or whatever. It’s like pretty sure that’s color and not a flavor, but we all drank ’em.

Steve Jones: Yeah. Everybody knows what red tastes like. This is blue, right?

Chris: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Jones: Nobody poured it!

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: So for everyone not watching it is in a brown, like what I think of as a beer bottle.

Steve Jones: It’s like a reddish purple. I poured some into cup over here. It’s not a clear cup, so I can’t show you, but…

Amber: think this is a winner. It’ll be kind of interesting for our conversation here today.

The ADA Compliance Deadline Has Arrived

Amber: I know we’re talking kinda, timely things and this episode is coming out on April 6th, which means that we are now less than 20 days away from the ADA compliance deadline for state and local governments that have 50,000 or more persons in their jurisdiction. So this is kind of a hot topic right now. If you’re a real small town or a special district area that only serves zero to 49,999 people, you get an extra year. But anyone bigger than that needs to start, well, I mean, hopefully they start a long time ago.

Chris: I can tell you right now, based on conversations that I’m having, many of them did not start a long time ago. But they’re of the philosophy, which is fine, you know, it’s like the next best thing: I need to at least show I’m making progress and not starting after the deadline.

Amber: I will say the other hot topic on this that I have seen is, who knows what’s gonna happen in the next 18 days. But there have been some talks among lawyers and other folks who very closely follow the legislation that potentially the date could change. Or even the requirement to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines could be removed. There’s an article that we shared somewhat recently in Focus State from Converge Accessibility. We can link it in our show notes as well, talking about some of the language that’s been coming out of the DOJ that suggests there might be changes to this.

Who knows? In the meantime, I think everyone should probably operate on it’s going to happen. So I’m curious what you all think, if there was one thing that you could recommend doing, if someone hasn’t started yet, what would you recommend?

Steve Jones: Well, I mean, you need to familiarize yourself with what these compliance requirements are, first of all. And you need to kind of assess where you are yourself in your own digital presence, right? I would lean on some kind of automated tool at first to get some glimpse and some picture of where you stand from an accessibility standpoint.

Now, not to toot my own horn, I do know a piece of software that does that really well if you’re hosted on a WordPress website. So I would get at least get the free Accessibility Checker plugin, if you’re on a WordPress website, install that. And just get a picture, see where you’re at. Now, I have a little bit of commentary, but these are 50,000 or more local governments. These are probably very big entities and I wonder like how many of these there actually are, and if that’s actually what’s kind of swaying some of the back and forth on if they’re gonna modify these or delay them.

You know, ’cause big organizations move very slowly and there are really hard to move as well. I don’t know how many entities that really is and, so maybe that’s what’s affecting me a little bit. But yeah, you need to start, you need to do something. And I think the easiest thing to do is, you know, get something in there automated and see where you’re at. And as of now, nothing’s changed.

Amber: I feel like it has to be impacting millions of entities because if you think any county that has more than 50,000 people. Their website, so like the county website, then the city website. And I don’t know how many cities there are in the United States that have more than 50,000 people, but that’s probably a lot.

I mean there’s also quite a few that are very small, but you’ve got that. And then anything that serves, so like the fire department probably has a website, and the police department probably has a website, and the public library has a website, and the K 12 schools have a website. And it’s like times, all that times, however many cities or counties there are. It is probably a lot that are impacted by this.

Chris: But back to the original question, what would we recommend doing? I’ll just echo Steve’s thing, which is start. I would tag onto that, if you’re like a smaller entity that’s serving a big city, like I have a lot of conversations at least recently with like libraries and K 12 schools who maybe don’t have the same amount of resources as an entire city would to bring to bear to this particular thing.

Talk to your city administrators about resources that are available to you. I’ve seen some smaller organizations that kind of fall under the umbrella of a large municipality that don’t have a ton of funding being able to lean on the higher ups at the city to get them additional access or resources that they can bring to bear.

And that might be support through a centralized IT department or procurement management system, or there may be other parts of your city that are already, or have already like created contracts and RFPs to try to address this that you may be able to tag onto. And yeah, obviously if you’re running WordPress a really low cost way, potentially even free way to get started would be to install Accessibility Checker and at least try to get a perspective from an automated scan of what your deficiencies might be to give you a sense of direction.

Amber: I think those are both great recommendations. My other recommendation would be, make sure you have your ducks in a row with how people can request assistance. So if you know that the whole website is not actually going to comply by the deadline. Make sure you have a good accessibility statement linked in your footer and you have some sort of process for people to contact you and ask for help if something on the website doesn’t work and that you have fully trained your support staff or whoever it is that checks the emails or responds to, answers the phone maybe, with what to do if someone says they cannot access that.

We are actually later this month having a WordPress accessibility meetup that exact topic of training support staff, which we can link in the show notes. And if you’re listening to this in later post April 2026, you can always find those recordings.

These PDFs are a Problem, Folks!

Amber: But I think on the topic of this in general, ADA compliance for state and local entities, there is a common problem that we have been seeing when we’re remediating websites for schools city, local governments, nonprofits, and that is issues with meeting agendas and minutes. These entities have these documents that have to be posted publicly. They have to be kept available for a set period of time.

We have been seeing two different types of problems centered around these documents, which is what I want to talk about more today. I think these fall into two categories. Category A is how that information is actually posted or organized on the website. And Category B is accessibility failures within the documents themselves. So at point, I think no matter what, when we get a website that has this kind of content, we’ve never seen it actually accessible, right? They always need remediation in this area.

Steve Jones: I think so. But you know, I will say that our scope of websites that come across our desk is probably minimal in the grand scope of, you know, 1.5 billion websites out there. But yeah, it seems like when we are engaged with different organizations that use these type of things, these meeting minutes and agendas definitely require a lot of remediation.

Amber: Yeah, I haven’t really seen it done well, and so I thought this is very timely, and perhaps it makes sense if we could dive a little deeper into best practices for board meeting agendas and minutes. But first, we’re gonna take a quick commercial break.

Brought to you by Acessibility Checker

Steve Jones: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.

New to accessibility? Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is here to teach you every step of the way, whether you’re a content creator or a developer, our detailed documentation guides you through fixing accessibility issues. Never lose track of accessibility again with real time scans each time you save, powerful reports inside the WordPress dashboard, and a front end view to help you track down hard to find issues.

Scan unlimited posts and pages with Accessibility Checker Free. Upgrade to Accessibility Checker Pro to scan your website in bulk, whether it has 10 pages or 10,000. Download Accessibility Checker today at EqualizeDigital.com/Accessibility-Checker. Use coupon code AccessibilityCraft to save 10% on any plan.

Chris: And we are back from commercial.

How Inaccessible PDFs End Up on Your Website

Chris: So we are web developers at heart, we don’t do a whole lot with documents, although I would say Amber certainly and others on the team know enough to be dangerous. But I think it makes sense to first talk about how these meeting agendas are actually making it onto a website. Amber, can you kind of set the scene for us as far as what we’ve seen on projects? How are these PDF files making it up there?

Amber: Yeah, so I think there’s some common patterns I have seen with how they’re actually being posted. Most commonly these are being shared in PDF format. The PDFs have been uploaded to the WordPress Media Library and are being manually inserted into a single page. So we have sometimes seen a page that has meeting agendas and minutes that go back to the 2010s and it’s just a really long page sometimes, or sometimes they like have a tab for each year and you can click on that and then you see all of them.

A lot of times they’re in a list where each meeting itself is like a list item that has then several things like the agenda and the minutes, and maybe even a link to Zoom or a video recording or something like that. Sometimes they’re in tables. I’ve also seen it where they’re in no semantic container at all. Like they’re just in a paragraph or a div. And so then the most common accessibility issues that we’re seeing on these pages include things like incorrect heading order, so not really grouping them appropriately by year, or by committee.

They might be in tables, but a lot of times the tables are missing headings or they maybe only have column headings and they don’t have row headings that give context as you move across the row about what different meeting date different links are connected to. Ambiguous anchor text is huge. I feel like this is a massive problem on these websites. There can sometimes be hundreds of links on a page that all say the exact same thing, view agenda, or download minutes. They have literally zero context about what meaning they’re for. So this is what we see. I’m wondering, Steve, if you might wanna explain what our approach has been to making these pages more accessible and solving some of these problems.

Steve Jones: So doing audit remediation work, what happens sometimes is it’s not always as straightforward as an auditor audits finds the things that Amber just told you about, right? And lists those out, and then you just go in and you remediate those things. A lot of times, through the audit process it highlights an overarching structural problem with the feature or the website as a whole. And then sometimes you have to, instead of just remediating, you have to take a step back and say, okay is this worth spending the time to remediate? Or should we take a should we take that step and then actually build something that’s going to actually solve all these problems? And something for us internally that we can reuse on other clients.

‘Cause like you said, and in development and in our companies, when we start to see patterns, we want to find solutions to solve these patterns every time that they come up. That’s kind of what we’ve done. We’ve approached this by actually building a tool to actually, take those meeting minutes, put ’em in a data store, and then output ’em with all the correct accessibility needs to solve these common issues.

Addressing the Inaccessible PDF Problem

Amber: Yeah, so I think that kind of goes to that bigger thing of, I was saying, a lot of times they’re just all uploaded in the media library and then they’re put on a single page and somebody has to manually edit the page, find the right place to insert the new document, and add it. And you’ve made like a custom post type to store the data uniquely?

Steve Jones: So we’ve internally created a plugin. We call it Meeting Minutes. It’s just an internal thing that we have been using on a handful of client websites. have a kind of a spec list for what it does. I do have these written down so I can read ’em out and not mess up.

But yeah, it creates a custom post type. It manages the meeting minutes and a dedicated custom post type, for all your meeting minutes. It lets admins add, details like date, agenda link, notes, link, and whether the meeting was held. Displays, meeting minutes in a paginated table, an accessible table that’s markup, on the website we’re, and it currently uses a short code to do this. It provides a REST API. So since we are hooking in and using a custom post type, we get the benefits of the WordPress REST API and it’s an endpoint where meetings can be pulled in into different applications or in different contexts that a developer or somebody else may have.

Helps accessibility by using structured table, which is easy, easier for screen readers. It adds a de descriptive link labels for agenda meeting meeting notes, so users do not hear like what Amber said, view agenda over and over again. I don’t remember exactly what it outputs as screen reader text, but it’d be like view, agenda for meeting on such and such date, right? That way each one is unique and it gives them context to where they are. And if it’s in a structured table, they kind of have some context to where they are already.

Announces, pagination updates with a live region, so screen reader users know when the results change. It moves focus back to the table after pagination, which improves keyboard navigation. Keeps labels visible on small screens, which helps mobile users and people who zoom in. Includes clear fallback text when dates, agenda links or notes are missing. And I think that’s it, right? There’s probably more, but that’s what I wrote down.

Amber: Just recently in this recent iteration, we added like a taxonomy registration as well, and the ability to filter, because this came up like I was talking about. When somebody said, oh, I actually do want different pages for my committee. And so they wanted to be able to say, oh, let’s just show all the finance committee documents and meeting minutes on this one page. So I think we added that recently.

Chris: I mean, having that kind of solution offers all sorts of advantages, right? And I think one of the biggest advantages of having all the documents in a custom post type is the fact that they’re centralized and listed somewhere so that you can go see what you’ve got, where you’ve got it be able to easily at a glance, modify, sort, filter them in the back end of WordPress, go tweak or replace things if you need to, if you need to issue corrections.

There’s a lot of advantages to having that versus just links scattered all over your website and probably not being tracked or audited in, in any shape or form unless you have Accessibility Checker installed. And that gives you a list of links to PDF, right? But that’s that’s not as good as a custom post type for numerous obvious reasons.

So lots of advantages to doing it that way. I am curious, with us being a WordPress product company, would we ever release this as a free or potentially premium plugin or make it public on GitHub?

Amber: So all from the marketing standpoint, I’m like, of course. Let’s ask the CTO here, who has…

Steve Jones: yeah.

Amber: … to deal with the realities of time?

Steve Jones: So, a common pattern that, that has evolved in our company over time and you know, we’re kind of a hybrid company, software, services. And you know, Accessibility Checker five years ago, it was kind of born out of the need that was driven by our client’s needs, right? Like we started to see a pattern, Hey, Amber had some tie-ins with higher education early on, and that seemed to be kind of a pull a type of client that was attracted to our work. And then they would come to us, Hey, we have to meet some accessibility requirements. Can you help us with that? And we’re like, yeah, sure. We can do that. So, so we learn it and then we start to see a pattern and then we go, well, hey, what if we made a plugin that could, can kind of help us with this? And that’s how Accessibility Checker was born, right?

And then, through our company morphing into a very accessibility-first focused company, other things come up. So we start doing audits and remediations and, you know, we start to see, hey, people have a need to archive their old and dated content. Instead of deleting it, they can actually move it to a place, as archived content. And we did that a couple times. I think we had an internal tool just like we have here, we used it on a couple websites and we’re like, Hey, this sounds like it’s a need of a lot of our clients. Let’s go ahead and make this into a real thing. And that’s where ArchiveWP born.

I feel like we’re here again. We’ve built a tool. We used it on a few clients and now we’re talking about it. We’re thinking about it and we’re refining it. So now it’s probably time to, kind of massage that into a production piece of software. I will tag that with a little caveat that while making tools like this for one-off clients is time consuming, but fairly straightforward. Making something as a generalized software product is a pretty big undertaking, even in the AI age. You can’t just vibe it and then it’s ready to go. So that’s the holdup, right?

Like we’re…

Chris: Yeah, it has to work on more than one website.

Steve Jones: That’s right. That’s right.

Amber: Two, you just get in the land of thinking about, like for our clients and our specific use cases, just building short codes is fine. But, if we’re gonna distribute something, I feel like it should match modern WordPress, which means it should have blocks. You still need short codes because the short code is what you’re gonna stick on an Elementor page, not a WordPress block.

So you have to have both. But it’s like you almost double your scope. Like even if we say, okay, let’s make this another free plugin, ’cause we have several free plugins on WordPress dot org, I still would kind of feel like maybe it should have a block. And, you know, so there’s that, and then there’s the whole other side of, you have to write documentation that in the same way… Like obviously we’ve trained our clients on how to use this, but we don’t have all these really detailed documents and we don’t have, you know, FAQs and like all this other marketing stuff around it. But I do like the idea of maybe at some point releasing it, whether it’s a paid plugin or a free one.

I know we have a couple that we’ve been like, well, we’re not totally gonna put a lot of work into making it super, super ready. So we just like made the repo public our GitHub so…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: It’s open source and shareable. I don’t know if…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: You have thoughts on that, Steve. Like a step below doing the work to put it on WordPress.org.

Steve Jones: Well, yeah, I mean from a software standpoint you know, in this day and age where everybody’s vibing stuff and putting it out ’cause they can do it quickly. But we kind of pride ourselves on trying to make something that’s really solid, works really well, and that we can put our name on and feel comfortable with that.

So when you choose to put something out for either sale or free, for sale, yeah, it has to work. It has to provide the value that somebody’s paying for it. You put it out for free, it still needs to work and it needs to not like fatal error somebody’s website. If you put it on WordPress.org, what you’ve done internally in your company is you’ve taken on a support burden, right?

And so when you make that like commitment to releasing something on the plugin repository, you’re making a commitment to support that and to put time aside when things come up to improve it or just to improve it over time, you know, to keep up with, you know, releases and changes and at least just bump the version. Sometimes even that’s hard. To bump the version, test it with the latest version in WordPress.

But I think when somebody says, Hey, I have this need. And then , Amber’s well, we have something for that. Steve, can you make that public? And we’re like, yeah, on GitHub, use it your own risk.

Amber: Yeah, it feels safer. I will say, before we move on to talking about the documents, I think like high level for folks, it might be worthwhile to say even our thing isn’t available, right? But like the approach we’ve taken of, you should have a custom post type to manage this data. I think we would suggest that for everyone and anyone can do that using a field, like a custom post types UI or advanced custom fields kind of plugin. You don’t even have to be a developer anymore to create those.

And I do think we landed on a table is the best way to display this, not list items, because there’s multiple different types of data for each meeting. Do you have any other general thoughts of just like recommendations on how to display this information on a website, Steve, that you’d advise people to do from a best practice standpoint?

Steve Jones: Structurally get it right from the data store, which custom post type, we’ve implemented a, a taxonomy in there so we can filter ’em out how we see fit as well. A markup table out of the box, adds a lot of value to a screen reader. It really does, if it’s implemented correctly. So why reinvent the wheel if the semantic HTML is already there to do it? Make sure that the links aren’t ambiguous is probably one of the biggest things. You can’t just put view, agenda, or view notes on every one. You gotta think about what that’s gonna read out to.

Like for the person, even though they have context that they’re in a table row. It just, over time it can just get redundant .

Amber: You know why else that’s important is if they’re using the screen reader shortcut, like the rotor and voiceover or the links list in NVDA to just hear all the links, they don’t get the table context there. So they would really need that date added to the link.

Steve Jones: That’s an excellent point. I think outside of that you know, , use Voiceover or some screen reader to go through it. Listen to it. Does it make sense to you? If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably not gonna make sense to somebody else.

Amber: Yeah, so of course fixing how you link to and distribute these documents is only part of the solution. You also have to make your documents accessible themselves. I know we have a lot of really great webinars from our WordPress Accessibility Meetup on PDF accessibility that we can probably link to in the show notes.

Your Software Vendors are Pobably Part of the Problem

Amber: So I don’t know if we really need to get into the nitty gritty of that process, but I’m wondering if either of you have any thoughts that you wanna share about PDF or document accessibility?

Chris: Not to use it?

Amber: Yes.

Chris: To make it a webpage if it can be one.

Amber: I have a question about this later on.

Steve Jones: There you go.

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: But maybe we jump there right now. Do we know if that’s allowed? Do they have to be PDFs?

Chris: No. I mean, at least not in Texas. I used to be on a school board for a charter school, and so I’ve had a bunch of formal training on Texas Open Meetings Act stuff. And no, at least in Texas, there is no mandate that it has to be a PDF. What the laws generally say across states is that it just has to be publicly available, accessible information that the average person can consume and reach. What’s interesting is with a lot of this stuff is there’s like a whole SaaS ecosystem around helping boards and like city councils and, I don’t know, all these type and steering committees like manage their minutes and their agendas and all their stuff and keep all their information together.

But the default go-to for most of these platforms and these SaaS’s is to: Oh, you need to get it outside of this platform. Let’s make a PDF. And all these platforms, all these SaaS’s are just generating inaccessible PDFs, ad nauseum. And I’m sure many of them have APIs and probably if you had a skilled developer like Steve, you would be able to, you know, hook into that API have it, generate posts on your WordPress website and have ’em properly tagged. Have ’em in a custom post type. Have ’em in some sort of searchable and filterable table, and get real fancy with it.

But let’s be real, you know, for the local charter school or the community library. They’re not gonna do that. And so I think some of it is a software platform problem, and some of it is just a, this is how we’ve always done it problem.

Steve Jones: Yeah, I think it’s an ease of use thing. And if you’re not taking measures to ensure that those PDFs are accessible, which can be quite costly, you know, maybe provide an alternative to the PDF and make a post. If you’re in WordPress, make a post a text document. Link a text document. Alternative ways to get that information, ’cause PDFs notoriously can be troublesome, especially PDFs that are generated from a system through some API that maybe the API doesn’t even consider proper headings and tagging within the PDF.

An Altenate “Fix” Some Organizations Have Pursued

Amber: Yeah, so I saw a really interesting article on Govtech about how Cain County, Illinois was discussing at one of their March meetings of their, the Cain County Board’s Administration Committee. At that meeting they were specifically talking about this ADA compliance deadline on April 24th.

And they said that some of their board agendas can be very long. I will admit, I don’t always open all of these on our clients, so I was a little shocked when I read this. They said that the county’s most recent board meeting agenda, for example, was over 1300 pages long. Much of what’s included in the county agenda packet, things like contracts and scans of documents that the county itself didn’t create, which they said means it will be very difficult for them to make the entire packet accessible.

So what they are proposing is a change to what they provide online in order to meet the compliance deadline. So only the ADA compliant materials that they create, which would be the actual agenda, resolutions, and ordinances, and not any attachments or reference documents will be posted on their website. And all of the supporting documents will now have to be available only through Freedom of Information Act Requests. And I found this interesting because essentially that article, it was discussing the fact that these document accessibility requirements, while the spirit of them is that it’s supposed to make these documents more accessible and more available to more people, what it’s going to do in effect for this county, because of the way they’ve decided to handle this, is it’s actually going to make some information less available to everyone.

Because you won’t be able to just go to a website and click open or download. You’ll have to go submit an official form and then you might have to wait some number of days to get it. And who knows if that’s even in time between when they the meeting agenda, before the meeting and when the meeting happens. And I’m curious what you guys think about this potential impact of how some organizations might be handling compliance.

Steve Jones: It’s less accessible at that point, so it’s behind a, you know, a request. I’m sure a Freedom of Information Act is not free to even though it’s called a Freedom of Information Act. I’m sure there’s a document fee or something in regards to that. And I think companies can re…

Amber: (Cross-talk) or something.

Steve Jones: I think companies can, within reason, charge a nominal fee for requests such as those. But yeah it essentially is taking information that may not have been a hundred percent accessible, may have been 50, 60% accessible and it’s actually taking the accessibility to the zero because it’s now gone, it’s off the internet. And you know, maybe that is a justification for you know, institutions such as this to be able to apply for extensions. As long as they’re showing an effort to move in that direction.

You know, there’s also other ways to handle this. You don’t have to remove it. You can mark it as archived content which we’ve done. Amber can speak to the legality of this, but you’re not required to meet all the same accessibility compliances if your content is marked as archived.

Amber: As long…

Steve Jones: You know…

Amber: … as it’s created before the compliance deadline.

Steve Jones: And not edited, yeah.

Amber: So that’s how they’re handling their past meeting minutes, they still have this problem of the future ones, right? With the scans that they get.

Chris: Yeah. And these are the kinds of unintended consequences that I think come out of one size fits all regulation of an entire sector to meet a certain standard. And maybe, maybe some consideration wasn’t given to these kind of cases. Which to me, like this particular one with Cain County does not sound like an edge case to me. Like this could probably be applicable to most public sector organizations. They could have massive board packets. I mean, I remember for, even for the tiny charter school, I was on the board of our board packets would regularly get to 70, 80 pages. And that was for a very small and relatively simple to run organization.

You can only imagine for a city, you know, and it’s it’s unfortunate, on the one hand. But on the other hand, I still understand the intent and the spirit behind what the DOJ was trying to do by extending these requirements downstream from Federal. I just think that there’s gonna be some work that they have to do with the people they’re regulating to try to figure some of this out.

And it may be that some more exceptions need to be added for particular cases. Like for instance, I think a somewhat reasonable one would be like, Hey, if some third party provides you with a document that you have no control over the formatting and tagging of you should not be required to remediate that. Unless you have asked them to provide you with that document as an end deliverable to your constituents or something. I think there’s…

Amber: Or you paid for it.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Like you’ve paid for it, not like an RFP response or a, or an invoice or something. I mean, ideally, all these things should be getting made more and more accessible over time. And hopefully that will be the end result of this. But it’s hard to, it’s like the messy middle of this, right?

Amber: This reminded me when I read this of the UC Berkeley case from 2017, where they took over 20,000 videos of courses, so just recordings that they had of classes that anyone could watch for free. They took them off of YouTube and iTunes U because they got told they had to caption them and they said that it will cost over $1 million for them to do so, which they couldn’t afford.

So, basically, the way they dealt with that was they chose to restrict public access to the videos rather than caption them. Even at the time I was thinking, this feels like a loss, not a win. But maybe that gives me the same feeling of how a deaf person, like a deaf person couldn’t access that. Now I can’t access it. So I have the same experience as a deaf person, you know?

AI and Automation Might Be Essential

Amber: Part of me does wonder a little bit if maybe AI will be helpful. Like nowadays in 2017, I don’t think YouTube was doing as much of auto captioning. I’m pretty sure if you went there and someone hadn’t uploaded captions, there was nothing. And so now I bet it’s better and I’m wondering if we’ll get to a point where AI can help with providing some sort of accessible alternative for those scanned documents that government can’t.

Chris: And I know this isn’t on our agenda to talk about, but one thing just popped in my head, which there was an article that came out not too long ago that kind of came across my desk when I was researching things to share with our audience. And it was an executive, like a compliance executive at Adobe.

So the literal people who are responsible for the PDF problem basically saying Hey, these deadlines are coming, and if automation and AI isn’t part of your strategy, you’re not gonna make it. Like you’re not gonna hit the deadline. You’re not even gonna come close. You cannot rely purely on humans for this stuff because in reality, most public organizations have a backlog of hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of inaccessible PDFs.

And so his whole case was automation has to be part of the story, at least initially. Maybe that can get you to 60 or 80% or something and it’ll get you better than you were before. But you can’t just do human work for this stuff.

Steve Jones: I would agree, and I’ve seen a lot of things recently in regards to that. I’ve seen you know, PDF to markdown files, you know, converters and things like that. And I think, you know, we use automation, not AI, but we use automation in our own tools to try to find accessibility issues that we programmatically can find with a high level of certainty. And I think it’s okay to lean on those things and I think we should, and we should refine those things over time. And where it gets in trouble is where you know the set it, forget it. I just want the one click solution. This tool says it’s going to write all my transcripts for me and it did it and I put it in there. I technically comply. It doesn’t say that my transcript has to be correct. So it’s the set it and forget it mentality can be dangerous. Try to bring automation in, but be that human in the loop that is, is there to validate what the automations are doing.

Chris: Absolutely.

Amber: Yeah, I mean, hopefully entities will figure out better ways to handle the third party documents that are provided, but I really like the thought that maybe they should try to move away from making their agendas and meeting minutes PDFs at all. I’m just in my head thinking what are the objections to the website? And I know one thing is they say, well, we have to post it publicly and it can’t be changed. And I think sometimes people think PDFs can’t be edited. It is so easy to edit PDFs. I do it all the

Steve Jones: time.

Yeah.

Amber: I don’t ever sign any document for my kid’s school by printing it out and signing it.

Steve Jones: Right.

Amber: Open the Pro version of Adobe Acrobat. I like fill in all the stuff. I’ve changed words on PDFs, like all kinds of stuff, right? But also they might not realize that a lot of CMSs, WordPress, but also many others also have a last updated date on post content. In WordPress, yes, you can fake your published date really easily. It’s more difficult for a non-technical user to change the last updated date, so that could be a way.

If they post the minutes and then they aren’t editing the content and they set up their theme to show when was it last updated, then it would see the publish date and the update date and timestamp are exactly the same. And so that might be a way to handle that. Where you can show or prove that it didn’t change from the time you had to post it before the meeting. But there’s workarounds for all those objections that might come up.

Steve Jones: Yeah, make it not a PDF. If you’re using a service of some sort, go to that source. Send them the requirements. Say, Hey, are you complying with this? Like you’re our vendor. You’re probably thousands of other people’s vendor. Are you taking steps to help us comply with these laws and these these requirements? Hold the developer’s feet to the fire. Demand that they make software that’s good for you and your users.

Chris: I think that’s a perfect note to end on. So, if you are facing down these deadlines and you’re not sure what to do, hopefully we gave you some ideas of how to proceed with PDFs, but if you need more help, feel free to reach out to us or the accessibility expert in your department or in your area, and I’m sure they will talk your ear off with all the different things you could be doing to get better outcomes.

Amber: Thanks everybody.

Steve Jones: Cheers. See you.

Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.