Learn more about how CivicPlus approaches compliance with the {{glossary.ADA}} and the {{glossary.WCAG}}.

CivicPlus Responsibility

Build

Our websites are built to be highly compliant with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) {{glossary.Section 508}} and {{glossary.WCAG}} 2.1 A and AA levels. Our website content and design teams train to deliver accessible websites, meaning 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 {{glossary.ADA}} and {{glossary.WCAG}} standards. This might mean they teach staff to include alternative text when uploading pictures or teach a webmaster to write content with a screen reader in mind. Your team must stay informed and knowledgeable 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 our 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 customers in the product release notes.

On-Going Education

Regulations are updated at least annually by the World Wide Web Consortium ({{glossary.W3C}}), an organization that publishes the {{glossary.WCAG}} guidelines, and intermittently by the United States legislative system, which updates the Section 508 regulations. Our product team closely follows these regulations and provides regular updates to customers through 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.

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 compliance 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 provides tools to help with ongoing compliance, but your teams must 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 customers as they modify and customize their websites without following {{glossary.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 customer 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, customers can put custom {{glossary.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.

On-Going 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 partner product Monsido Accessibility platform (powered by Acquia) 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 compliance tools and resources.

Questions

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

Additional Resources

Web Central Accessibility Conformance Report