Stop Recreating the Wheel: Local Government Organizations Sharing Accessibility Information

Local and state government organizations should be able to share information about the accessibility of various technology products they use. If a local government organization spends money to evaluate the accessibility of a product, it should make that information freely available to other local and state government organizations.

Vendors don’t want everyone to know about any limitations that make their product not accessible. However, this process should compel vendors to do better with accessibility, because if they have received feedback from one local government that they are not accessible, they should understand that a second local government will face the same or similar challenges and report the same feedback.

If the vendor wants to demonstrate that they’re serious about working on accessibility, then they will want to be more specific in how they are solving any issue reported from their customer. The vendor should ask questions and continue following up until they resolve the issue. Once the vendor resolves the issue, it will improve the accessibility experience for any other local or state government that wishes to purchase their technology product.

Thomas Logan: Hello, everyone. This is Thomas Logan from Equal Entry here with Ken Nakata of Converge Accessibility. In this episode of Accessibility Insights, we’re talking about how local and state government organizations can share information from their research on vendors and the accessibility of their products between each other.

Vendors and Laundry Lists of Accessibility Problems

So, I just want to kick this off, Ken. We’ve had many years of working in procurement and with this idea that a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) or an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) can be a way to measure and institute better accessibility. Could you start off with maybe somewhat obvious, but why do vendors and people that are trying to sell to the government not want to provide a laundry list of problems they are working on for accessibility?

Ken Nakata: Well, Thomas, the obvious answer is that if they tell governments all about their accessibility problems and they have a lot of them and they’re being very honest, it really does drive business towards their competitors. So they don’t want to do that because they want to win the work.

Thomas Logan: And would you say, I think from our experience over the years working together, I feel like there’s been a shift, especially in the last five years, where, especially for larger organizations, they’re able to do an additional assessment on these documents and say, “Even though you said that your conformance document, everything works great, I tried it out, it’s not working, I’m going to push it back to you.”

Would you say you feel like that’s been changing for assessments of products?

Ken Nakata: I think so. A lot of the vendors don’t really have their own expertise in-house on accessibility. So even when they’re trying to be honest about their accessibility reports, and saying that they support things like color contrast or heading structure or something like that, oftentimes, their products still aren’t accessible.

And then there are other times where a vendor just doesn’t really pay that much attention to it and thinks of the VPAT or the ACR is just a sales vehicle and then just negligently or not negligently misrepresents the accessibility of their product and makes it seem a lot better than it is.

And I think that that’s the reason why there’s been some pushback on just relying on ACRs and VPATs for governments to help them determine which product is the most accessible and meets their business needs.

Why Local and State Governments Wouldn’t Want to Share Accessibility Information

Thomas Logan: And alright folks, I feel like from this part I want to take a step back too to say that typically in these documents, these Accessibility Conformance Reports, or these VPATs, the idea is that we are using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or the rules from Section 508, to provide a set of criterion to say yes or no, supports or does not support.

And what happens is that, because this is quote, unquote, “a voluntary product accessibility template.” A company fills it out, they voluntarily fill it out, but it may not be accurate. And what Ken and I are interested in is, if something’s not accurate in this written document, which is just composed in text, how do we share that information between municipalities, between local governments, between state governments?

And this is, I think, very important just from our years of experience working on this, that it takes time and money to assess someone’s VPAT, and if someone fills it out voluntarily, I wouldn’t say voluntarily, but it takes time and money to assess whether those claims are true.

And Ken, I’d like to open up to you. Do you think there’s any reason why a local government or state government would not want to share the information they find when they do these assessments on products for accessibility?

Ken Nakata: Absolutely. If a government is trying to comply with Title II of the ADA and these new Title II regulations, it wants to make sure that web based applications that they’re using are as accessible as possible. If they’re being really thorough about it, they’re going to do a review of the accessibility of that application.

But if they do a report and they get a report on the accessibility problems, that document also creates a roadmap for a plaintiff if they wanted to sue that same entity. So if they get that report, if they share it, they’re going to want to make sure that there’s lots of nondisclosure agreements and things like that in place. So that document doesn’t get leaked out to a prospective plaintiff

Thomas Logan: In that case, then the transparency, which normally seems like a good thing for government, because the way that our legal system functions, if you document and have known accessibility issues published with the way that the DOJ is now, you’re basically saying, “Please sue me.”

Ken Nakata: Effectively. That’s exactly right. In a perfect world, a government would be able to do an accessibility review of the applications that they’re using, tell the vendor about those problems and then there’s get them fixed.

And in a perfect world, we’d be able to share that information between governments because that’s the point of this whole episode, is that there’s so little reason for all these different governments to be testing the same applications over and over again, and just finding the same problems. That’s a tremendous waste of government resources.

And in a perfect world, we’d be able to share all that information freely. But the problem with that is that if you make it too much of an open system like that, then vendors won’t want to play because they’ll lose to their competition. And governments won’t want to play because they’ll be opening themselves up to lawsuits. So the challenge is, is how do we share information without creating either of those risks?

How to Share Accessibility Information Without Risks

Thomas Logan: And I’m going to give an example, just to hopefully just make this very illustrative for our audience. Let’s say that we are the city of Austin, Texas, the city of Nashua, New Hampshire, and the city of New York City, New York. We’re three different cities. In each of these cities, we’re responsible for collecting garbage from our populace.

We’re going to, many times, be purchasing software from a third party to help us monitor and explain our routes and our schedules and manage this infrastructure and between these three cities, even though they’re very different sizes, they may working with the exact same company. And this is where what we’re trying to discuss here is what we’re identifying is a problem, like New York City may have a larger budget to analyze the accessibility of this trash collection software service than, say, Nashua, New Hampshire.

I’m still using pretty large city examples, but I just wanted to put that out there that what we’re explaining is that for all of these different municipalities, often they’re purchasing from the same vendors. It’s just, hundreds of times over, different municipalities purchasing the same software.

Ken Nakata: Exactly right. And it’s one of the things that really surprised me and starting to work with state and local governments is how many of these applications there are. It’s not like we’re just talking about, everybody’s using Office 365. And in some sense, the state and local governments have amazingly complicated websites because they have so many functions, and each of those different functions often is a different piece of software.

So, for instance, if you go to your local city and you go to the clerk’s office in the court. The clerk’s office uses one piece of software where you can access records that are filed with the court. The software that’s used for record-keeping in the property department for real estate, that’s an entirely different piece of software because it’s a different need. And so they have different specialized software just for that. And then you’d license your dog, for instance, because you have to have a dog license in the city while that’s an entirely different piece of software too.

And when you think about all those different apps, all those different functions and services and programs and activities that, that state and local governments provide for their populace. And you think, each of those things is a different application. It becomes immensely complicated for state and local governments to manage all that stuff. And so, it isn’t surprising when we’re looking at some of these clients that they have well over a hundred different applications for all these different types of functions within their government. For their populace, and they’re all testing the same things over and over again.

Another complicating factor in all of this is the companies that are in this market are really a niche market. These are not companies that have been selling to the federal government and has been subject to Section 508 for the last 20 years. And they’re not companies that sell to the private sector because, well, they do to a certain extent, but not very often. So, the HPs of the world, the IBMs of the world are not going off and buying dog licensing software for instance.

So it’s a very specialized market that each of these companies cater to, and there are hundreds of them. How do we share the testing information and the accessibility information between municipalities and counties and states? How do we share all that information so that we’re all not recreating the wheel? That’s the big challenge, I think. And nobody’s doing that right now.

But somebody could be doing that right now. And Thomas and I have both been giving a lot of thought to what would that look like if somebody did. And how do you do it in a way that doesn’t make the vendors not want to play and makes the states and local governments not want to participate because they’re exposing themselves to risk?

Thomas Logan: And to put that in a different way, and we’re obviously not attacking any specific dog licensing software that exists out there in the world. Hala if you’re listening to us, but it’s more of the point that there are hundreds of counties that may need to purchase dog licensing software. There are not hundreds of dog licensing software providers, right?

The need to have this accessible software from various municipalities, this is in the number of like hundreds, the number of people like producing software that serves this need much smaller. This whole idea here is that why would we be spending the money to assess five companies doing dog licensing software?

Again, hypothetical folks, but maybe there’s five. Why would the hundreds of different municipalities do that analysis on those five pieces of software? Eventually you’re like, “Yes, we need to do dog licensing. We do dog licensing in a common way here in the United States. Let’s share the results and let’s procure and purchase the most accessible dog licensing software that exists,” which should be demonstrated in their VPAT and in their conformance report.

Great. That’s how we want this to work.

Ken Nakata: It should be. It should be documented, but often isn’t, and that’s the problem. How do we share this information? So we’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, and I think before this call, I think we came up with, I think, what’s a workable model, some organization that’s removed from this would have to hold this, some organization like National Association of Counties or National League of Cities or a software vendor organization such as ITI or, some organization that has a stake in this, but not a direct stake in it.

And the kind of information that we thought should be shared would be, I think basically four things; one, the application name, what was being tested. Second, what’s the version that’s tested? Because a lot of local governments are using versions that are 10 years old, what was tested? Was it a use case testing? What did they test? The back end? Things like that. And also just who tested it?

Who’s a contact person at that organization? So you could reach that organization and say, “Hey, Did you test this thing? And what were your results?” And just by doing that, we thought that it does put a burden on an organization to have to go and make all those phone calls or emails to those people. But it certainly is a lot easier than going and testing it yourself.

And then, they’ll know whether the product was, tested and then they would also be able to tell you what the vendor said. So they would be able to say whether the vendor said that the product is going to be updated or that the new version coming out and, the new version that just came out, came out with the goal of making it accessible, and things like that.

And over time we thought that that’s probably the only practical model that we can think of for being able to do that. You have thoughts on that, Thomas?

Thomas Logan: My thoughts are, I think one of the goals Ken and I had of creating this podcast, obviously we’re creating this for a certain audience and we’re bringing you commentary that combines the legal perspective and the technical perspective. This whole idea here is very critical and crucial to both of our passions for making things better.

I think we have put out similar ideas in recent episodes. So we’d love to hear from you. Like we want to continue the conversation, especially those of you all listening that are working in state and local government, give us ideas, give us feedback. Maybe you’re like, this is something that does work. Or you are like, this is something that doesn’t work.

We really want to learn from your experiences and we want to have a conversation with people listening. So we thank you so much for your time and we will see you in our next episode. Thank you.

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