Council office flags federal web-accessibility deadline; staff to provide guidance for alder blogs and multimedia

Karen, chief of staff to the Common Council, told the executive committee on Aug. 5 that federal requirements will require Madison’s public-facing web content to meet accessibility standards by April 2026, and the council office and IT are preparing guidance for alders.

Karen noted that a practical step alders can take now is to avoid using all caps in blog headlines because capitalized text can cause problems for screen readers. Staff and IT plan to provide training and guidance on required fields such as alt text for images, closed captioning for video, and strategies for handling archived PDFs and legacy blog posts.

Committee members raised technical questions. Alder Tishler, who described a background in broadcast and media accessibility, asked whether the city would budget for closed-captioning resources; Karen deferred to IT for technical specifics but said machine captioning has improved and human review is often still needed for accuracy. Alder Lankella and others asked whether the requirement applies to new content only; Karen said staff expect some impact on archiving and that IT is working on options to retain old content in a way that does not confuse the public while allowing alders back-end access to historic posts.

Karen said staff may reserve the right to adjust or correct content (for example converting all-caps headlines or adding missing alt text) to meet compliance deadlines, and that more detailed guidance and training materials would be distributed as they are available. The council office encouraged alders to begin adding clear alternative text descriptions to images in blogs as practice.

Karen identified Legistar and other document formats (notably PDFs) as areas that will require additional work and coordination with IT. No new funding or implementation dates beyond the federal deadline were announced at the meeting.