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Clerk and county IT seek CIPA microgrants for lobby kiosk and digital accessibility tools
Summary
The clerk's office proposed a bilingual, ADA-accessible lobby kiosk to help constituents find services and perform common transactions; county IT asked to apply for a CIPA microgrant to buy CommonLook accessibility licenses.
The Jefferson County Clerk’s Office and Business Innovation & Technology (BIT) asked the board for support to apply for separate Colorado Information, Privacy and Accessibility (CIPA) microgrants to improve digital access for residents.
Clerk Gonzales and the clerk’s staff proposed a digital wayfinding and service kiosk for the county administration building lobby. The clerk’s office said it sees roughly 14,033 in-person visitors at administrative motor-vehicle and recording locations between January 1 and October 30 (about 3,500 per month, roughly 218 per day at those locations). The kiosk would provide bilingual wayfinding, ADA accessibility features and the ability for visitors to complete some transactions on-site such as voter registration, license-plate renewals and searches of digital archives. The clerk said she would staff ongoing licensing and maintenance costs through the clerk’s existing public-education/remote-services budget if the county receives a one-time grant to purchase the kiosk hardware and initial programming.
Separately, Kristy Klipka from BIT and colleagues proposed applying for another CIPA microgrant — up to $10,000 — to buy approximately 10 CommonLook licenses for digital accessibility remediation. Klipka told commissioners that earlier county pilots using CommonLook had remediated more than 317 documents (about 1,960 pages) and that the microgrant program covers one-time technology costs with no local match required.
Commissioners expressed support for both applications. The clerk noted that the kiosk would be bilingual and ADA-accessible and that staff were coordinating with facilities and BIT on siting and technical specifications. BIT staff emphasized that multiple separate CIPA microgrant applications are permitted for different projects in the same year.
No appropriation was requested at the briefing stage; both offices said they would seek supplemental appropriations only if the county is awarded the grants.
