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McLean County committee approves resolution to require WCAG AA accessibility on government website
Summary
The executive committee approved a resolution directing county staff to implement web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) across McLean County’s website, with a proposed gatekeeping process for publishing and a compliance target noted.
The McLean County Executive Committee on May 5 approved a resolution directing county staff to pursue compliance with the U.S. Department of Justice web accessibility rule and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard across county websites.
County staff said the Department of Justice rule applies to county websites and that compliance should encompass documents, videos, images and captions. Mr. Nelson, a county staff member who presented the proposal, said the county is asking to change authoring roles in the CivicPlus content management system so that fewer users can publish directly to the live site. The proposed workflow would allow departmental staff to draft pages but require review and a final publish action by trained accessibility reviewers.
“Compliance is supposed to be in place by April 26,” Mr. Nelson said, and he described enforcement risk and a yearlong work window to meet requirements. He noted litigation patterns in other states and recommended a gatekeeping approach that would be responsive but would require reviewers to check items such as alt text for images and captions for video.
Committee members voiced support for the accessibility work and for involving community members. Member Burn, who said she uses accessibility features regularly, thanked staff for attention to the topic. Member Berghau asked for clarification that the change would not limit content editing but would only control publishing; Mr. Nelson confirmed the change would focus on format compliance rather than content.
The committee approved the resolution by voice vote with no recorded roll-call tally.
County staff said training sessions have already taken place for personnel who manage web content and that the department plans additional education and a help-desk category for page review and publication. Staff also noted that existing posted videos will need captioning or refilming if captions are not present.
