County staff say website near 95% accessible but PDFs remain key hurdle ahead of new state law

Lake County communications staff told the Board of County Commissioners they are close to meeting Colorado’s new web-accessibility standard but that significant remaining work — especially on PDF documents and tables — must be finished before the July compliance deadline.

Sandy Scheiner, the county’s communications manager, told commissioners the state bill identified in the packet as “House Bill 21 11 10” is scheduled to take effect in July. She said the county’s main website is approximately 95% compliant with WCAG-level checks performed in the last audit, but that uploaded PDFs and complex tables remain a larger problem.

"If an individual finds something that they can't access, we do have a form on our website with 2 — well, actually, the law says 2 ways of contact, but we have 3," Scheiner said, describing the county’s intake and accommodation process. She warned that noncompliance carries financial risk: "A citation for noncompliance is 3,500. So if we have 285 instances in any of our digital media that is noncompliant, that's a million dollars just to put it in that context."

Scheiner reviewed steps the county has taken: a 2024 resolution adopting an accessibility plan and quarterly reporting, a third‑party audit by Deque, and an internal technology accessibility team. She said Deque audited the site for a higher WCAG conformance level (2.3), while the county’s content-provider tools check to the 2.0/2.1 baseline. That means some remediation — particularly for PDFs, tables and vendor-provided pages — will require additional tools or outsourcing.

She estimated a remediation cost of about $6 per PDF page for outsourced remediation and said the county would pursue state grant support where possible. Scheiner also urged departments to designate “champions” to improve staff fluency on accessibility best practices and recommended that future vendor contracts require WCAG 2.1 compliance.

Commissioners and staff discussed practical next steps: taking some documents offline and making them available by request during remediation, strengthening contract language for future digital vendors, and applying to state grants to defray remediation costs. Staff said they will prioritize the highest-use PDFs and work with the state Internet portal authority on funding.

Scheiner closed by asking for patience and countywide buy‑in as staff train contributors across departments. "Kindness, grace, patience, all of those things are what we are gonna need to kind of get through this," she said.

The county will continue to report quarterly to the commissioners on accessibility progress and said it will temporarily remove some PDF content or replace it with request-only access while remediation proceeds.