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Technology Commission authorizes $10,000 to begin ADA/WCAG remediation of Franklin City website
Summary
The Franklin Technology Commission approved up to $10,000, funded by a health-department grant that expires in December 2025, to pay a vendor for an initial WCAG 2.1 pre-scan and prioritized remediation of the city website; the commission required a measurable prescan and postscan baseline.
The Franklin Technology Commission voted Dec. 3 to authorize spending up to $10,000 to begin remediation of the City of Franklin website so it meets baseline web accessibility standards.
Commission members said the funds, drawn from a Franklin Health Department grant that expires in December 2025, will pay for a vendor to run an initial WCAG 2.1 compliance scan, deliver a prioritized remediation plan, and implement low-hanging automated fixes on live web pages. An initial phase will exclude the city’s document archive, which staff said contains more than 10,000 legacy files that will require separate OCR and remediation work.
The vote followed a staff presentation explaining the technical categories of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — perceivable, operable, understandable and robust — and how common problems such as missing alt text, keyboard-navigation traps, video captions and non-OCR PDFs keep the site out of compliance. “We only have $10,000 to go with this,” the Director of IT said during the presentation. “There are over 10,000 documents stored on the Franklin website.”
Why it matters: Commissioners emphasized that a documented baseline and measurable improvements are important if the city is later asked to show it took steps toward compliance. Several members urged a prescan and a postscan so the city can demonstrate progress in court or to a complainant. One commissioner framed the procurement as an exploratory first step designed to move the needle on obvious, low-cost fixes while documenting how much work remains.
The contract discussion centered on whether to keep the current content-management vendor, Northwoods (Titan CMS), or switch to a higher-cost alternative such as CivicsPlus. Staff said Titan hosting is inexpensive — roughly $350 monthly — but many accessibility fixes are the customer’s responsibility because the city controls the content. CivicsPlus was described in the meeting packet as costing $15,000–$40,000 up front with annual fees of $10,000–$25,000, figures commissioners cited while weighing value against cost.
Commissioners also pressed for clear deliverables. The approved approach requires a vendor pre-scan against WCAG 2.1, a remediation plan tied to the scan findings, and a post-remediation scan to show changes in measurable terms. The commission explicitly authorized the Director of IT to direct Northwoods (or the selected vendor) on remediation priorities and to spend up to $10,000 under that authority.
On process and risks: Staff warned the larger work — OCR’ing and remediating thousands of legacy PDFs and documents and improving search taxonomy — is a separate, multi-phase project that will likely require additional funds and time. The commission noted state records-retention laws require some documents be preserved indefinitely, which affects decisions about what to keep publicly posted.
Next steps: The vendor will run a prescan, report back with prioritized remediation options and estimated costs for further work, and the project will proceed under the Director of IT’s discretion within the $10,000 authorization. Commissioners said the item will be presented to the common council as part of the procurement and funding plan.
