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Winter Haven staff report ADA web and mobile compliance work ahead of April 24, 2026 deadline
Summary
City staff said they have scanned sites and third‑party portals, removed or are remediating noncompliant PDFs, added alt text and plan live closed captioning; the city’s compliance deadline for municipalities over 50,000 is April 24, 2026.
City staff reported progress toward complying with the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II web and mobile accessibility rule, and outlined steps to meet the technical standard (WCAG 2.1 AA) ahead of the municipality’s deadline.
“Katrina” (staff) told the commission the city has scanned the entire website and third‑party portals with automated tools, is updating alt text on images, and is working with vendors where the city contracts for portals (for example, the water department’s customer portal) to remediate accessibility issues. She said PDFs remain the biggest remediation challenge and that staff have removed noncompliant PDFs from public pages while systematically updating them for accessibility.
Katrina said Winter Haven qualifies for the earlier compliance date because the municipality has a population over 50,000; the effective date cited in the presentation is April 24, 2026. Staff have run training sessions (beginning March 25) for content creators and have had more than 100 staff members participate. The team is also testing tools to provide live closed captioning for streamed meetings and exploring live‑translation apps that could offer on‑device translations for attendees.
Commissioners asked how the changes will help hearing‑impaired residents at in‑person meetings; staff said closed captioning will be available on live streams and that staff are vetting tools that could also display captions in the meeting room or provide live audio translation to earbuds. Staff emphasized much of the accessibility work is behind‑the‑scenes coding and that users may not notice visible changes even while the site becomes more accessible to assistive technologies.
No formal action was taken in the transcript provided; staff said they will continue remediation and training work and will update commissioners on progress.
