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Cowlitz County IT reports roughly 92% WCAG compliance, outlines training and monitoring plan
Summary
Cowlitz County IT told commissioners the county’s websites were about 92% compliant with accessibility checks and proposed department-level accessibility leads, training, and regular audits to meet a Level AA requirement by the April 24 deadline.
Cowlitz County’s IT director briefed commissioners on the county’s work to meet web accessibility standards and described a plan for training, remediation and monitoring across departments.
Mac McCoy, director of IT (speaker 5), said the presentation covered the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2) and noted that the Department of Justice expects public entities to meet Level AA. He framed the effort as risk mitigation and modernization, and said the county must meet the compliance deadline (reported by staff as April 24).
Calvin (speaker 14) reported that an internal tool the team built using a Google-based accessibility checker showed roughly 92% compliance across county websites. He said CivicPlus is the vendor hosting most county office websites and that Superior Court had recently been added to the same platform. Calvin and IT staff recommended identifying accessibility leads in each department, producing training (including videos uploaded to the county LMS), and running periodic compliance reports on an agreed cadence (monthly, quarterly or semiannually).
Commissioners asked technical questions about how screen readers work and whether residents must have particular software; IT explained that users typically run their own assistive tools and that county pages must be structured so those tools can interpret content. IT offered to produce regular compliance reports and to provide department-level training so each office could build accessible pages and remediate findings.
No formal action was taken at the meeting; commissioners thanked IT and adjourned after the briefing.
