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State officials report major progress on Vermont's website accessibility push, flag ongoing gaps
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Summary
Agency of Digital Services and Administration told the House Energy committee that automated scans of 130 state template sites flagged about 45,000 issues initially; central code fixes and editor training have cut that to roughly 3,000 and driven an average template score near 99%, but officials said document and application remediation and a skills gap remain.
State Agency of Digital Services officials told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure committee on April 15 that the State of Vermont has made substantial progress toward meeting newly adopted digital-accessibility requirements but still faces work on documents, legacy applications and training.
Rebecca Kelly, chief communications officer for the Agency of Administration, and Maggie Wilson, director of web services at the Agency of Digital Services, said the state is using a two-pronged approach: central technical fixes to the shared Drupal template and targeted training and tools for site editors across agencies.
The presenters said an automated scan of roughly 130 state template websites initially surfaced about 45,000 accessibility issues — a large share of which were duplicate defects stemming from shared design components. After batched code deployments and editor remediation, they reported a roughly 95% reduction to around 3,000 flagged items and an average automated score of about 99% on template sites. "We've dramatically reduced the amount of issues," Wilson said. "We have pages of folks that are at 100."
Why it matters: the rule cited by presenters adopts the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA as the baseline for determining digital accessibility; the standard covers perceptibility, operability, understandability and robustness for users with blindness, low vision, hearing loss, mobility and cognitive barriers. Agency leaders said the April 24 effective date applies to new content posted after April 23 and that remediation is an ongoing operational commitment rather than a one-time compliance deadline.
Steps taken and remaining gaps: the team described two primary remediation tracks. First, engineers and the vendor (Tyler Technologies) pushed global template fixes (examples included language-translation behavior, heading rules that prevent duplicate H1 elements, responsiveness and slideshow controls). Second, the agencies created editor-facing dashboards and trained roughly 7,410 employees on an "introduction to accessibility" course so content owners can address descriptive link text, alternative image text, color contrast and other content-level issues that automated scanners cannot reliably detect. Officials cautioned that PDFs, PowerPoint-to-PDF conversions and captioning of video remain technical pain points that require more advanced skills.
On vendor accountability and procurement: presenters said procurement language was updated (Attachment C via Bulletin 3.5) to add WCAG compliance into nondiscrimination provisions and that nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) are being attached to technology contracts so vendors must deliver accessible products or face remedies. "We added a provision that specifically calls out the need to comply and meet this rule requirement," Wilson said.
Tracking complaints and enforcement: the agencies said every template site now includes a prominent accessibility contact in the footer to route constituent reports to an agency point of contact, but the enterprise does not yet have a centralized complaint database; they plan to explore a reporting system akin to public-records workflows. On enforcement, presenters said federal complaints historically result in negotiation and compliance plans rather than immediate punitive action; the presenters emphasized remedies and remediation rather than litigation.
What lawmakers asked: members pressed on multi-factor authentication and whether it creates access barriers, the degree to which user-experience modernization is part of the effort, municipal deadlines (municipalities received an extra year in some cases), and whether the project required a new appropriation. Presenters said the steering committee has worked within existing resources, agencies have used contracts where needed, and the rule text frames the standard as not an unfunded mandate.
Next steps: officials said phase 1 focused on template sites; phase 2 will address specialized applications and legacy systems with technical debt and is expected to take longer. They said rescanning, manual audits and ongoing training will continue and that agencies should publish clear accessibility contact information on their sites to assist constituents.
The committee thanked the presenters and moved on to additional testimony on related energy items.
