Ann Arbor accessibility coordinator details digital-access push, staff training and accommodation requests

Jenna Trung, the city’s ADA accessibility coordinator in the Office of Organizational Equity, told the Commission on Disability Issues on June 17 that her office has received 12 accommodation requests since she joined the city about 11 months ago and has handled one grievance that fell outside the city’s jurisdiction.

"Since I've joined the city, it's been about 11 months," Trung said. She described three main types of contacts the office receives: formal accommodation requests, grievances and general resource-navigation questions. "We received one grievance, but that was actually outside of our jurisdiction," she added, saying staff referred that person to the appropriate Title III resources.

Trung said the office’s largest ongoing effort is improving digital accessibility. She described work to assess how third-party vendors conform to accessibility expectations, to revise contract language so vendors are required to respond to accessibility requests, and to streamline governance of the city’s primary website to reduce the number of web editors and improve content quality. "We're working on restructuring our governance model to a certified web publisher model where there are fewer editors and there are more...guardrails in place," she said.

The coordinator also reported progress on staff training: the city spent $4,000 to acquire document- and presentation-accessibility trainings from the Rocky Mountain ADA Center and has enrolled more than 800 staff in training, with about an 86% completion rate so far. "We have over 800 staff enrolled in that. Right now, we're sitting at about an 86% completion rate," Trung said.

Trung described roughly 20 requests since she started related to document and application accessibility, and about 10 requests focused on resource navigation. She also noted a civic-user map testing project conducted with the University of Michigan School of Information and five participants with disabilities that produced five recommendations for improving map accessibility within the constraints of ArcGIS.

Commissioners praised the work and asked for regular updates. Vice Chair Zach Damon thanked Trung for the report and said he was "very proud to hear" about staff training and the accessibility measures. Chair Larry Keeler and other members said they would like to receive these reports on a regular basis.

The commission accepted the report with no formal action requested; the meeting proceeded to other agenda items and adjourned later in the session.