Making municipal websites
more accessible
Manitou Springs works towards HB 21-1110 compliance
By Rachel Woolworth, CML municipal research analyst
For mid-sized municipalities like the City of Manitou Springs without a standalone accessibility department, compliance with House Bill 21-1110 is a heavy lift.
“We are a relatively small but mighty staff. I think we are doing what we can,” Manitou Springs Public Information Officer Alex Trefry said of the city’s work to meet the law’s technology accessibility standards.
Passed by the state legislature in 2021, HB 21-1110 requires governments across Colorado to provide proper technology accommodations for individuals with disabilities. Such accommodations include text descriptions of images and transcriptions of video and audio content on the municipality’s website.
If municipalities do not meet the technology accessibility standards outlined by the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology by July 1, 2024, cities and towns could face a court order requiring compliance, monetary damages, or a fine of $3,5000 if a person in the disability community is limited in their access.
Though Manitou Springs formally started working on a digital transition plan in June 2023, technology accessibility work was informally taking place years before. This allowed the municipality to customize its transition plan to align with state mandates, instead of starting from scratch.
Manitou Springs kickstarted these efforts by hiring a consultant to identify common issues across the city’s web platforms, including payment forms, PDFs, digital newsletters, and public meeting agendas, to name a few. Issues were identified on both vendor and internal platforms.
The city responded to external problems by adding technology accessibility guidelines to procurement processes for any vendor that may generate digital content on behalf of the city. Vendors managing preexisting web content, such as CivicPlus, were asked to make retroactive software changes.
To confront internal problems, Manitou Springs is requiring employees to participate in a weekly, 13-step training on web accessibility. The training, which is already underway, teaches staff how to properly generate compliant documents on Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word, how to audit preexisting content, and more.
The top priority for Manitou Springs, Trefry said, is to bring new web content and popular preexisting web content into compliance. “My advice for other municipalities working on this mandate is to break it up into manageable parts,” he said. “Focus on whatever you think is most important first.”
Manitou Springs City Council allocated $200,000 in the 2024 budget to technology accessibility efforts, a funding stream stakeholders hope will help the city gain compliance with HB 21-1110. The municipality is also discussing the possibility of bringing on an ADA coordinator to widen accessibility efforts across different topical areas.
When asked if Manitou Springs is likely to reach compliance by summer 2024, Trefry said: “In terms of being 100% compliant, I doubt it. But we are making the proper strides to be where we need to be.”