ADA Title II Rule: Digital Accessibility Compliance Guide (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Thank you all for joining today's session, ADA Title 2, What Public Entities Need to Know About Digital Accessibility. My name is Noah Pearson. I use he, him pronouns, and I am on the marketing team here at 3Play Media, and I will be moderating today's webinar. And with that taken care of, I'd like to introduce today's speakers. First off, we have David Sloan. He is Vispero's Chief Accessibility Officer and Manager of TPGI's UX Service Delivery Team. He's been with TPGI since 2013 and has worked in the accessibility field since the early days of WCAG 1.0. David is originally from Scotland, but now based in Boston. In his spare time, he researches whether New England fish and chips is better than the Scottish version. We also have Eric Ducker here. He's an online video veteran. For over a decade, he has partnered with leading brands, universities, and media companies to make engaging and inclusive video strategies a reality. Today he leads the product marketing team at 3Play Media, helping bring those strategies to content published across the world through solutions like closed captions, audio description, dubbing, and subtitling. When he's not focused on accessible media, you can find him spending hours in the kitchen perfecting his next culinary creation. Sounds like the next one's got to be fish and chips, Eric. Thank you both for being here today to talk about the new ADA Title II ruling. Before we dive into questions, I want to note that we are not lawyers, so nothing we share today should be taken as legal advice. If you do need clarity on your specific situation, it's always best to check with your organization's legal team. So with that out of the way, we can get into some questions here. This first question is for David. Can you give us a brief overview of the ruling and what it aims to do?

[00:02:01] Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. And before I start, just I want to say thank you to everyone for joining this session today. Looking forward to the conversation. The ADA was enacted in 1990, and at that point, the web was maybe less than a year old, established in CERN in Switzerland. So the ADA was very much focused on the physical environment and less so on the digital or the virtual world. But over time, clearly, as more and more of what everyday life happens virtually, there was a need to get more clarification on how the ADA applies. What does digital discrimination look like? What can you do to avoid discrimination against people with disabilities online? So finally, last year, the rule was published focusing on Title II, and we're going to come back to that shortly in terms of what Title II covers. To really provide clarity to the existing ADA requirements, how do they apply to the digital world? And the rule was very much a way to provide additional clarity to those organizations covered by Title II, focused specifically on websites and mobile apps, and I think we're going to dive into a lot more detail about that shortly.

[00:03:27] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you for giving us that essential background. Kind of a follow-up to that question, who exactly is covered by Title II, and are there any nuances about which public entities are responsible for accessibility?

[00:03:41] Speaker 2: Yeah, so Title II focuses on state and local governments in the U.S., and particularly the programs, services, and activities provided by or funded by those state or local government entities, and we'll call them public entities. So that also includes public schools, public universities, colleges, really anything provided by or on behalf of a state or local government, and the law focuses specifically on programs, services, and activities, which, again, may be provided in person, in a physical location, or virtually online. There is also an additional definition of a public entity, the special district. So without going into the official legal definition, it's like an entity authorized by state law to provide a function or a set of functions that kind of almost qualify it as a separate entity. So, for example, a public utility provider would be considered a special district and also covered by Title II.

[00:04:53] Speaker 1: Awesome, thank you. Yes, it sounds like it's definitely a pretty wide umbrella there. Next question I have is for Eric. Can you share the key deadlines for compliance, and how do they differ based on jurisdiction size?

[00:05:07] Speaker 3: Yeah, so thanks for having me, Noah, and I'm excited to be here. There's really a definition around kind of a large entity versus a small entity, and the deadlines vary a little bit. But just to kind of keep in mind, a large entity is defined by that entity having 50,000 or more in population. So for our public universities, for example, it's not based off of the public university enrollment, it's based off of the jurisdiction that that university resides in, and that entity that it resides in. So that's where we're seeing a lot more applicability to the urgency of this deadline for all of our public universities, given that a lot of universities reside in populations that are exceeding 50,000 people. So that deadline is our April 24, 2026. And that deadline was purposely released out in the future specifically because they want to make sure that published content is actually accessible that's maybe in the library, i.e. the backlog catalog. And then any new content is also going to be needing to be made accessible. So there's a requirement for both that backlog content that's still relevant for public consumption, and then ongoing content. So there's really a dual deadline that is happening at the same time. And that's April 24, 2026, so just coming up in about eight months. In the smaller entities, so basically anyone below 50,000 that are still considered a public entity, you have an extra year effectively to achieve those deadlines. You should still start planning. You should still start paying attention to this ruling. And one note, I just kind of saw a question pop up on, for example, private institutions or private universities. We're not seeing private universities directly impacted by this. There are certain interpretations that we're seeing where there's a substantial amount of federal funding or state-level funding coming to the private universities. They're taking a proactive approach to make sure that they are adhering to these accessibility standards, but it's not crystal clear given Title II is about public institutions. And there are other parts of the ADA law that discuss private-level institutions.

[00:07:38] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks, Eric, for providing that clarification there. Next question here is for David. How does the DOJ define digital content in this rule?

[00:07:48] Speaker 2: So in this rule, the focus is on web content and mobile apps. So that's your HTML websites and also digital documents that are provided through those websites, video as well. The rule has this definition of conventional electronic documents. I guess the Department of Justice couldn't use brand names, couldn't say things like Microsoft Word or PDF, and had to use a kind of neutral term. But essentially, the sort of popular document formats that we're all familiar with, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, spreadsheet, and open-source alternatives to that, but any electronic document that is also available online and is used to provide a service program or activity, then that would be covered under the definition. Now, again, this is specific to this new Title II rule. The ADA, more broadly, extends to services, programs, and activities, however they're provided. But the specific technical accessibility requirements introduced by the rule are focused on those specific digital content types. Awesome.

[00:09:16] Speaker 1: Thank you. Go ahead, Eric.

[00:09:18] Speaker 3: Can I add something just kind of like one of the common questions around what the scope of content? So obviously, in every organization, there's public and private kind of communication that's happening or behind Passport Protected. And one of the, obviously, public communications, so your marketing websites, your public town websites all need to be accessible. There was an outstanding question early in the rulemaking process of whether or not Passport Protected content was also going to be inclusive of this accessibility ruling. And the clarity there is, yes, if it's meant for a broader public consumption. So if you are at a university, for example, and you have an LMS, that needs to be accessible. Just because it's private to the students, the students kind of constitute as basically public consumption for that content. So that's a huge change because a lot of universities kind of relied on making a decision of we are going to use a public-facing website we've always known needs to be accessible. And anytime a student raises their hand for accommodation, we make it accessible. This is really pushing for proactive accessibility across the campus for public universities specifically. And this extends, David, you can correct me if I'm wrong, this extends to any kind of government institution website that also is meant for public consumption. Just because it's behind a paywall, a login, like a billing website, it still needs to be made accessible.

[00:10:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think this is one of the things that we really need to give the Department of Justice some credit for is recognizing the burden that would be required to fix absolutely everything. Now, there are different perspectives on whether the exceptions that were included in the rule were appropriate. I mean, certainly, again, stepping back and saying that the ADA covers, provides a broader provision and this rule kind of provides some specific clarity to specific types of digital document. But ultimately, the exceptions that were put into place were really trying to help public entities focus their efforts on where the greatest positive return is going to be realized. So stuff that is archived, stuff that people rarely, if ever, access. Legacy documents have exceptions from the rules, from the rules requirements. You know, it's a kind of sense of practicality. Focus on the stuff that people are most likely to use that has the highest impact or has the highest negative impact if there are accessibility barriers. And therefore, you know, if you can fix those barriers, then it's going to really positively affect people who would otherwise be prevented from accessing program services and activities. Awesome.

[00:12:33] Speaker 1: Thank you. That is some great advice. Moving on, we have an attendee question here. Going a bit back to jurisdiction size, we have an attendee asking about the reasoning for having a large entity that likely has more content than a small entity have a shorter compliance deadline. Any thoughts there, David or Eric?

[00:12:55] Speaker 2: Yeah, I put a link into the main webinar chat, which is some guidance on calculating the population size that applies to an entity to help them figure out which deadline applies. And related to that, I guess that the larger entity having less time was on the assumption that they would have more resources to address the existing resources that needed to meet the requirements and also more capacity to adapt policies and processes and practices to be ready for when new content was published after the deadline that it would be accessible. So I think it's giving more time for smaller organizations with less budget, less resources to be compliant rather than saying, well, but I appreciate that you can look at it in another way and say organizations with more content are likely to be the larger organizations. But I think that the focus was on helping smaller entities. One thing I will also note is that the special districts have the later deadline, the 2027 deadline, even though special districts often serve large populations. So that is a kind of exception to this. The smaller the district or smaller the entity, then the longer they have. In this case, sometimes a large entity might have more time to meet requirements.

[00:14:29] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you for that explanation. And thank you for sharing that link. Definitely a great resource for our attendees here. Moving on, the rule mentions WCAG conformance. But for those unfamiliar with WCAG, what does that mean in practice for digital content? Maybe you can kick us off, David.

[00:14:49] Speaker 2: Yeah, so we talk a lot about the WCAG or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on the assumption that everybody knows exactly what they mean. So I'll try and sort of give a very concise description of what they are, how they've evolved. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 1 was published in 1999. Version 2 was published in 2008. And then subsequently, we've had sort of dot releases where we've had some additional requirements, all of which have reflected how the web has changed, how the assistive technology used by people with disabilities has changed, and how that changes what accessibility requirements, people who build websites, who write content that's published on the web, what sort of requirements they need to meet. And the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are structured in four key principles. Perceivable, whether content can be perceived by people with different senses, whether it's vision or hearing or touch. Operable, whether somebody having, being able to perceive the content, can they interact with it? Can they follow links? Can they fill in content in a form? Can they submit or interact with more complex functionality? Then the third principle is understandable. Once I've accessed some content, can I understand what it means? Can I predict how something will behave so that I find the resource? And then the final principle is robustness, whether the content can be used by different technologies, either now or in the future, including assistive technologies that are used by people with disabilities to help them interact with digital technology. So WCAG is broken down into principles, guidelines, and then success criteria. And there are success criteria, the ones that are testable, the ones that you can use an automated tool or a manual test to test. And they become really the de facto global standard for digital accessibility. And generally, when we talk about digital accessibility standards, we're most likely to be talking about WCAG. So it's a globally recognized set of requirements or standard. And for that reason, it was chosen as the technical standard for this particular rule. One additional brief note is that the rule mentions WCAG version 2.1. There is a more recent version, WCAG 2.2, which added a few extra requirements and also took one away. But the Department of Justice decided to go for the one version previous to the current version, just to, again, make the task easier to comply. Complying with or conforming, I should say, to WCAG 2.1 to level AA standard is still going to go a long way towards ensuring that the digital content is usable by people with disabilities.

[00:18:00] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you, David. Eric, maybe you could touch on how WCAG applies to video content. Yeah.

[00:18:09] Speaker 3: You know, David knows a lot more about accessibility at the web level and the digital level. I get to my little corner of the world of video. So excited. You know, thankful for the balance here. With WCAG 2.1 AA, which is the binding standard, what that really means from a letter of the law is you need to have prerecorded captions available on all of your video content. That means you need to offer live captions on all of your streamed content, so any real time content. And then you need to have audio description available on all of your video content. For prerecorded content where it's necessary, meaning not all content requires an audio description track. But basically, if you are not able to view that video using that kind of test of perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, you might need to consider having an audio description track because at the end of the day, you're just putting yourself at risk of a potential litigation against your organization, depending on how valuable that piece of video content actually is for someone to operate and, you know, be a consumer or be a participant in your digital experience. So that's kind of the letter of the law, and the WCAG guidelines go into a little bit more detail on exactly what that looks like. You know, I'm going to answer a question that most people have, what's good enough for accuracy? That is, funny enough, not something that the Department of Justice wanted to touch. But when you really read the WCAG guidelines, at the end of the day, highly accurate captions is really important. We're seeing that in practice. We're seeing that in the media entertainment business as a parallel to this world. It's all about user experience at the end of the day. Bad captions can lead to bad consequences, and you have to weigh those options. And, you know, we're seeing that kind of in real time with at least when we're talking to the public universities that we're partnering with.

[00:20:17] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you. We have an attendee question here. We had in our university many instructors and designers in mild panic over needing to learn and apply all of the WCAG before April 2026. What's your take on how many folks need to be experts and what everyone else can slash should do in an immediate and then ongoing way? Eric or David?

[00:20:47] Speaker 2: I'll start with that. And I think we had probably anticipated this question and that we were kind of going to cover it later. But I think it's a good idea to start now. I think that word panic is something that we've heard a lot where it's like, oh, my goodness, I got to do so much so soon. And I don't even know what I need to do, let alone in how much of the stuff that I look after. And it's really helpful to think about accessibility in a kind of staged way, in a prioritized way. And again, looking at the way the rule was written, the Department of Justice in setting some exceptions helped people focus on what matters most first. So ideally, accessibility is most effective when it's a team game and everybody has their responsibility, supported by subject matter experts, supported by tools, supported by resources that help, that do as much of the work as possible. But I think kind of stepping back, taking a breath and thinking, what content am I responsible for that will need to meet the requirements? And can I order that content in some level of priority? What's the most important to fix? Which content is most critical for people to be able to use without barrier? Which content is used by most people? Which content is used by people in emergency situations where it's not used very often, but when it is, it's really, really important that it's effective and it can be used. So that kind of thinking about prioritization is important. And then prioritizing what kind of accessibility fixes you need to make, you need to know where the barriers are and you can scan a website using an automated tool and it will tell you where some barriers are. Manual tests can help you check where other barriers are. And again, depending on what kind of resource you're talking about, if it's a Word document, then they're going to be more likely to be certain barriers than others. Whereas if it's an interactive website or a mobile app, there may be the sort of profile of issues that are more likely to be present will vary. And depending on what your role is, you may have certain capabilities to fix things. And in other cases, if you're not a developer, you're going to have to refer to, ask a developer for support. So generally, it's like knowing what are you responsible for? What's your skill set? And then focusing on what you can do and seeking assistance from other players. But it is, you know, that focus and prioritization is really important. I think we're going to come back and talk more about that, I think, later in this session.

[00:23:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, go ahead, Eric.

[00:23:53] Speaker 3: I was going to add a little bit, I think on the video side, because, you know, one thing that we're seeing in real time here is, you know, I mentioned this before, nothing has changed about the student accommodation world in public universities. If I raise my hand and I need to overcome an access barrier, as a university, you have a requirement, a responsibility to confirm that I do need an accommodation to overcome that access barrier. So like nothing changes there. So if you need video content for a student who's deaf or hard of hearing, that's still an expected standard. What has a lot of universities worrying, maybe, I don't know if panic is the word I want to use, but worrying about how are they going to get budgets? You know, they are looking at the proactive, it's the lecture content, it's the lecture capture, it's all of the campus level video content. And we're talking about, you know, millions of minutes at some of these larger universities that are being produced every single year. And a lot of these schools might only be used to spending, you know, $100,000 a year on closed captions and audio description services. And so this represents a potential big upswing. But the way the world works, sometimes there's good timing and AI is a really, really well timed innovation that's happening in conjunction with the rollout of these rules. AI is a legitimate path to de-risk your accessibility requirements. It's not going to solve your compliance to these rules, but we're seeing universities adopt a very measured approach, leveraging AI for caption creation, at least for a lot of their content. But then looking for tools, like a minor plug, like 3Play Media, to understand how accurate AI is and being able to just spend money where they need to spend money to make sure that the accessibility is at least meeting some minimum requirement, that accuracy is meeting some limited requirement for accessibility. And then on the other side, if you think about generative AI and all the advancements that we're seeing, I saw in the comment thread around audio description and, you know, the DCMP looking at, you know, supporting folks with AI generated audio description. That's another avenue that we're seeing a lot of opportunity to reduce the burden, the financial burden that we're seeing with universities in maintaining a de-risk approach to compliance here in the video content. So if this rule rolled out three years ago, I think panic would be the right word. I think now we're in kind of a mild worry stage. But luckily, I think there's a lot of AI solutions out there, such as 3Play Media's solutions that can help kind of alleviate some of these concerns. But I don't want to plug 3Play anymore. So at the end of the day, this is a well-timed innovation happening in the world with regulation that is doing good for this general population.

[00:27:10] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you for those great tips. Hopefully that helps quell some of the panic that people may be feeling. And like David alluded to, we do plan to finish today's conversation with some more tips on how to build a strategy to achieve compliance. So definitely stick around for that. We've had a couple attendees ask about audio description, also known as descriptive video. Eric, can you provide some clarification on what audio description is and some examples on what you might need AD on for a video and when you might not?

[00:27:44] Speaker 3: Yeah. So audio description has been around for a long time, and it's most prevalent actually in the media and entertainment industry. If you think about your typical highly produced content that you see in the movie theaters, there's a lot of downtime to describe the visuals. And there's a lot of visuals that are really important to understanding and having that entertainment value equivalent to someone who's sighted. And so audio description is this additional layer of audio that allows someone to narrate effectively the important visuals of that content. And so that gets layered in, mixed into the actual original dialogue and original music, sound and effects to create an immersive experience for someone who is blind or low vision. So as I said, we see this kind of most popular in the media entertainment world, but we're seeing the requirements kind of move into more of this instructional video type that we're seeing or training video type that's really important. So when you're thinking about if you're presenting a chart, you're presenting a table, you're presenting a graph, if you're not describing that content and describing it well enough for someone who can't see what you're pointing at, there likely is a requirement that you need to provide an audio description track as an additional aid for a low vision or blind user. So what we're seeing in the university system, for example, is a lot of the public website video content, they're really trying to prioritize that content and providing audio description they're also obviously pushing for universal design in the academic world, making sure that professors are trying to practice. But the reality is that's not foolproof. Professors, whether they've been doing this for five years or 30 years, have a way of teaching and telling people to relearn how to teach is a monumental task. And so audio description is really there as an insurance policy to make sure that a student isn't left behind and isn't, at the end of the day, doesn't have to raise their hand to consume the content that they've paid a lot of money to actually consume. So hopefully that gives a little bit of a background, Noah or David, let me know if you want me to go deeper.

[00:30:12] Speaker 1: No, that's great. Thanks, Eric, for that clarification. Next question we have here is for Eric and David. Are password protected or internal digital resources exempt from the rule? David, we can start with you.

[00:30:26] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think this might be a good point because I'm having a look at some of the comments and questions in the chat, and I think there's some conversation about the exceptions more broadly. So we could just go through the exceptions. I mean, yes, password protected individualized electronic documents, i.e. that's content that's about a specific person or a particular property, that is one of the exceptions from the rule. Pre-existing conventional electronic documents, so that's the PDF, the Word, spreadsheet, whatever, pre-existing before the applicable deadline, that would be an exception. However, if those pre-existing conventional electronic documents are used to provide a service program or activity, then the exception doesn't apply. So let's say you're a professor and you're using an accessible PowerPoint presentation to deliver a course, then you would have to fix that, even though it is a pre-existing conventional electronic document. Archived web content, so that's any content that's clearly defined as being an archive, legacy content that's never going to be changed. This is a critical thing. It's like, if anything changes post-deadline, then it likely is no longer pre-existing, and the exception doesn't apply. Content posted by third parties that wasn't at the request of the public entity, so maybe it's a comment on a blog post or a social media post, that would be an exception. And pre-existing social media content posted by the public entity would also be accepted from the rule. And again, these are exceptions from the rule for web content and mobile accessibility, not from the ADA as a whole. If somebody needed access to that content, then they could still ask for a reasonable accommodation to get access to that content.

[00:32:45] Speaker 1: Awesome. Eric, I don't know if you want to give an LMS example for those password-protected or internal digital resources.

[00:32:54] Speaker 3: No, I think it's just, at the end of the day, what I said at the top of the hour here is is LMSs, although password-protected, are still kind of in the public scope for a student experience, and so we should treat that such a, you know, the DOJ kind of views that as a public space, as opposed to, you know, a direct message to a student is not necessarily requiring an accessibility component, you know, an accessibility component.

[00:33:26] Speaker 1: Awesome, thank you. With digital documents, since they're also in scope, David, what are the key things that public entities should watch out for with document accessibility?

[00:33:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is a big area of concern amongst public entities, given that they often have large numbers of existing digital documents. And while looking at the exceptions, that not to say, oh, we don't have to worry about this, it's more, help us, it's a way to help you prioritize efforts on what's most important to fix first. You know, that's certainly helpful in kind of guiding efforts, but in terms of practical things to watch out for with document accessibility, I think document structure is a big deal. You're making sure that the document has identified headings and subheadings so that that structural, that structure is available to everyone, whether or not they're using assistive technology, such as a screen reader, alternative text for images, supporting magnification and reflow so that the document is still readable when somebody needs to magnify it to make it easier to read because of visual impairment. The interactive forms in a PDF, for example, are still usable and the labels are associated with the input fields and that somebody can enter data and submit that data without encountering any issues. So those would be some of the big things, color contrast as well, using color to communicate information or avoiding, relying on color perception to communicate information. Other things that are important for documents as well as other digital resources. And the other thing to be aware about with digital documents is the publishing workflow. How is the document created? Is somebody writing it from scratch? If so, maybe give them a template to help make the styling decisions for them. So have a consistency in look and feel that has been already pre-approved for accessibility that can save some effort and help manage the risk of creating an inaccessible document. If a document is generated from a publishing tool, how effective is that publishing tool in ensuring that the generated document is accessible? This can sometimes be a challenge, for example, when you have an application that outputs PDF. Is it outputting accessible PDF? If it is, great. If not, then the PDF that's output needs to be remediated for it to be accessible. It's an opportunity to look at how documents are created, how they're assembled, what tools are used to author documents, and are those tools helping authors make good decisions in terms of accessibility and where better tools can be used, then that would be the best way to go.

[00:36:32] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you, David, for those great tips. I do definitely agree with building out templates and just making it easy for people is usually the most effective way to go about that. Next question here is for Eric. AI and accuracy is definitely a hot topic right now, and you touched on that a little bit earlier. Can you speak a little more about what people should consider when evaluating AI solutions?

[00:36:56] Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been reading the comments, and don't get me wrong, I concur with everything there. I think one of the things to pay attention to here are a few things. One, I think it's really important that we think about AI responsibly. AI is an incredible tool to make us more efficient. It's allowed our ability and availability of captions to be much higher as a first pass for human review, and so that's allowed us to do a lot more. I just want to call out that at the end of the day, a human reviewing the captions is paramount to success in terms of readability and accessibility to that content. There's also some of the advancements in AI have made it easier for us to understand how accurate some of these captions are actually coming out with AI, and so to your point, and I love the term craptions. I think it's a really important term to embrace. At 3Play, we're really focused on making sure that customers are never publishing anything below the quality that they are willing to pay for, and so at the end of the day, we've been pushing tools that allow universities to use AI when they can. In other words, we've evaluated and determined that AI is 95, 98% accurate, and then using humans to actually clean up some of that content, especially prioritizing, because once again, we're talking about a million minutes or 10 million minutes versus 10,000 minutes of content that a lot of customers are used to working with. There's a little bit of push and pull there, and we're trying to find an opportunity to get as great captions as possible on the most amount of content possible with our customers. It is really important that our customers and those working with vendors are really paying attention to that AI quality, and it's not just AI quality aggregated, but at the file level. Every single video is different. Every single video can have really bad audio, really challenging audio, and some can have really perfect audio, and AI does an amazing job, but sometimes it doesn't, and it's really important to know when it's not doing well, and then use humans in an effective manner to do that. I also want to acknowledge one other comment that I think is important, is that AI is kind of this big blanket term, and that there is true and very fair environmental concerns. I share those concerns around the generative AI models. Most of the AI world for captions is still using legacy technology that doesn't have that same level of environmental impact at the end of the day, and we see those models still performing equal or still better than the generative models that are really, really challenging for our environment, so definitely share that concern, and we're really cognizant of that at 3Play in general, of making sure that we're very efficient with how we leverage AI to support these accessibility goals that our customers have.

[00:40:09] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks for that, Eric. If you do want to learn more about AI and accuracy, check out our 2025 State of ASR report, Automatic Speech Recognition. Casey will drop a link in the chat to check that out. All right. Next up, another question for Eric. How does the rule differentiate between new content, existing content, and archived video?

[00:40:34] Speaker 3: Yeah, so the easy answer is new content coming out after April, you need to have these rules in mind. The existing content that's truly publicly available, once again, you're going to need to make sure that that backlog is covered for all documents, including, I'll let David talk about the world of PDF remediation, but there's those requirements, and then archived content is not explicitly a part of this world, of this need. So basically, if no one's watching it, there's no accessibility concern. So if you really aren't publishing that video or publishing that piece of content, you don't need to prioritize that bulk of content. If that archive becomes existing content again, you do want to make sure that you do publish that with accessibility in mind once you've unarchived something. David, maybe you have something to add just on the general digital content outside of video, too, there.

[00:41:34] Speaker 2: No, I think you spoke to it really well, and again, that key point that archive is something that kind of, it's labeled as such, and it's also clearly, it's old content, and it's never used. As soon as it becomes part of usage and delivering programs, services, activities, then it's subject to the rule requirement. But also, again, going back to the original ADA, if somebody with a disability asked for an accommodation and asking that, in accessing that content, then you would still have to respond to that request, which might be remediating the archived content or, in rare cases, defending inaction based on the undue burden exception that the ADA also has available. Essentially, it would cost too much. It would take too much resource to make this content accessible. But that's a very, it's an exception to be used with extreme care rather than something that could be used sort of frivolously.

[00:42:50] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you both for outlining those distinctions there. Next question. Title II applies to state and local government agencies. So, David, what does this mean for private vendors who sell digital products or services to those entities?

[00:43:04] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I've also, again, in the comments, people have been asking about procurement and vendor management. And I guess we can answer this question in a couple of ways. If you are, if you work for a public entity and you use services and content provided by third party private entities, you're ultimately responsible for the accessibility of whatever that private entity provides you when it's contracted or you've chosen it's open source and you've decided to use it to provide programs, services and activities. Ultimately, it's the public entity that's responsible. This does create a challenge when you're then relying on the contractual relationship as some kind of leverage. From a third party perspective, if you're not a public entity, but you sell digital technology tools and services to public entities, then you have a huge opportunity to help your customers in the public sector meet their obligations, reassure them, partner with them, help them rather than saying, well, this is not nothing to do with us. It's up to you. It seems like a really backward step to build a business relationship. Given that your services and tools might be attractive to or already used by multiple public entities, all of whom are responsible under the Title II regulations, it makes sense. You're not doing this for one customer. You're doing this for all of your current and potential customers in state and local government sector. Other people will benefit from accessibility as well. This is a huge opportunity. It's a risk. If you're not optimizing your tools and content for accessibility, your competitors likely will be. So there's a huge opportunity in the private sector to really step up and show that you're helping your public sector customers meet their obligations. As a Title II public entity, there may be frustration right now dealing with existing suppliers or being stuck in contracts with suppliers who are slow to meet their obligations. It is a difficult thing to work through, but looking at opportunities to ensure that your vendors know their risk, that you're managing accessibility in your procurement processes, that's super important. I'm going to do one shout out, and I'm going to stick a link in the chat for the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit, HECVAT for short. This is a standard toolkit that was produced for higher education, but I think is useful more widely as a standard way to ask a tool or digital service vendor for information about the accessibility of their tool or service. And the more people are using standard ways to ask for accessibility information, the more private sector – somebody's beaten me to it, Thomas Tobin, thank you so much for doing that – the more that there's a standard request and vendors are not going to be able to reply and say, well, everyone's asking for accessibility in different ways, we don't know what the market needs. There's a standard request for accessibility, and there's less excuse for them not to reply. And when you get a vendor that replies by providing an accessibility conformance report using the VPAT template, that's one standard way. It kind of comes from the federal space, but it's going to be helpful to state and local government entities as a standard way for an organisation to tell you, or a supplier, to tell you about the accessibility of their digital product. So look out for VPAT and request it wherever possible.

[00:47:07] Speaker 3: Yeah, I just want to add on the video side specifically, I think, and this comment came up, our probably number one public vendor enemy is YouTube right now in terms of providing audio description capabilities out of the box. There's obviously vendors in the web captioning space that provide wrappers around YouTube, but it's not necessarily the most seamless publishing experience. And so it is really important to understand. I think most video platforms at this point are supporting both captions and audio description capabilities. There's some that are handling extended audio description versus standard audio description. That's a much far fewer number of platforms. So that's really important to keep in mind with your procurement teams of the accessibility of the web player is extremely valuable in this space. And it's important to push on those vendors. We're pushing on those vendors too, but our customers, our joint customers, are going to push a lot harder than we can. And then, yeah, I'm going to echo what David said. We get a first-hand knowledge of a lot of third-party content providers in the education space that are working with us or working with other vendors to make sure that their content is ready for public Title II ADA laws. And this is not just US-based companies. This is international companies that are producing content coming to vendors like us to ask, hey, we know that our customers are asking for this. Can you help us proactively solve for it? So I think asking and pushing is actually a really valuable thing. I know it can be challenging, and some vendors will come back and say it's on our roadmap eight months from now. But I think it's really imperative that we get that push from the customer base, from the buyers of these pieces of content, and that will get people to move because otherwise, to David's point, there's probably competitive content that you could likely work off of. And people are really paying attention to this, even outside of the US, is kind of my point.

[00:49:09] Speaker 2: Eric, I'm just going to jump in. Again, I'm looking at the webinar chat, and I see some, I guess, frustration or kind of skepticism that we'll see progress amongst vendors in improving accessibility. And I recognize that some people have been trying to push for this for many, many years. What we now have is a rule that with less than a year to go before the first deadline, I'm optimistic in seeing more pressure. There's more people. We've got 300 people on this webinar, more people learning about the ADA requirements and asking for vendors to help them meet those requirements. So I would like to see this as maybe a kind of start of a real up curve in terms of the volume of people asking for accessibility, and hopefully that will help move the needle in terms of what's out there on the market.

[00:50:09] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you both for those great points. Moving on here, what are the consequences if a public entity fails to meet these video accessibility requirements? Maybe you could get us started, Eric.

[00:50:21] Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll start with, I think, the more pessimistic view, and then David's got a slightly, I think, more optimistic view. I think we're in the United States. We have a parallel law regulation called the EAA in Europe as well, and that just kind of came into place in July. And Europe really, obviously, has a framework of fines and kind of written out penalties for not conforming to compliance. The U.S. is very different. The U.S. is very much like you need to find a party that has got standing, and that party needs to be interested in pushing a lawsuit against the institution. So there's some layers to this, and that's kind of why, honestly, a lot of the universities that we're talking to really talk about de-risking, because it's nearly impossible to be perfectly accessible, given the scope and the amount of touch points that they have across, say, 10,000 faculty producing content. So there's some layers to this. And so the number one thing to watch out for, and there's plenty of landmark cases that have helped bolster accessibility for the general population, like the Harvard case against the Harvard case, for example. There's others out there that are maybe not as public, so I won't share too many names, but that's really important to be mindful of at the end of the day, is that this provides a lot more standing for a lot of individuals to seek relief in these scenarios of non-compliance. But, David, there's also a better view, I think, as well.

[00:52:13] Speaker 2: DAVID ROBERTS-LUNDBORG Yeah. I mean, I think when we, and again, it's trying to tease apart the perception of accessibility as this huge expense of fixing stuff that's inaccessible versus building things that are accessible out of the box, born accessible, if you like. And the more that we can focus on improving processes and practices and building things that are accessible out of the box, the more we seize the opportunity to improve digital services and improve the efficiency of providing digital services, which could potentially help organizations save costs elsewhere, rather than seeing accessibility as this tax and this overhead that's applied based on the perception that it's all about fixing existing stuff that was built with accessibility barriers present. Sure, there's stuff to fix, and this rule provides guidance to public entities to fix it in a prioritized, pragmatic way. But investing in processes and practices and helping get us to a point where everybody has a role to play and a responsibility for accessibility supported by subject matter experts, where appropriate, supported by tools, whether it's AI or other tools, it helps improve efficiency and effectiveness of digital services for the growing population of people who have accessibility needs, rather than seeing this. This is the other big takeaway, is this is for a growing sector of the population. People have accessibility needs, and finding excuses not to meet those needs just doesn't seem to make sense to me. So, you know, this is something that helps more of us, and really, there is a huge opportunity to align accessibility with just providing the best quality services we can.

[00:54:14] Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thank you both for providing some great answers to those questions. We've talked a lot about the requirements, responsibilities, and scope of the ruling. We just have a few minutes left here, but David and Eric would like to quickly give you some great tips for implementing a strategy for compliance. And while they do that, I'm just pulling up a slide that details how to get in touch with Eric and David, so be sure to reach out if you do have any outstanding questions. Turn it over to you.

[00:54:40] Speaker 3: Yeah, David, maybe I can kick things off. I know that I want to be mindful of the time here, and there's a ton of resources that both I know, David, your team and my team have for people. One of the things that I think I want to comment on that didn't get touched on is, like, the people side of actually organizing this. And, you know, we talked about the requirements, we talked about the technology, but ultimately people are going to drive this change. And so at the university level, for example, and I can speak to them, speak to that level, which is there's probably someone who's at your university or you are that person at the university responsible for driving this change. And so we really encourage you to push your concerns and your needs to the right people within your organization that you can help rally around. You know, nine months ago, we kicked off a series of conversations with universities and they started with, I don't know yet. And they have slowly built out a team. They built out an accounting of all of their video content, all of their other digital documents that are needing remediation to be meeting compliance. And now they're in kind of that budget mode. So I guarantee you that most of the universities that you are either working with or working on behalf of are down this path of really making sure that they have the right tools in place. But really, I want to, if you are feeling like you don't know what to do next, probably talk to someone that you work with closely and see how you can navigate and help drive that change to make sure that your institution is really ready for this when April comes. David.

[00:56:18] Speaker 2: Yeah. And I would just add to that, that if you work for a public entity, the chances are that you already have some level of ADA program support in place. You may well have an ADA coordinator. Maybe they've been focused on the physical environment rather than digital, but leverage those existing processes and practices and contacts. The other thing I would say is involve people with disabilities in all that you do. Ultimately, what's effective is when somebody with a disability can use a digital resource as equally effectively as anyone else. And while it's great to use automated tools to check things, checklists to help you, involving people the right way, not delegating the responsibility or pointing out barriers to people with disabilities, but doing what you can and opening a feedback channel, seeking support, providing feedback when somebody does raise an issue, that's ultimately an essential part of any strategy towards moving towards a more inclusive online environment.

[00:57:34] Speaker 1: Amazing. All right. Well, thank you so much. That's all the time we have left for today. I see those reactions coming in. Thank you. Huge thanks to David and Eric for sharing such great information with us. And thank you to our audience for joining us and asking some great questions. So thanks again. And I hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much.

[00:57:56] Speaker 2: Thank you, everyone. This was great.