Web Accessibility

Before AudioEye, I spent countless hours outside of my normal work duties manually checking our website for accessibility issues, reviewing every page with free online tools to catch formatting errors, missing alt text, improper headings, or missing video captions. It was the most time-consuming and stressful period of my career. It became clear we couldn’t keep up with the demands of managing accessibility on our own.

Acquia Optimize gave us the data to demonstrate the real impact of our accessibility efforts. We’ve been intentional in how we remediate issues, and the platform’s tracking is one of the clearest ways we’ve shown that our work is making a difference.

We feel that just because Section 508 currently applies only to federal websites and not local government websites is not a reason not to make improvements to better service our citizenship. The implementation of CivicPlus’ AudioEye solution not only allows us to offer citizens a better experience, but it also provides us with access to a subject matter expert on digital compliance, which alleviates most of our concerns regarding Section 508.

Having an internal staff member certified in compliance and trained to act as our dedicated subject matter expert on Section 508 is not feasible, and fortunately, it’s not necessary since we have CivicPlus as a partner that can provide us with an accessibility solution as part of its offering.”

Taking on a website accessibility project can be overwhelming initially, but definitely schedule that introductory call sooner rather than later because the team is super helpful at explaining what different things do and the best ways to streamline your daily activities… I think what’s been the most helpful were the broken links because we had a different kind of broken link Finder, but it wasn’t finding everything that was broken.

One of the [CivicPlus Web Accessibility] modules I like is quality assurance. I think our score is great. It’s a 97% right now. This module saves time by locating broken links and issues throughout the site instead of combing through the website manually. We have a population of around 40,000 compared to other cities that are over 100,000. So, they would have many more departments than we do, but it’s still a lot of pages to comb through, regardless of the size of your municipality.

Before [Acquia Optimize], we found errors manually or did not even pay attention to them. We are essentially made up of 50 different companies. So, as you can imagine, it was feasibly impossible to continue physically searching for errors ourselves. We needed a tool to help us bring those errors and issues to the top.

We do have multiple authors on the site working on the site, so quality control in the common voice is always going to be important. It’s very effective for us as a quality control tool as well as an accessibility checker. It’s also helping us find a lot of things that need branding refreshes and updates that need to be done.

Compliance was nonexistent before, so we spend more time checking accessibility. CivicPlus makes it so easy that our entire workflows are more seamless.