[Dan Tuleta] Okay everyone it is two o'clock and I do appreciate everyone
for joining us today we are here again for another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays
today this week or this month rather we're going to be talking about What You Need to Know about
DoJ Digital Accessibility Guidance in 2022 as always we do encourage you to reach out to us
if you'd like to discuss any of the topics in more detail and if you'd like to set up maybe
a personal demonstration of our Equidox software or maybe talk about some PDF remediation services
that you may need please feel free to reach out to us at any time at Equidoxsales@Onixnet.com
our website is also www.Equidox.co so there's plenty of information there about
us and different ways of contacting us and you can also reach out via phone at 800-664-9638
so before getting started as always I just want to quickly mention our parent company Onix networking
Onix is headquartered in Cleveland Ohio we've been in business for over 28 years now
basically we are a cloud consultancy primarily known for being a Google Premier Partner we're
also partnering with Amazon Web Services and our mission is to improve organizational efficiency
through cloud computing solutions now Equidox the reason that we're here today to talk about
more accessibility focused topics Equidox is a best-in-class PDF remediation software
we offer PDF remediation services as well so for any organizations that don't have the technical
background or the bandwidth to remediate documents on your own we can do that for you
we also offer expert accessibility services and lines with different consulting and web testing
VPAT completion so on and so forth and our mission is to ensure that
digital information reaches everyone through accessibility solutions this is just a quick
sampling of some of our customers so I'm just going to let this slide run with their logos
and today on the webinar so anyone that has joined these webinars in previous months you're probably
familiar with me my name is Dan Tuleta I'm a sales engineer but I have a co-presenter today
with me Tammy Albee who is a content marketer here on the Equidox team and she's formerly of
the National Federation of the Blind so she comes to us with a wealth of experience and she's going
to be kind of working through the majority of the presentation today and passing it back over to me
so Tammy with that said I'm going to jump to the next slide and I'll hand it over to you
[Tammy Albee] Thanks Dan great to be here looking forward to reviewing this topic with everyone
so I did work for the National Federation of the Blind for four years I worked in the NFB
NEWSLINE department which is a free newspaper service for people with print disabilities so
people who are blind or visually impaired or who have strokes or learning disabilities
any eligible person can use that service to access hundreds of newspapers all around the country
and so that was my main job there but when you're working with the National Federation of the Blind
you become involved in all of their initiatives and one of the biggest things that they do
is lobbying and advocacy for disability rights specifically for the blind as they would refer to
themselves as the blind so I spent a lot of time learning about that sort of thing and as these
new developments are happening with the Department of Justice it kind of brought back to me the
memories of when I worked there and the kinds of things that we experienced in the organization
trying to get more specific legislation passed for digital accessibility for everyone
so this slide shows you the increase in digital accessibility lawsuits over the last
five or six years 262 in 2016 jumps to 814 in 2017 2314 in 2018 another big jump
despite the pandemic in 2019 and 2020 there were 2890 in 2019 and 3550 in 2020 and last year
in 2021 there were 4055 digital accessibility lawsuits
these are an increase that just doesn't seem to be stopping people are continuing to have issues
with digital accessibility and it seems that a lawsuit is sometimes the best way to get their
concerns addressed when they cannot access information on someone's website or via
their digital information or other content like documents or social media or emails
you can go to the next slide Dan so some of these organizations that are being sued may surprise you
it's a lot of really well known organizations I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the landmark
cases of Winn-Dixie which was one of the first Domino's Pizza which has been going back and
forth for the last several years lots of different decisions in different courts about Domino's Pizza
most recently the Supreme Court declined to hear the case feeling that it had already
been addressed in the district court but also organizations like Amazon Beyonce several banks
like JP Morgan Bank of America TD Americatrade and American Express and quite a number of various
educational entities including testing organizations like the Law School Admissions
Testing Certified Public Accountant exam and literally hundreds of colleges and universities
around the country have been sued because they did not provide adequate access to their
digital information either on their website or through their documents next slide please Dan so
the question is why are there so many lawsuits about digital accessibility and the reason
is that there aren't federal guidelines specific enough for non-government entities
to handle the questions that organizations are asking about digital accessibility people don't
know what they are supposed to be doing if you look at the built environment there are many
very specific specifications for buildings ramps bathrooms parking spaces how high the counters
are supposed to bein a retail organization how many bathrooms the measurements of everything
all that is very specified for the built environment but for digital accessibility there
really aren't any published guidelines for public entities so you can go to the next slide Dan
so it's not that there are no published guidelines at all under the federal law
accessibility laws you have that you're sort of divided into two sections you have Section 508
and that applies to federal employees or members of the public who need to access government
information and communication technology there are lots of specific regulations under Section 508
about what digital accessibility is supposed to look like however section 508 it does not
apply to public entities that is covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act which states that
no one is supposed to be discriminated against for any lack of ability or many other things related
to disability but there aren't any regulations under the ADA that specify what digital
accessibility is supposed to look like next slide Dan so because of this lack of information about
what digital accessibility means to the federal government there's been a lot of complaints from
public organizations to Congress to the Department of Justicee there's been a lot of correspondence
back and forth about this people asking for clarification and this lack of clarification
is what is resulting in so many lawsuits because they don't know what to do so they either don't do
anything or they do the best they can and then someone complains and because there's no clear
regulation the law has to be interpreted by the court so recently there were some correspondence
back and forth to the Department of Justice and we'll get to that in a little more detail later
but after years of not saying anything specific most recently the Department of Justice released
a statement that says “we've heard the calls from the public on the need for more guidance on web
accessibility particularly as our economy and society become increasingly digitized
this guidance will assist the public at understanding how to ensure that websites are
accessible to people with disabilities people with disabilities deserve to have an equal opportunity
to access the services goods and programs provided by government and businesses including
when offered or communicated through websites” and this was released by Assistant Attorney
General Kristen Clark she's part of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division next slide Dan
so what does compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act require? according to
the Department of Justice digital accessibility is a little bit flexible so that it will allow
organizations to include current and emerging technology they have said in various
correspondence over the years that they didn't necessarily want to pinhole everything because
there was so much new technology coming along and they wanted organizations to have the flexibility
to make their websites look like they wanted to and didn't want everything to be all templated and
look the same that's kind of the impression that's given by some of the correspondence back and forth
with them so they kind of say accessible digital resources means the information should be usable
with many different tools and many different technologies and how you provide that is up to you
and their recent guidance does refer to Section 508 regulations which as I said
before are specified for federal agencies and government websites and they also refer to that
and we'll talk about that in a little bit what that means so those are the regulations that they
are referring to without specifically saying this is what you're supposed to do next slide
so I think most of you probably know but why is digital accessibility important
so as we've seen there are thousands of digital accessibility lawsuits every year
so that definitely is potentially going to affect every organization
that has a website or provides digital informationrecently the DoJ has finally released
some more specific guidance stating specifically the accessibility is part of the Americans with
Disabilities Act and they've also said that they are prioritizing digital accessibility compliance
and they're going to be reenforcing that the other things that we should think about when it comes to
digital accessibility are that it expands your market it increases your SEO including everyone
including people with disabilities means that you're including that portion of the population
in your efforts to interact with the public using your website so your audience is gonna expand if
you're including people with disabilities and they make up 20 to 25% of our population so that's not
a small piece of the audience to be excluding that's quite a number of people that you can
be reaching when your digital accessibility is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities
Act and naturally of course it is the right thing to do we don't want anyone to be left out we don't
want to exclude anyone from access to whatever our website is providing everyone should be
included everyone should have access to the same information that that everyone gets next slide Dan
so accessibility isn't just for people with disabilities as well they're about 20 to 25%
of the population has permanent disabilities like blindness or low visionthey could have
deafness or hard of hearing this includes mobility issues chronic health issues learning disabilities
but there are also temporary disabilities if you have an injury or an illness that might cause
you to have a hearing or a sight loss or mobility issues you could find yourself having difficulty
accessing digital information I had a issue with one of my contact lenses and I wasn't able
to wear them for a couple of days and I found myself using the accessibility features on my
phone because it was just easier than squinting at the tiny screen when I couldn't wear my contacts
and then there's other times when digital accessibility comes in handy
in the built environment if you're carrying a heavy load you might really like to be able to
use that ramp or an elevator or if you're on a noisy bus you want to look at a video you may
not want to have the sound on it you won't be able to hear it and maybe you don't want
people to know what you're looking at so digital accessibility comes in handy for all of us and I
think it's important to also remember that all of us are aging into disability as we get older
it becomes harder to see some of us are losing our hearing and if it hasn't happened to you now
it may in the future so digital accessibility is something that will be and can be for everyone
not just people who have permanent disabilities so I think it's really good to keep that top of
mind you never know who is going to need access to that information in an alternate fashion
so you want to really keep that top of mind when you're building your websites when you're building
your digital documents and make sure that everyone in every situation is able to access
next slide dan so when I worked at the NFB and I'd spend a lot of time reading all the old
historical articles and the materials thatwere kept as records at the NFB and the
the journey to getting the Americans with Disabilities Act signed is quite a storied one
you may find some interest in looking back through some of those NFB records to look at
that but in 1990 President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law
and it says among other things that it prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in
several areas including employment transportation public accommodations that's really important
because that's one of the things that digital accessibility can refer to if your website
is public place and many courts have said that it is then the Americans with Disabilities Act covers
that as part of public accommodations it also covers communications and access to state and
local local government programs and services and so that last bit also refers back to Section 508
that government entities need to make their digital content accessible to everyone and
in this left-hand picture you can see a number of people with disabilities they were protesting at
the capitol and lobbying for this law to be signed and some of them abandoned their wheelchairs and
crawled up the steps to the Capitol and I don't know if you've ever been there but it's a lot of
steps and it was summer so it was probably very hot there there's not a lot of shade
so they were pretty determined to be heard and this is one of the ways that they protested and
the right-hand picture shows President Bush with several representatives signing the law
and Dan can we go to the next slide so we mentioned WCAG a little bit earlier look is the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and it was developed by an international group of experts all
around the world it is made upuh it was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium which is made up
of a number of organizations around the world who all are members and help work together to build
these web content accessibility guidelines and they're updated periodically but the four main
ideas that what covers are that all digital content should be perceivable
operable understandable and robust and if you have some interest in that there's a lot of information
on our website about WCAG and what perceivable operable and understandable look like so if
you're interested in that you can take a look at our website and get a little bit more information
next slide Dan so I'm not gonna go through the entire historywhen I originally built this deck
it was much longer and we decided it was a little bit long so those of you can see the slide there's
a number of underlined items on this when you get the slide deck after this webinar all of those
underlines connect to different articles with more information or source material for these
these items so you can take a look at those if you want some more information but I'll just
read through this really quickly in 2019 so that was a couple years ago there are number of rising
lawsuits which we saw in the beginning of the presentation incur spurred 103 congresspeople
to write to the Department of Justicee and request digital accessibility guidelines and
the DoJ responded with a letter saying just generally the Americans with Disabilities Act
applies to places of public accommodations we talked about a little bit earlier
and then last year several other congresspeople proposed the Online Accessibility Act in Congress
you can read a little bit more about that in that article but that particular law was not
supported by disability organizations because one of the things that the Online Accessibility
Act was aiming to do was to reduce the number of lawsuits organizations were complaining that
there were too many lawsuits they were spending a lot of time doing dealing with those but the
disability organizations didn't want this Act to go forward because what the Act did was it
set up a resolution system for complaints that delayed the ability to file lawsuits
until after this system of resolution was gone through but it was very lengthy it could be as
long as six months before they'd even be able to file a lawsuit if their concerns were not
addressed so that Act has not been signed into law I believe it has been tabled or lost in committee
but it is still on the books to be looked at by Congress at some point now this year the American
Foundation for the Blind which is not the same as the National Federation of the Blind it's another
blindness organization but along with them and 180 other disability organizations including the NFB
sent a letter to the DoJ requesting digital accessibility regulations they
stated that it had been a long time and these have been promised which they had been and they'd even
been worked on by many organizations including the NFB I can remember when I worked there
the team that was helping to draft suggestions for what those regulations should look like
but they were withdrawn in 2017 so they never passed so this group of organizations this year
sent another letter requesting the regulations so the Department of Justicee responded almost
immediately I think it was the very next week which is pretty quick as far as government
goes and they responded with this Guidance that refers to Section 508 and Section 508
regulations incidentally include references to WCAG 2.0 AA and again that Guidance affirms
that digital accessibility is covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act next slide again
so what they said about the WCAG and 508 standards was “existing technical standards
provide helpful guidance concerning how to ensure accessibility website features these
include content accessibility guidelines which are WCAG and the Section 508 standards which federal
government uses for its own websites” so if you're interested in more information there there's some
links here they'll be in the slide deck that'll be sent around after this webinar next slide Dan
and again they've stated they will continue to enforce the ADA department is committed to
using its enforcement authority to ensure website accessibility for people with disabilities and to
ensure that the good service programs and activities the business and state
local governments make available to the public are accessible and these three links are some examples
of enforcement that they have completed so if you're interested in looking at those there's
some links there again it'll be in the side deck one is Project Civil Access the other
is an H&R Block case and there's another case called Peapod there are several other cases
related to this enforcement in these other materials if you follow these links next slide Dan
so another thing to keep in mind is even though the federal guidance is still not
as specific as we would like many states have their own specific accessibility laws they can
vary from state to state and everything is still covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act
but many states reference WCAG and or 508 guidelines many have financial penalties for
non-compliance and if you are doing business in a state even though it is not your state
you still have to follow their accessibility law so it behooves you to know the accessibility laws
for the states in which you are doing business as well as the state in which your business
exists and if you need to know more information about that we have also built a rather extensive
accessibility regulations guide it's divided by state and that link will
be in the slide deck as well or you can find it on our website next slide Dan
so again these are some additional guidelines outside the united states in Canada the European
Union United Kingdom and Australia all of these links are live they will be in the slide deck
as well so if you need more information about those if you're doing
business in Canada or any of these other areas these laws also will apply to your
business and these are all digital accessibility laws next slide Dan
so what should you be doing we we have slightly less vague guidance from the Department of
Justicee and a clear mission to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act so what is it
that your organization should be doing so first thing you should do is find out what laws apply
to your organization obviously the ADA does you should find out about state laws in your area
you should be if you are upper management or if you are not upper management you should
be encouraging your corporate leaders organizational leaders to prioritize and
promote accessibility it should be part of your organizational culture it should be just sort
of how you do business every day it would be helpful to develop an accessibility statement
that talks about what accessibility looks like for your organization you want to evaluate your
current website and all of your digital resources and make sure they're accessible you want to train
your staff so that they're producing accessible content and fixing any that isn't and of course
you want to remediate any content that isn't accessible and make sure that as things are
changed and updated and edited accessibility is still included and if necessary you can delegate
accessibility tasks through your organization maybe you assign someone per department maybe
everybody has to be responsible for their own stuff maybe you need an accessibility coordinator
if you're not sure how to address this please contact us we are happy to help you figure out
the best way to set that up for your organization depending on your size and how things fit together
what your normal workflows are there are a lot of different ways to address that and we're happy to
help you with that and additionally you should always continue to provide ongoing accessibility
training on new technology and new tools spend some time picking tools that are going to save you
time and be available for as many of your staff as possible and I think that's a really good segue
I'm gonna hand this back to Dan now because one of the reasons that Equidox exists is to provide
accessible PDF files so back to you Dan [Dan Tuleta] Great thank you Tammy so we
only have a few minutes left so I will be talking rather quickly through the remaining slides but
I will say that we have a another webinar that we recorded several months ago that kind of goes
into this topic in a more thorough way so we will provide a link to that in the inside of this slide
deck moving forward so you'll all receive this after the call so many organizations of course
use yes because it is a popular and a secure file type so many websites that we have audited
or provided some consulting on contain thousands or even hundreds of thousands of PDFs living on a
single website and even one inaccessible document can render your entire website deemed to be
inaccessible so despite the fact that you've gone through great lengths to make your
website accessible one PDF document sitting there that's untagged or very poorly tagged
can leave your whole website open for litigation if a user is trying to access it so PDFs also may
have many different content creators so that can lead to a ton of inconsistencies in the way that
they're designed and published which can make them a challenging format for sure to deal with
but we what we do know is that every PDF needs to be accessible so if you have PDFs floating around
on your website or on your intranet or on your content management system in any way they do need
to be accessible for not only your employees but also for anyone that might be visiting your sites
so this is what I was referring to earlier where we do have a full webinar regarding these steps to
PDF accessibility so where do we start in terms of addressing our PDF accessibility challenges
the first thing you want to do is assign a staff you want to evaluate the scope of the project
create a written plan that you can adhere to and kind of enforce throughout your organization
prioritize the documents typically starting with the most frequently interacted with documents
and then also working through the newest documents and the easiest to remediate
kind of going through the prioritization of those documents can get you
can get you started and get you through the bulk of the work in the shortest amount of time I also
want to choose a tool or a vendor so if you're going to outsource that document to the documents
to be remediated by professionals or if you'd like to bring a software tool into your organization
to assist you to self-serve or mediate and get people using that tool on a regular basis
then once you've chosen a tool or vendor you of course need to remediate the documents
and then validate the documents so confirm that they are in fact accessible that things
were not overlooked and then it's from there it's just general maintenance so constantly
doing the upkeep that's required any new content that's being producedanything
that you're introducing to your website just making sure that it is also accessible before you
post it and instead of undoing a lot of work that you've already doneso PDF remediation there's a
lot that goes into it just at a high level there's important things called tags and these tags are
identifying headings links applying alt text for images tagging lists tables fillable form fields
and also adjusting the reading order so we can talk more in detail about that during like maybe
a product demonstration if anyone is interested in chatting more so Equidox is of course our best
in class PDF remediation software we we aim to make it easier faster and just in general better
so we automatically can detect PDF elements we have a lot of artificial intelligence powering
our Table Detector and our List Detector we can also remediate PDF forms we can add alt text
images in one location we have an HTML preview and compliance warnings to really assist the user
and even if you're a novice remediator you can remediate documents with confidence knowing that
you've done things correctly but also because it's a web-based application you're able to
collaborate on larger and more complex documents so if you need subject matter experts or if you
need to work through it as a team through a document you certainly can do that with Equidox
so we do offer Equidox software licenses and we work on a concurrent user licensing model
we offer organization wide licenses so if you want to deploy this across your entire company you can
training and support is included with the purchase of licensing
and we also offer a an on-premise version so primarily Equidox is a cloud-based application but
if cloud security is a challenge for your organization we can deploy this on-premise
so you can keep everything inside your own four walls operating on your own network
we also offer professional conversion services so we have a team of expert PDF remediators so
if you'd like to talk to us about that feel free to send us documents just request a quote we will
upload those documents or you can send them to us we will remediate the documents inside of Equidox
and then we put it through a rigorous multi-step validation process including using screen readers
to replicate how a blind individual would interact with that document and then we
return the documents to you and they are fully accessible fully compliant ready to be posted back
to your website and the pricing for that servicing model is it's based on three different parameters
so volume how many documents are we talking about and how many pages in those documents that's a big
it's a big factor of course the complexity are they very complex documents are they more simple
like powerpoints or just word documents and then the delivery also matters too so if you need a
document returned to you within the next few days that can impact the price versus if you don't need
it back for several weeks or even a month or two just all these different factors kind of
getblended in to determine the pricing for the services but please feel free to reach out to
us if you have any questions or would like to talk to an account manager about how that works
the typical workflow is of course documents are submitted we set deadlines
and the procedures are agreed upon a system for the document transfers between the two
parties is developed so if you want to send it to us via Google Drive or even some sort of FTP
transfer center remediated validated and returned to the customer but then oftentimes we have a lot
of customers using a hybrid model so I mentioned the software before as well as the services
so if you'd like to use the software internally to remediate as much as you possibly can on your own
and then you can send us the documents that are maybe more complex they have a short turnaround
time or if you have a large backlog that you just don't want to commit the team and the resources
to working through you can always work with us and let our team handle that for you and in the final
slide deck that we send around there is there will be a video link in here about how our Equidox PDF
software works so if you'd like to take a look at that this is just a short 10 minute or so video
to give you a high level understanding of how the the software and the workflow that goes into it
in terms of remediating documents yourself and how that operates but please feel free again to reach
out to us and ask us for a separate looks like we are playing it on accident here there we go
now if and just just kind of wrapping things up here in the interest of time I know that we are a
couple minutes over so I do I do apologize for for going over today and I just want to be respectful
of everyone's time but again please feel free to reach out to us at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com
our website is www.equidox.co or we can be reached at 800-664-9638
now we're also very active on LinkedIn and all the social media networks really
so please feel free to connect with us there to hear the updates on Equidox and our team
and what's going on we would love to interact with you so please feel free to reach out thank
you very much everyone and have a great rest of your day we'll see you next month
[Tammy Albee] thanks Dan have a good afternoon everyone