State Laws Addressing Accessibility

Mike Scott

Something that we look at as we approach this law, and the, but really most of all what I want to do today is share with you a little bit of what the law is and what it does. And more importantly our experience in developing this law and just beginning to implement it. Before we started this endeavor, we actually did look to see what other states had done and found from a number of resources that are out on the web that most other states have had some kind of guidelines, policy, order, and a few of them a law that dealt with information systems accessibility and there are a couple of good resources out on the web. I am gonna do, follow me right now, so you can come take a look at just a few of the things I want to point out. Janet, we both got follow me on, I don’t know if that is a problem but we’ll see if this works. I’m gonna paste in an URL into the chat and I’m gonna attempt to go to that page. Hopefully you are seeing this on screen. The first page I want to show you is the Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center. And hopefully everybody is seeing that on your screen. If you are not seeing that on your screen, try clicking the refresh button and if you are still not seeing it type me a message really fast that says I am not seeing it. Okay, I''ll assume everybody is seeing it. This was this was one great resource unfortunately as you can see that big message right in the middle here that is no longer current. But this was one great resource on IT accessibility. And, down towards the bottom of this page you will see they have link called Overview of State Accessibility Laws, Policies, Standards and Other Resources. And this is about the most up to date resource that we could find that looks at different state laws. And unfortunately even though it is the most up to date it is still not up to date as you know through the last update listed as February 2006. For example we know the Illinois information on this is not correct but this is a good place to start. From this list you will see that most states, have some sort of requirement, that deals with information system accessibility. What we learned from this, was that you know a lot of people have been down this road and kind of struggled with this task and we hope to learn from what others did. And I will say we were a little bit discouraged by the fact we couldn''t get as much information as we were hoping and that is part of what I want to share today share what we have done so maybe that can be useful to others if you are the approaching this type of effort. So basically most states have some kind of requirement, they range dramatically. It is difficult to get up to date information. We did some hunting. Janet did some hunting for us. We reached out to a lot of different people and really had a hard time coming up with a lot of good to find a model that we could lean on. So unfortunately reality there is not a lot of up to date information out there. And, maybe potentially worse there is even less information about the kind of current levels of success the different states are using. So we did reach out to talk to people who are involved in different states and kind of get a qualitative feel. And, the last bit of bad news I will share is that the anecdotal evidence we have talked to folks has not been very encouraging. Most states while they have these requirements in place are having a very difficult time reaching the levels of success that they wish they were reaching. And, we are seeing that pretty uniformly across the states that we have talked to again kind of based on that anecdotal evidence, nothing hard and fast, but backed up some too what we are hearing out of the federal level which is that the feds are also having even with 508 in place for 7 years now, the feds are even having a hard time with the implementation. And there was a study that I saw that I couldn''t put my hands back on the gist of it was that the kind of percentage of compliance that they were seeing was in single digits. Which was obviously a whole lot less successful than I think everybody hoped. And there were just kind of a couple of agencies, that were really stepping up and doing the job well, but across the board it was not going as people had hoped. So with that, I guess kind of setting the bar and making us recognize that this must be a difficult task, we kind of headed into the effort of addressing the Illinois IT Accessibility Act. And I think what we realized as we were going in there was going to be a challenge both to write good standards and probably even more difficult to have mechanisms that would effectively implement the standards. But at the same time the group that was involved, included stake holder advocates, people with disabilities, representatives in the agencies. I think we all felt that even with that kind of concern up front, that it was still an effort that was very much worth trying. Probably similar to what you all have experienced. We have had firsthand experience with kind of pockets of successes. Again I have been working with the Illinois Department of Human Services Division of Rehab Services for a number of years. And we have done some real world projects where we developed information systems and addressed accessibility to the best of our knowledge. And then actually trained and supported several dozen staff with disabilities, staff at the agency who have disabilities, in using the systems. And we have seen firsthand, that when done correctly, addressing the IT the way it should, addressing IT accessibility the way it should be, can make a you know night and day difference in the ability for in this case staff with disabilities to do their job as well as customers and stakeholder with disabilities to get the information they need to get. So we all felt that it was a worthwhile effort and we also felt that well, we might not be able to reach the level of being perfect, that we felt like incremental advances were worth the effort. That if we could basically be better than what we are now, that it was worth undertaking the effort. So that kind of leads up to where we started with the IITAA. Let me give you a little background about kind of the history in Illinois and how we got here. I''m going to go to another web site that we don''t need to look at quite yet. But we will get off this other page. The main page that I''m going to show you today and be referencing is the DHS, the Illinois Department of Human Services IITAA page. That is the site that has information about this law. Stop the little flash intro there. So before we get to talking too much about the details and information that is on this page I''m going to give you a little background how we got here in Illinois. In Illinois we started looking at accessibility seriously in the late ''90s and runs to the year 2000. And at that time, we were working primarily with the just kind of web developers who were interested, become the volunteers, the cutting-edge, leading-edge people who cared enough to voluntarily want to do this. And, at that time we were working with as a standard we were working with the web W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. That is WCAG, I will use the acronym WCAG if I say that again, that is what it means. And so we were looking at WCAG 1 and we were looking at the kind of the level that we picked as appropriate was level Double A Conformance which is compliance with the Priority 1 requirements. For those of you who need a refresher on WCAG the World Wide Web Consortium wrote their standards down in to 3 levels of priority. Priority 1 - being essential or critical. Priority 2 - being pretty important, and Priority 3 - being enhancements if you will. And so we were looking at the level one and two requirements as being what we needed to hit to really make systems usable for people with disabilities. Shortly thereafter and in 2001 the Federal government released the Section 508 Standards and we were kind of right at that point we had hooked up with a group called the "Web Masters Round Table" which was a voluntary association of web masters from a variety of agencies. And we were educating and we were doing presentations about the standards and we were actually putting together couple day training programs hands on training programs to teach people. And at that time we ran into a dilemma which was now we had two sets of slightly different standards that we needed to work with. And I point that out because this is an issue that has come up again and again and again and there is actually in the industry it''s referred to as the issue of harmonization. And that is harmonization meaning do we have harmony or basically is there consistency between the variety of standards that may apply. And it was very frustrating at that time for us to have two standards that were close but not quite. And the significance of that is we were looking at those standards people were asking the question which one of theses should we comply with. And the answer really that we came to was that we needed to look at both. And I think for those of you that have worked with Section 508 Web Standards the current version they are roughly equivalent to the Priority 1 requirements out of WCAG with a few variances. And at that level we recognize it was all too easy to comply with those requirements, well not really achieving accessibility not really making systems that were usable by people with disabilities on a day-to-day basis. And so we wanted to be in line with the Federal government however, we felt that that didn''t go far enough. So what we ended up doing at that point was teaching, kind of modified our courses and our educational materials to basically look at a kind of a hybrid of both 508 and WCAG 1, Priorities 1 and 2. And the other thing that we found at that point was as we were doing the training programs we spent a lot of time doing the training, going over the standards, we would read you know here is requirement A out of 508 and here is what it says and here is what it means. And out of WCAG here is what it says and here''s what it means. And at one point I don''t remember who it was but one of the web developers in the audience said, why don''t you just tell us what it means and skip the what it says. And the discussion from that kind of led into what we have heard from a lot of fronts, that the standards, both sets of standards 508 and WCAG are hard for kind of the front line web developers to digest in a lot of cases. The WCAG stuff being academic and sometimes overly idealistic and the 508 stuff just being too terse and not having enough detail for developers who weren''t already experts in the field to know what they were doing. So with those two things that desire to have a standard that was hard that did both that addressed 508 and WCAG requirements, that went far enough farther than 508 to the Level 2 WCAG requirements that we had already been looking at and that also that presented the information in a way that people who needed to use it which was the web developers presented in a way that they could understand it. Led us to the development of our Illinois''s first stab at developing accessibility standard. That was in 2002 we developed what was then called the Illinois Web Accessibility Standards. And they were basically it was a combination of WCAG 1, Priority 1 and 2 and 508 requirements. And they were rewritten in a way basically using the language that we used when we were training web developers and on how to implement them. And that document was adopted by an Executive Order by the Governor in February of 2002. An Executive Order directed the agencies to that they needed to follow these standards when they created web sites and web applications. And so that was kind of our first start in the kind of the pseudo-legal arena that was with that Executive Order and the IWAS standards. And well, we recognize the double standards aren''t perfect we did get a lot of good feedback, both from the folks that we were training as well as we got contacted by other states. And in a few cases a couple of other countries. To say you know hey, we like this. How did you get there? Why do you use it? Can we borrow it? And so there were a few places I think Maine is an example of a state that kind of based off of the standard as we merged them together for the IWAS - Illinois Web Accessibility Standards. So that was our history so that happened in 2002. And then what happened in the last several years, which led us to the IITAA the actual law, was that we started out well. We did good we had kind of an interesting group that expanded and we developed the standards and there was some fanfare and the Executive Order and it was going along well and then, there was an election cycle. And at that point we changed governors and changed parties at the same time. And this was where we learned one of our important lessons and that was a Governor''s Executive Order is maybe not the ideal vehicle for accessibility standards. Basically when a new administration came in especially because there was a lot of changing of hands because of the change in party, the IWAS standards to a large extent got forgotten. So as new people came in they just weren''t recognizing, it wasn''t something that was done by this administration. And the power of the Executive Order Governor''s order disappeared rapidly when that Governor leaves. So, I guess lesson number one was we determined that a law was a much more desirable avenue and that was one of the things that led us towards the IITAA. Actually, in introducing the IITAA, I wasn''t directly involved in bringing it up and sparking it, we had been kind of sitting back and working to do thing we always do which is to train, to support, to provide technical assistance to people who are creating accessible informational systems. And it was actually the National Federation for the Blind in Illinois, who took the first big step towards the IITAA and they talked to their state senate representative and basically said, you know, we like to make this requirement. And that was what got the ball rolling. They get the senate sponsor lined up. They got the senate sponsor committed to doing this. They basically started the task and at that point once it was started they brought in the people who had been involved previously including the Department of Human Services, the Illinois Assistance Technology Project. And a couple of other stake holders in the group. And they brought us in and sat at the table and said how do we make this work. And from that point we actually developed the law itself. And if you look on the web page that I got up, the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act page here. The first list of links here contains a link to the Public Act itself. And I just want to flip over there real quick so you should see a page now that says Illinois General Assembly at the top. And then says Public Act 0950307. And this is the actual language of the act. And what I want to point out about this is this Act is actually very the law itself is very short and sweet. There is not a whole lot to it. We very intentionally we were very concise and very intentionally left a lot of the detail out. What we do have in the law is basically, that kind of our lead up here, leading up to kind of the most important sentence in the Act which is Section 1, I''m sorry Section 5B, where it states it is the policy of the State of Illinois that information technology developed, purchased, and provided by the State is accessible to individuals with disabilities. And getting that statement out there is obviously the most important thing that this law does. Basically says that the state is stepping up to doing this. We then had just a very few, four key definitions, that really defined the scope. And the important things in the definitions here the two most important ones here, the definition of electronic and information technology. And in here we actually use a definition that is lifted largely from Section 508 and again the important thing was that it defines the scope. And it says most importantly that this law is going to cover internet and intranet, software, operating systems, video and multimedia, telecom, kiosks, ITMs, copiers, printers, and desktop and portable computers. So it is basically the six areas of 508 just kind of in a friendly language there. But the important thing was we are saying we not just covering web. We defined it we are covering all of IT. And if another state was addressing whether or not they do, we are only addressing web or more than that and it is important to have that scope laid out. The other important thing here is we also have a definition of state entity and this identified the organizations that would be responsible for complying these requirements. And in Illinois, given the current political climate we were able to extend it to basically all of the immediate state government including the agencies and so forth, the constitutional offices and the public universities. We did not because of law that we called the State Mandates Act we did not include local government, school districts, or community colleges. The State Mandates Act requires that the state can''t pass a law, that would apply to local governments, without providing funding. And one thing that we did not have at this point was any good resource for funding. So again we made sure in the law here to define the scope of both what is electronic and information technology and what state entities does it apply to. And then really the meat of the standards and the most important thing here is that the standards say that earlier the policy was that all IT would all IT, all new IT would be accessible. And then referenced the development of standards, basically says, to answer the question what is or how we define accessibility what is accessibility and how do I know if I have done that or not. We did not reference, we did not include technical standards in the law and we did not specifically reference any other technical standard. For example we did not reference Section 508 or WCAG. But we however referenced kind of a generic standard, that in this case we gave ourselves 6 month to come to agreement on what that would. But the most important thing is that the standard lives outside of the law which allows us to change it, to change it as necessary. What we did find out in talking to a number of other states in getting ready for this initiative was a lot of states had codified in the law, the specific reference for example to Section 508 or to WCAG 1, Priority 1 and 2 or to a certain set of technical requirements. And the problem there was most of those states who had that done kind of replied that they had the regretted it. That it locked them in too tightly. They couldn''t change it without going through the whole effort of changing the law which is a whole lot harder than changing a reference document. And this is the same idea what the Federal government did was Section 508 the Rehab Act Amendments referenced the standards that the standards aren''t part of the law because they recognize as well that changing the law was a whole lot harder than it was changing something that was referenced in the law. So we set up the standards to be outside of the law. Basically pointing to them referencing them and in our case, giving ourselves 6 month to kind of get together and hash it out and come up with something. And then the next most important thing that we did was, that we required in the law that at minimum once every three years, we would review and if necessary, update the standards. And this is another important thing that we learned from talking to other states that had been down this road was that we all know that technology changes extremely fast. We are also seeing now that the accessibility standards are changing, all of sudden with WCAG 2 coming out, the 508 refresh going on, those standards are changing. And to be honest this was a lifesaver for us just in the process of developing the standards. By putting this requirement out there that we will review and revise the standard if necessary at least once every three years, it was the safety valve that we needed. So as we worked with the work group, to identify the standards, there were cases when we ran into the unavoidable disagreements where we were just weren''t going to see eye to eye with everybody in the group. And in that case we were able to say you know what let''s table this issue, let''s come back to it in two to three years when we do the revision. That will give us some time to research and to figure out the details and so forth. So, having this not only insures that we can keep the standards current you know as technologies change and as the other industry standards change, but it also gave us a way of getting through the standard setting process by having the ability to say you know let''s come back to this later. We''ll put it on the list, and we will look into it and that way people felt that we could disagree like we didn''t have to have nail things down they weren''t set in stone. You know at the end of the standards making process. So that was another very important thing in this about this law. And I guess I should point it too kind of buried here in the description is in, that this law is a go forward law only. It is not reactive. It applies only to information technology that is purchased or developed or substantially modified after the standards are in place. And that was another important piece I mentioned earlier that we weren''t able to do anything that required any significant funding, that the State of Illinois''s budget was for those of you that know a little bit about Illinois politics, was not good and at the time we were passing this law. And, it was very clear that we weren''t going to get significant funding. If we were relying on significant funding or someone else an opponent could show significant expense because of this law, we weren''t going to get it passed. And so, you know in order to be cost effective, we did two things. One is we said, this doesn''t apply to old existing systems which there is no if you have to be retroactive it is going to cost money to change old systems. And two, we made a strong evidence based case for the fact that on a go forward basis as long as you recognize the requirements for accessibility and do the appropriate leg work up front that it doesn''t have to cost significantly more to create an accessible system than it does to create an inaccessible system. So those were kind of the important things about the law and I think it worked out well. So far the difference constituent groups, the different stakeholders involved, the advocates, the agency folks who have to implement, the state purchasing folks who have to implement on that side, all have felt pretty comfortable with the way the law was written. And again it is proved even in the standards setting process to be a lifesaver the fact that we got you know reference to external standards and the ability to update the standards in the future. So that is where we are today and basically where we are in the process, with the IITAA as we just completed the 6 months we are just completing, actually February 20th is the end of the 6 months standards establishment phase. We actually have the standards completed and they are posted on this site. Again, I am looking at the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act page on the Illinois DHS Department of Human Services home page. And a little bit further down the page under the section called standards we actually have a link to the IITAA Standards. And let me just take a minute just to kind of show you what we have here on the standards. The IITAA standard themselves are modeled very closely on Section 508 and that was kind of one of our selling points, in convincing some of the people who were going to be involved in implementing this, was we said we are not blazing new territory here. As much as possible we are modeling after what the Feds have been doing for the last 5 or 6 years. You know this is not new territory. When we go to a vendor they shouldn''t be saying we never heard of this before although it does still come up from time to time. So we modeled it on 508, if you are familiar with 508 a lot of the stuff in the IITAA standards will look familiar to you. We lifted as much as we could directly, some of it was reworded to the appropriate for the state context. Some of it was reworded to clarify in cases where we felt it needed to be clarified. But basically as you go through here you will see, you know, most of it should look very familiar. We did also attempt as much as we could, to be aware of what was going on the Section 508 and the WCAG 2, the Section 508 Refresh and the WCAG 2, the new version of WCAG, being WCAG 2. We wanted to be aware of what was going on where those were headed and wherever possible we kind of where the things were solid and not too much dispute, we went ahead and worked in the newer language as much as we felt was appropriate. So some of these for example here under exceptions some of these in here are based on the work that''s being done by the WCAG Refresh Group. And some of the stuff that is in the, I''m sorry the 508 Refresh Group and some of the stuff that''s in WCAG 2. In the standards themselves we have functional performance criterias, very much like what is in the Section 508. And then our technical requirements you will note in 5 of the 6 sections that we sections area of technology recover they essentially are lifted directly from 508 with just very minor modifications. And so our first just like in Section 508 is Software Applications and Operating Systems, we got the same requirements here and there were just a very few places where we modified either for clarity or where we felt that, I''m going to skip the web one for now, where we felt that some of the requirements, were just not things that we could accomplish. And I think the best examples of those were probably in the Video and Multimedia area. For example, under Video and Multimedia we have a requirement for closed captioning if you are familiar with the federal requirement it talks about whenever video and multimedia needs to be captioned, whenever it is and there is a strange definition used in 508 that talks about it being a production that is core to the agency''s mission. And the short of confusingness of that, we debated through a whole bunch of different scenarios should we always require it and what is desirable and what''s practical. And the compromise that we came up with here was a slight variation I don''t want to go into the detail right now, but the slight variation what was in 508. So the point there, was that we used the Section 508 standard as much as we could. And modified just a little bit. The one place we deviated from that was in the section on Web Based Information and Applications. And the reason we deviated here was because, well basically because we already had the Illinois Web Accessibility Standards in place. And we felt strongly the group felt strongly that we didn''t want to backtrack. We didn''t want to require less than what we had previously had been requiring. And as I discussed earlier, the main complaint that we had earlier with the Section 508 requirements, for web was that they didn''t go nearly far enough. So at that time we included some of the Priority 2 requirements from WCAG 1. And basically, we didn''t want to throw that away at this point. It was interesting to watch the Section 508 Refresh Group was they were apparently having the same feeling, because the new drafts that were coming out of that group had they clearly go a whole lot farther then the current 508. And they weren''t done enough to use them as they are. But we did look at where they were headed and we recognized that until such time as these are finalized, we needed to kind of stick with what we had. So we basically took the Illinois Web Accessibility Standards, and from those, we went through updated, revised and so forth and then created the IITAA requirements for web based information and applications. You may notice here, and in this section the text is actually links and that is because we have actually a supporting document here. In the old Illinois Web Accessibility Standards we went a lot further with our explanation than just the little one line requirements. We actually provided a what, why, and how that was again back to the original goals for the IWAS requirements was that they be understandable, clear, and usable by web developers and people need to implement them. And, the feedback that we had gotten previous in this format was very positive and we didn''t want to lose this. We didn''t want to cram it all inside of the standards so we kind of did a two part companion document. We got the IITAA Standards which we were looking at previously, that document, and then we have what we called the Implementation Guidelines for Web Based Information and Applications. And this is where we basically for each requirement in the standard we go through and give the supporting information, the what, why, and how and references and so forth that explains the ins and outs and how to implement and give some advice and so forth. And again, we think that was a good compromise between having all the information including all the information without making the standards document itself too lengthy. So the different people from different audience can use whichever document is appropriate to them. So we imagine web developers will use this document, procurement folks will use this document, and hopefully everyone will be happy. At least generally happy. So that is kind of the nature of the standard as they are now. We did leave the door open and the thought was we got if we go implementation guidelines on this see Kevin''s note there yes we do need a shorter name, but we will go with this for now. We do we did leave the door open here for the future development of implementation guidelines for different technologies. Actually the groups started to talk about, you know, separate implementation guidelines and specifically address PDF. And we can go on from there. So over the next few years we will probably be working on those to expand this out and have those ready in time for the next required update of the IITAA Standards. So but right now we have got these two, we got the standards document we got the implementations guidelines and that really makes up the technical requirements. For what it is worth the other the other document that goes along with these that are actually required by the law was that we come up with recommendations for how does this then sit into the state procurement process. Obviously doesn''t do us a whole lot of good to have standards laying out there if we don''t know how do the state agencies and the other entities that are covered by the law, how do they actually make this put this into effect. So we worked with some very helpful folks from the state procurement representing the state procurement entities. In Illinois it''s called Central Management Services. And, we basically identified some things that the different players could do, in this case, Central Management Services which consolidates a lot but not all of the procurement activities. their responsibility would be to make sure that we get the standards published in the appropriate places, that we includes language in our governance documents which are the documents that basically need to filled out whenever you start development of a new project or purchase. We basically said, that we want to integrate the appropriate checks into that process and probably most importantly that some boilerplate language would be included in all the relevant contracting, requests for proposals, so forth big documents. And so our recommendation here which was okayed at least in draft by the procurement legal folks was to include something along these lines. Where it says as required by the Public Act all IT including the areas we talked about must comply with the ethical requirements of IITAA Act as posted at it gives you URL. So that requirement is going to be worked into the contract documents and the RFP and IFP documents that are used in starting and procuring a system. And I think that is very important piece so that we got the standards and we say okay and how are the standards going to be used. In addition to these requirements, we actually had some discussion didn''t come to conclusion on, the next step, in the process and that is, well, okay I have got the standards out there and requiring everybody to follow the standards when I either purchase something or build something, how do I know whether that''s been done. How do I know when a response to an RFP whether the vendor really knows what they are talking about. Or how do I know if I built the system whether I achieved it or not. And I will be honest with you we didn''t have a good answer for that. We talked about using the VPAT which is tool that is used for 508 which is also being revised. The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is basically a form that says, how was your product accessible? Our experience with VPAT has been, people can, I guess I’ll just be frank and say people can lie on that or people can be mistaken in filling out a VPAT. People sometimes don''t know what they don''t know and they''ll think that yes we are accessible when they don''t understand what that means. And so we recognize that a VPAT is a step, but it is not a full proof means. And to be honest we are looking over the next couple of years to get some experience under our belt and try to figure out what how do we address the next step and how do we basically evaluate whether the standards are being met, whether the processes for incorporating the standards are effective. And we are looking into that. We did talk to some other states on that front too. I think most states were kind of sharing the same feeling that even though we got standard out there we are really scrambling or really unable to do any kind of enforcement or quality assurance. In the states where we talked to where it is working and the federal agencies where it is working they typically have come up with a dedicated resource to an expert evaluator who can look at a proposal and say yes this person, this vendor replied in a way that makes me believe that they know what they are talking about. Or I can test a product and say yes, this product does what it needs to do. So, the places where we see it succeeding they have found ways to make those resources available. Because we were not able to get any funding for this, for the IITAA at this point, we recognize that we are kind of in a bind, but we also felt that again, one of our goals was even if we cannot reach perfect, incremental progress was worthwhile. So what we have done at the point is we have written the standards, we have got requirements for the standards in the appropriate places, and hopefully that is a first step in this process. And again because we have got this on-going requirement for revision and updates actually in the law, you know, I think a lot of us felt like, it is okay to take it a step at a time. And one thing that we will certainly be doing is reaching out to other states and asking more who is having successes on implementing. And are there models that we can use that don''t cost a whole lot of money or and at the same time we will probably be lobbying within Illinois to see if we could have resources designated to kind of step up to that task. I think the reality is that it is probably not realistic to think that anybody who is not pretty well versed in accessibility is going to be able to evaluate the compliance with the standards. There is just you know maybe I will be proven wrong on that one and come up and we can come up with some testing techniques and certainly there are good tools that get us part of the way there, but bottom line is with technology as being as complex as they are now, I don''t think at least in our experience we found it to be realistic to think that we can take a procurement officer who deals with accessibility as you know a couple of percentage of their, I mean 5% of their job is dealing with accessibility things. Somebody in that role is not going to have the depth of knowledge to be able to make that kind of evaluation, to even feel comfortable making that kind of evaluation. So we need to find a better answer for that. So that is what we have got about the IITAA and I want to have just a couple of things before I open it up for questions here, we did post and we left up on the site actually what we were working on developing the standards, this site was looked a lot different and it was kind of our main work space quite a bit of work space for the work group. We stuffed all that information here under the IITAA group work link and if any of you are interested in kind of seeing what we did and how we went through there is highlights at least I hear. One of the important documents I do want to share we laid out clear goals, deliverables, and guiding principles for the work group. And some of these I think are, you know, things that worked well for us I would like to share with you. Basically besides the goal was for the work group was to develop the standards as well as the recommendations for procurement so forth. And one of these we did up front was we established guiding principles. And the five guiding principle that we established and we came back to every time we talked about a change, every time we talked about a proposal for a standard we came back to these five things and asked okay, is it effective, is it practical, is it harmonizing, is it usable, is it appropriate. And basically those things mean effective, number one we said we always want to remember that this needs to work for a person with a disability sitting in front of a piece of technology trying to get their job done. That was really kind of our reminder that we needed to go beyond and again, I''ll be frank beyond the 508 the old 508 requirements for web. We needed to go further than that and this kind of reaffirmed that we wanted to make sure that actually at least we much as we could the standards would get the job done. Practical, that was another thing that came out of the group the feeling was and actually one of the concerns that we heard raised a number of cases about the direction that the new WCAG and 508 Standards are going is they are an attempt to be more general and less technology specific, they are becoming a lot less practical. And it is going to be difficult for a web developer who is not familiar with accessibility, it is going to be difficult for them to read for example WCAG 2.0 and know what does that mean for the code that I am trying to write right now. So one of our guiding principles was we wanted these standards to be practical. That is that they applied to current, real world technologies. We wanted to look to the future, but focus on what was necessary today. And that''s why we kept that the IWAS type what, why, and how, implementation guidelines because we wanted that. Harmonized, I mentioned this earlier that was the reality that it is difficult for vendors and contractors, you know, people who are going to be getting technology for us, it is going to be difficult for us as a state to get technology that complies with our standards if we are the only ones requiring the standards. If we are in line with 508 that''s a whole lot easier, you know, a whole lot more weight to that then there is if, you know, Illinois has its own thing it''s doing it''s own thing. So as much as possible as much as it conflicts with the first two principles we wanted it to be harmonized. That is again harmonization is an issue that industry is really harping on in the work being done in WCAG and 508 there is a lot of pressure on them being placed on them to harmonize although it doesn''t look like it is happening maybe as much we hoped it would. And I think we found kind of hit and miss success on this. I guess bottom line is we harmonized whenever we could and extended when we felt we had to in order to be both effective and practical. So harmonization is a real, real world issue that is important to be aware of funny word but important issue. Number four here usable, we just again wanted to stress that our documents would be clear and concise. This was feedback based on the previous work with web developers and procurement folks. They said, you know, cut to chase and tell me what I need to know and so we wanted to emphasize that. And then lastly, appropriate, and this one was added later just to say that we needed to stay within our scope. There was some kind of natural feeling while we were developing these standards to, you know, go out, and take on more than maybe we should have been taking on. And so, a couple of times we had to recognize and say hey yeah, it is good thing to say that, you know, all people with disabilities in the state should have access to technical support I''m making something up there. It is good idea but it’s not within the scope of what we are doing. So appropriate really was our reminder was to stay within scope. And I think those things, those five things we laid them out up front and we were very happy we did. And they really helped to guide us where we were going. And so with that said I see we got only about 10 minutes left. So I could say more things but I will take a break now and go ahead and open it up for questions. So if you a have question either type it in or raise your hand and I think Janet is going to help us.

Janet Peters

I will jump in here because one question was already typed thank you, Mike, for a great presentation. Said that the key to implementation, will be education about how to, and why to, provide accessible IT. And his question is: What states or agencies have model education programs?

Mike Scott

That''s an excellent question. I don''t know that I know the answer to that. Within Illinois, we within the Department of Human Services Division Rehab Services, we put together some training programs from education program that we do regularly whenever we get an audience. And I guess it would be, to toot our own horn a little bit to say, you know, I think we have got effective education and training programs and the difficult part is of course getting the captive audience to listen to it. Other states again hit and miss I think in the Federal government there is just really just a couple agencies that are stepping up. So I don''t know that I feel really I feel strongly enough that we found a model other than that. So but good question sorry I didn''t have a better answer to it. I see has been another question posted here.

Janet Peters

I''ll go ahead and read that for people who can''t see this. Asks what buy in obstacles among those who needed to approve the project did you encounter when you initiated this effort and how did you overcome them? Good question.

Mike Scott

Yes, excellent question. Buy in was key. We very, very concerned and we were very afraid about our ability to get buy in. It actually went a lot better than we had anticipated. And I think the keys to it were, you know, the obstacles to it clearly are the fear basically the fear of not knowing what to do or of it being difficult or of it preventing the agency or someone from doing something they wanted to do, you know. I think there is still a lot of, still that misperception out there that accessible means plain, dull, boring. And we preach that over and over again that accessible does not mean text only. With modern technologies and modern assistive technologies techniques so we preached that whenever we got an option. And to overcome the fear aspect, I actually think it was advantageous to us that largely because the fiscal issues we didn''t we couldn''t put any enforcement or punitive requirements in the law some initial drafts had that in and we pulled it out because that would have had the financial impact that would have sunk it for us at this time. But in pulling those out we were basically, basically been able to pitch this as these are requirements we don''t have penalties in. And we basically it is a good we need to be making a good faith effort. And what I always followed up with was that the Senator who sponsored this said, give the State a chance to do the right thing. And if it doesn''t he promised the NFBI in this case, he promised the constituents that if they didn''t step up to it that he would submit an amendment in the future to put some teeth into the bill. And we shared that with people we said, you know, the good news is there are no penalties now. We got a chance to do the right thing because we want to do the right thing. But the bad news is if we don''t, there are going to be penalties down the road. And I think that took the edge off the fear in a lot of cases. That and I think our focus just on being practical and findings compromises that balanced, you know, the ideal what we want to do for people with disabilities with the practical what we need to do to actually make this achievable and our emphasis on this needs to be achievable and doable. You know, even if it doesn''t reach the ideals, I think that went a long way. I will take a break now and take another question.

Janet Peters

I will let other people talk, but I see, typed a question here and I will just read that. Is there a group of IT persons who share information such as web standards introducing accessible web design into K12?

Mike Scott

In Illinois we have had we had a group called the Web Master Round Table which kind of went away with the change in administration a few years ago. We''re trying to pull that back together and we have not achieved it yet. There is also a group within that existed prior to us working on accessibility called the Illinois Technology Board of Advisors. Basically the IT staff and the chief CIOs of each agency participated in this group. And we tried to hook up with them. Also the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, John Gunderson has a program there the Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility. He has pulled together along with some other folks involved with higher education, he''s pulled together a group. There is some information about that on the at the University of Illinois if you did a search on CITA - Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility. You find John Gunderson''s stuff and he has some groups. So I guess the answer is we have kind of a collection of haphazard groups and we have been trying to tie in with all of them. Our hope is that we can kind of bring them together and reestablish the more formal group that we had previously. Okay I think I see another question.

Janet Peters

There is another typed question and if you want to use your microphone you can just go ahead and click control and then you''ll get control of it after Mike is done answering this question. This is: Have you had conversations with schools teaching web programming regarding accessibility and the local technical colleges are very interested in regarding this, accessibility.

Mike Scott

Yes, excellent question. We''ve just started that these conversations I think John Gunderson and his group from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign has been having that conversation. We have been in on it just a little bit. And there is little bit of interest growing I think is absolutely key. I work for a small IT consulting company and we regularly do hiring and one of things that we run into is I can''t hire a programmer out of college who knows a thing about accessibility. And, and even when we send new hires to out to training programs, 9 times out of 10 if we send them to a university or a community college training program on web development they are teaching inappropriate techniques to the point where we are doing all of our training in-house. But so I think the answer, this is a very important issue because I think the key to us being able to address accessibility without the fear and without the screw ups that happen is to get this worked into the training curriculums. And we just started to have that discussion and John and his group I think have been doing more of that. So I think anybody who is interested I would be happy to follow up with them afterwards and get in touch with the University of Illinois sponsored group to go further down that road. Thanks. I will hand it over for another question.

Janet Peters

Are there any further questions you can type them or hit control to use your microphone.

Mike Scott

I see the question there, am I employed or am I a volunteer? I am actually am employed if I had won the lottery I would do this as a volunteer but I can''t afford to do that. We are being I am under contract with the Illinois Department of Human Services, Division of Rehab Services. We have got a team of 3 folks here who work on accessibilities and in general and this just fell into our purview, so yes, I am employed.

Janet Peters

Any last questions or I see, someone is typing.

Claudia Diaz

Yes Janet, asked a question earlier what are buy ins or obstacles among those who needed to approve the project did you encounter when you initiated this effort and how did you overcome that?

Janet Peters

I think we have already answered that one. I think I am on, and, if we didn''t answer it sufficiently you can go ahead and ask again. I see you have a follow up. This is: Was this recorded so we can watch it at a later time? I had problems with the web navigation that was used. Yes, just for reference as soon as we are done with the questions here in a couple of minutes I will post an evaluation link that I''m going to ask you all to fill out kindly, as well as the whole session was recorded and will be available in our archive section. And I email all the registrants and participants a link of that. Has a follow up question, Mike, for you: Often this is an issue not valued enough to have committed staff. Do you have recommendations about how to sell this as a dedicated staff person?

Mike Scott

This is to question, thanks for using the mic there Janet. The question, how do we sell this to get dedicated staff I think that is the $64,000 dollar question. That is a tough one you know I think it is really key to you have to find the places where there is a connection obviously we have worked through the Rehabilitation Services where there is obviously connection because this is court of admission. And then of course the challenge is to make the pitch that it is doable. And you know I think the VR agencies are a good approach. You know really the sell comes down to you know recommendation I have the sell comes down to one it is doable. And two it doesn''t mean that you know things need to be ugly or text only, you know, we got good when it is done right. And three it doesn''t have to cost more. We have seen it over and over again and probably the biggest selling point that biggest stick we have used, is the argument that basically you can either do it now or you can do it later. And if you do it later it''s going to cost a whole bunch more. And we looked to you can refer back to the way the ADA when it first went into effect regarding architecture barriers and, you know, people it was new it was scary, but now it is old hat and people do it and it is just as easy maybe not a perfect example. But people just automatically build a ramp now. The other thing we point to is probably the best example was the lawsuit against the State of Arkansas where they built the system, promised it would be accessible, built it, it wasn''t. I think it cost if I remember the numbers right like $19 million dollars to build it, it wasn''t accessible and a couple blind staff came back and brought suit and said, you know it was supposed to be and it wasn''t. And the Arkansas Court said under ADA and under Arkansas requirement, it had to be fixed. And it ended up costing them $52 million dollars to go back and fix it. We have seen over and over and over again that it costs twice or twice or more it can cost twice or more to remediate a broken system as it would to do it right the first place. So that is probably the strongest argument you know from a practical standpoint or return on investment standpoint is that it is risk mitigation and doing it now can be a whole lot less expensive than doing it in the future. Okay. More questions and go I''ll go ahead and take, see the next one here is. That was, that one maybe is a question for Janet. I will say I don''t know the answer to that. Have I found certain regions to more into this movement versus other regions. Janet, do you have any feelings on that?

Janet Peters

Obviously I am most familiar with the Great Lakes region and in preparation for this presentation I called the states in our region. And I think that there is some movement in this region and I think nationally I mean there is some there is some momentum behind it. I think there is you know frustration with how to do it and starting from scratch which is why we wanted to offer this presentation to give other states, a model and sort of a pep talk that this is something that is doable and a process that can be started. I think your presentation was, gave us some really good information. I think we do need to wrap it because it is after 2:00 o''clock and I want to respectful to our Speaker''s time. I have posted the evaluation form and I see Steve just posted it as well. And you can link on that right from our, from this site. As well as you will receive an email follow up email with an evaluation form of this session as well. If you didn''t get your question answered today I apologize. Please feel free to email me a question, and I will try to do some research and work with Mike to get that answered for you. Yes, okay. So, if you are reading Steve Jacob''s post he says, that his, use his link to his name not the one I posted. And it will be emailed as well and then Mike has put his email in the public chat area. And I want to thank Mike our Presenter and I want to thank you all for participating and, being interested in this topic. Thank you.

Mike Scott

Thanks, Janet and thanks everybody appreciate you taking the time. Feel free to email the address I threw up there if you got any questions. And maybe we''ll get a chance to do this in the future. Thanks.