PDFs are everywhere and that's not always a good thing
The Americans with Disabilities Act was crafted close to the dawn of the internet era, and way back in 1990 in the era of President George H.W. Bush it's safe to say that it was going to be difficult to predict how transformative the World Wide Web would prove to be.
The National Council on Disability weighed the benefits of the internet over a decade later in a 2003 study on applying the provisions of the act — "to provide a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities" — in the rapidly changing online environment.
"While information-age technology has changed life for everyone, it has created unimaginable opportunities, and in some cases cruel frustrations, for Americans with disabilities...", the report read.
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"There's not really any bad government websites, they're just not 100 percent good." said Justin Young, Pooled Trust Advocate at the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester.
Young is blind and uses screen reader technology to access information on the internet. He sat down recently with the USA TODAY network as part of its statewide survey on the quality of information on local government websites.
"Everything's online basically now. The pushback from the blind community is, we need guidelines because you have guidelines for everything else."
The main culprit? The now ubiquitous PDF document. "Usually PDF files, they will not be read by screen readers because there's nothing for them to detect", says Young. "A good example of that would be from Monroe County; a lot of their forms are PDF documents and they are applications for things but you cannot fill them out."
Screen readers enable people to listen to the text on a computer screen or program but as Adobe Systems, the company behind the Portable Document Format (PDF) acknowledges in its own literature: "Unfortunately, PDF and screen readers do not always interact as users would like. The main barrier to accessibility is that PDF documents are not always designed by their authors to be compatible with screen readers."
The USA TODAY statewide survey of local government websites found PDFs aplenty with the vast majority of them providing financial information and meeting minutes.
The good news is there are fixes available, but they involve additional steps for those authoring documents (and possibly software upgrades) to create "tagged" PDFs that make the text "machine-readable."
On graphics-heavy websites, full accessibility also means ensuring there is alternative text alongside images. Here's what that looks like on the Monroe County home page.
To replicate some of the issues that Justin Young runs into on other pages of the Monroe County website, you can plug any website URL into a tool called WAVE, a project of the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State.
The site generates a report of faults, alerts and features for every web page based on their accessibility.
Stephanie Woodward of the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester says non-compliance can have implications for all local governments, including vulnerability to legal action.
"Denying access to communication is a violation of a civil right and only increases isolation and degradation. Access to communication includes access to internet content. As the internet grows in content and significance, it also grows increasingly inaccessible. While websites with flash and other plug-ins are visually appealing, their content cannot be accessed by an individual who is blind or has difficulty seeing."
Steve Acquario, executive director at New York State Association of Counties, said that his organization conducted an informal audit of its membership last fall on the accessibility issue.
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“We are aware of the need, and believe from our outreach that the vast majority of counties are aware of the need for the hearing and visually impaired: and somewhere that the state of New York could help. The state could come up with a grant program to ensure that their sites are accessible and compliant." said Acquario.
Acquario said that counties also tend to post information in the PDF format to avoid manipulation of data by third parties, but that sentiment runs contrary to the broader motivations of open government and public transparency.
A primer on machine readability for online documents and data from the data.gov site co-authored by Theresa Pardo from the Center for Technology in Government and Jim Hendler, head, Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute frames it this way: "In a practical sense, machine readable information helps government agencies to bridge the gap between 'documents' (which are typically static and frozen in their format) and 'data' (which may be dynamic and can be open to further processing). By adopting a machine readable perspective, these same agencies can meet their open government and open data objectives more completely, reliably, and responsibly."
Justin Young from the Center for Disability Rights has another take. "People need to understand it's unknown waters at times, because it's always changing and there's always something new."
Resources
See how your local town or county website performs on accessibility using the wave.webaim.gov site.
A Primer on Machine Readability for Online Documents and Data available on data.gov
The American Foundation for the Blind, using year 2000 Census data estimated there were 110,000 legally blind people in the state of New York. A tenth of those are totally without vision.