How One State is Working Toward Digital Accessibility for All Students
With the digital accessibility compliance deadlines for the updates to ADA Title II approaching, educators might feel overwhelmed. How do they ensure that their students receive accessible materials?
Education leaders in Aurora, Colorado faced a similar question in 2023. They blazed a trail through legal requirements, technical hurdles and educational needs—and thanks in part to their work, the path may be easier for other districts to follow. Here is their story.
“Two years ago, I was tasked to be a project manager for our school district,” said Jennifer Prusak, Innovative Student Technology Systems Manager of Aurora Public Schools. “There was a new [state] law that was being implemented called HB 21-1110.” The law, similar in intent to the new ADA Title II requirements, stated that digital content must be available to everyone with disabilities.
“That law was the first of its kind to make it so we had to vet all the vendors for accessibility,” Prusak said. Like the ADA Title II update, HB 21-1110 also requires accessible PDFs and websites. While the requirement was there, Colorado did not have a blueprint to follow for compliance.
Prusak formed a statewide coalition of all the school districts, hoping they could share information and resources so that they did not duplicate their efforts.
When the work began, the district had about 350 critical vendor applications that they needed to make sure were compliant, plus many others that were lower priority but still needed vetting. At the time, vendors were not communicating very well about the accessibility of their products. As the coalition began sharing information, a recurring theme emerged: a lot of districts were asking the same questions of vendors. If they could share their findings, it would save them all a lot of time.
How They Addressed Potential Liability
The problem was, nobody in the school districts or state office wanted to be responsible for the potential liability if they accidentally shared incorrect information. But educators in other states were already managing data privacy agreements, or DPAs, and those agreements also had legal requirements. In fact, around a dozen states had opted into a concierge service from EdTech Leaders Alliance (ETLA) that had built the platform for a national database of vendors. That service included legal counsel.
“We approached them and said, ‘Hey, we need this for data privacy, but we also need this for accessibility,’” Prusak said. ETLA agreed to create an accessibility agreement that could either be paired with a DPA, or offered by itself to those vendors that did not need a privacy agreement. But it would cost money for the whole state to participate.
Prusak approached an agency called the Statewide Internet Portal Authority (SIPA) in Colorado. She applied for a grant from SIPA and received the funds needed to buy the platform and the concierge lawyer service. The grant from SIPA went to an organization called the Colorado Association of School Executives (CASE). Districts that pay into CASE—10 of the state’s 179 school districts—were then on board to utilize the platform to collect accessibility plans from vendors and the service that made it manageable. By late winter this year, 100 to 200 products are expected to be vetted and approved, and the remaining school districts will have access to the service.
Pamela Candelaria currently leads accessibility at Aurora Public Schools and is seeing vendors begin to take accessibility seriously. “The majority of them at least have an accessibility plan, where they can tell you something about how they’re moving to accessibility, and they’ll have … documentation that shows where they’re meeting the standards and where they’re still falling short. More and more frequently now, I am starting to see vendors actually having that published on their website.”
But what about quality? “At the end of the day, making sure that they’re accessible is going to increase the quality of instruction that we have, because it’s going to be accessible by all of our students. We don’t have to worry that we’re leaving anybody behind inadvertently,” Prusak said.
Preplanning is Important
Thanks to their pioneering work, other states may now join the database and find accessible products more easily. But Candelaria emphasized the commitment it takes to make accessibility a reality. “Having some preplanning, and having a really solid team identified is really important. … It isn’t just an IT issue, it isn’t just a curriculum issue. So making sure that you’ve got the right people involved in the process as you’re planning the compliance efforts for your district is really important to success.”
She also emphasized that accessibility goes much broader than special education. “Having these laws in place and making sure that everything’s compliant ensures that we meet the needs of our entire community. Parents [with disabilities] don’t have to come to us and say, ‘Hey, I wasn’t able to access this, what can you do to help me?’ We’re getting ahead of it so that we don’t have to know if they need an accommodation.”
“Not every student gets identified,” Prusak said. “I was one of those students. … I didn’t know I was dyslexic.” She coped with reading challenges on her own until she went to college and it became impossible. She ended up taking a year off to re-learn reading and study skills. Then she went back and earned her bachelor’s in education and her master’s in educational technology.
“What I learned from that process is, people sometimes have silent disabilities. They might not even know about that. But the more tools and the more things that we can offer people … Why would we not give people that gift?”
Resources
NCADEMI has helpful resources for your state or district, including the ADA Title II Roadmap. NCADEMI also offers Quality Indicators that help states and school districts create sustainable systems for providing accessible digital educational materials.
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