Special Episode: Introduction to Real. Relevant. Required.

In this special episode, Becky Rehorn introduces her new book, Real. Relevant. Required.: A Practitioner's Guide to ADA Title II Digital Accessibility for State and Local Government. The book is written for the people within public agencies and AEC firms who are responsible for making digital accessibility happen, but have not had a resource on how their work is actually done. It covers what the DOJ's final rule requires, what conformance looks like for the specific content types agencies produce, how to build an internal accessibility program that lasts beyond the initial compliance push, and how to write procurement language that extends accessibility requirements to consultants and vendors. This is not a legal guide or a technical manual. It is a practitioner's guide, grounded in over 10 years of experience inside the AEC industry and built for the people doing the work. Available now on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H27D7ZJV

Access Brief is produced by Accessible Organizations Group LLC.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Access Brief Podcast Edition of the Book Real, Relevant, Required, a Practitioner's Guide to ADA Title II Digital Accessibility for State and Local Government. My name is Becky Rehorn. I'm glad you're here. Companion resources for the book, including downloadable templates, checklists, and procurement language, are available for free at AOGAccess.com forward slash book. Introduction As I write this, a public comment period has just closed on a transportation project in my state. The project website published the environmental documents. The public hearing notices went out through the usual channels, in the communications inviting the public to participate. I read a sentence that I have seen with only minor variations in hundreds of public agency notices over the course of my career. Persons with a disability who require aids or services to participate may contact the ADA coordinator in advance of the hearing. Until recently that sentence was enough to meet the letter of the law for most state and local government agencies. It is no longer enough. The phrase meet the letter of the law is used carefully here. Accommodation on request language alone has long been insufficient to fully satisfy Title II's equal access mandate, particularly where the underlying content is itself inaccessible. The April 2024 final rule is best understood as the first federal regulation to specify the technical standard by which compliance with Title II's digital access obligations will be measured. On April 24, 2024, the Department of Justice published a final rule that amended Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act to specify, for the first time in the 34 years since the ADA became law, a binding technical standard for the digital content public agencies produce. That standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG version two point one level AA. After extending the original deadlines by one year in April twenty twenty six, DOJ set the current compliance dates at april twenty sixth, twenty twenty seven for agencies serving populations of fifty thousand or more, and april twenty sixth, twenty twenty eight for smaller agencies and special districts. Chapter two covers the rule, the extension, and the deadlines in detail. This book is written primarily for practitioners in the transportation and infrastructure sector, including the architecture, engineering, and construction AEC industry. If you produce, review, approve, or procure digital content that will be published on behalf of any agency, whether that content is a PDF, a project website, a public notice, a set of meeting materials, a comment portal, or a consultant deliverable, this book is for you. If you are an agency director who has just been told your website falls short of WCAG 2.1 double A, and you are not yet sure what that means for the next twelve months, this book is for you too. The principles and frameworks in these pages apply equally to any public entity subject to Title II School districts, transit authorities, municipalities, special districts, and readers outside the AEC sector will find the operational guidance directly transferable. But the examples, the patterns, and the voice come from the industry I know. Who needs accessible digital content? Before going further, it is worth addressing a question that shapes how every reader will process the chapters ahead. Who are we building this for? The most common assumption is that digital accessibility is primarily for people who are blind or deaf. That assumption is wrong, and it leads to a narrow, reactive approach, the same accommodation on request posture that the April 2024 final rule was written to replace. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly one in four American adults more than seventy million people live with some form of disability. That number includes people who are blind or have low vision and people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It also includes people with mobility impairments who navigate with a keyboard or voice commands because a mouse requires fine motor control they do not have. It includes people with cognitive disabilities such as attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, traumatic brain injury, and autism, who rely on clear structure, plain language, and assistive technology to process written content. It includes people with temporary impairments, the employee recovering from wrist surgery who is working one-handed, the project manager on medication that affects concentration, the resident whose eyeglasses were just updated and whose vision is still adjusting, and it includes the aging population. The National Academies estimate that roughly ninety million Americans over the age of forty have age related vision changes. That number will more than double by twenty fifty as the baby boomer and Generation X cohorts continue to age. Many of these individuals do not identify as having a disability. They have simply found that the text is smaller than it used to be, the contrast is harder to see, and the screen is less forgiving than it was ten years ago. When any agency builds accessible digital content, it is not building for a narrow category of users who file accommodation requests. It is building for the full range of people the agency serves, including the ones who will never identify themselves, never file a request and never tell the agency that the content did not work for them. They will simply leave. That understanding matters for everything that follows in this book. The rule exists because the law has always required equal access. The technical standard exists because equal access in a digital environment requires a measurable definition. And the deadline exists because without one most agencies did not act. But behind all of that, behind the rule, the standard, and the deadline, are real people trying to do ordinary things pay a water bill, comment on a project, read a public notice, attend a hearing. The question this book answers is how to make sure they can. I have spent more than twenty five years in strategic communications, stakeholder engagement, and content creation, including more than a decade as an independent strategy and communications consultant, advising organizations across industries. Since 2015, I have worked primarily inside the AEC industry, producing and reviewing public-facing content for transportation projects, streetscapes, and corridor planning studies across Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and beyond. I have led communications for projects ranging from downtown streetscapes in Sevierville, Tennessee, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, to the Cumberland Avenue Corridor Reconstruction in Knoxville, Tennessee to, most recently, communication strategy and accessibility requirements for planning studies along the I-24 corridor in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I have sat on both sides of the agency consultant relationship, developing accessibility language for consultant scopes of work, and delivering under accessibility requirements as a consultant. Once I began working on projects that required public participation under the National Environmental Policy Act process, and planning and environmental linkages studies, I noticed a pattern. Accessibility was a line on a checklist, almost always addressed through the same accommodation on request language quoted earlier. The underlying assumption was that accessibility was something the public would ask for when they needed it, rather than something the agency would build in from the start. The structural problem with accommodation on request is what happens when no one asks. Though the agency might believe that no news is good news, the hard truth is that the accommodation on request model imposes sufficient friction that many people who need access cannot or will not ask for it. They go elsewhere or they go without. The april twenty twenty four Final Rule in part responds to that structural gap. This book is also personal to me. It is the reason I earned my certified professional and accessibility core competencies credential and built my independent practice around this work. I use assistive technology every day. I have ADHD diagnosed in adulthood, one of approximately 15.5 million US adults with that diagnosis, more than half of whom were first diagnosed as adults. I also have age related vision changes that will become more significant over time. My primary reason for using assistive technology is cognitive. Hearing the content read aloud helps me stay with the text rather than racing past it. When I open a well structured document with clear heading hierarchy, logical reading order, and properly tagged content, assistive technology moves through it the way the author intended and I get the information I need. When I open a PDF that was exported without structure, the experience breaks down, the audio jumps between elements in no logical order, a heading here, a footnote there, a table cell from the middle of a row I have not reached yet. Images disappear entirely because no one wrote alt text. What looks like a clear, well organized document on screen becomes, through a screen reader, a puzzle with no picture on the box. Accessible digital content for me is not an abstract concept. It is how I do my job. And as the section read prior describes, I am far from alone. That is the thesis of this book, and I will state it once here and come back to it in the final pages. Compliance is the floor. Inclusion is the purpose. Meeting the standard protects your agency from enforcement risk. Building access into the way you work ensures that the people you serve can actually use what you publish. The april twenty twenty four final rule is a legal requirement and it should be treated as one. But it exists because millions of people were being excluded from public services and information their government is obligated to provide. An agency that meets WCAG two point one level double A has done what the law requires. An inclusive agency is one that seeks to raise the floor. The chapters ahead are organized around three questions a working practitioner brings to the subject. Part one real explains what the rule actually is, stripped of legalese, how we got here, what the april twenty twenty four final rule says in plain language, and what WCAG two point one double A means in practice. Part two relevant addresses who is covered and why the old accommodation model is no longer enough, with particular attention to public engagement deliverables, the PDFs, maps, comment portals, and hearing materials that most agencies produce without a clear compliance framework. Part three required is the operational section, how to build a compliance workflow, how to embed accessibility language into consultant contracts, and how to sustain the work beyond the initial deadline. The book is short on purpose. You can finish it on a flight or in two evenings, and I have written it to be read that way. There are endnotes for every legal, regulatory, and statistical citation so you can verify the sources and go deeper where needed. There is a companion landing page with downloadable resources designed to put the book's frameworks into practice, a digital content inventory template, sample procurement clauses, a public engagement accessibility checklist, a VPAT evaluation guide, a conformance statement template, and a deliverable acceptance checklist. Companion resources are available at AOGAccess.com forward slash book. If you are listening to this because your agency or your firm is behind the deadline, I want to be clear about something before you turn the page. You are not alone, and you are not past the point of useful action. The rule itself anticipates that agencies will be at different stages of progress. It does not demand perfection on day one, but it does demand demonstrable documented progress and a credible plan for sustained access. Being behind right now is not the worst position to be in. Not knowing how far behind you are is worse. In chapter one, we can find out how we got here.