Recent updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are raising the bar for digital accessibility across public institutions—including K–12 school districts. These changes will impact how districts manage their websites, apps, and online communication to ensure every member of the community can access critical information.

In this webinar, we'll break down what the updated guidance means for school districts and how you can begin preparing today. First, Apptegy's Mitchell Wilston will explore how the Apptegy platform supports accessible communication and ADA-aligned website practices. Then, Senior Client Success Manager Sara Berley will focus on practical steps districts can take to begin addressing accessibility across their digital presence. We’ll share common accessibility challenges districts face, where to start evaluating your website and content, and how to build a sustainable approach to digital accessibility moving forward.

Whether you’re responsible for communications, technology, or district leadership, this session will help you better understand the new expectations—and how to ensure your district’s digital spaces are accessible for every family you serve.

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Transcript

Brittany Keil: All right, let's go ahead and get started. So good morning and welcome to our twenty twenty six ADA updates webinar. We're really excited for you to join. First, I'm going to go through an overview and then I'll do a couple of housekeeping notes.

I see we're having a few questions. So already I can tell you, yes, we are recording this. We will send out a recording afterward along with notes and resources. So, you know, don't worry too hard about taking notes.

We will get those to you. All right, so my name is Brittany Keil and I'm the senior manager of research and media for Apptegy. I'll be introducing our facilitators, the transitions, but I wanted to quickly go through an agenda and make a few notes. So first we'll be introducing what the ADA Title II updates are all about.

Then we'll be hearing about how Apptegy's platform is ready to meet this moment. Then we'll be going through some tips and tricks on how you can prepare your district for success. We know this is very much on your mind, and we are here to support you. As for housekeeping, I have three quick notes.

First, as I mentioned a second ago, we will be sharing the webinar recording later this week. So if you have to hop off early, don't worry. This along with lots of resources will be sent to your inbox. You can view them whenever you want and share with whoever you need.

And then second, our client success team is currently running the Q and A function for this webinar. So if you have an individual question, please use that Q and A function so that you can get your answer taken care of. So we will do our best to get all the questions during the webinar, but if we don't get to you, we will follow-up afterward. No need to sign up for additional, if you need an additional recording or anything, we will send that to you.

As I mentioned, if we don't get to your questions, we will follow-up afterward and make sure that we take care of you. One more thing, we are not monitoring the chat for this webinar. So if you have a question for our CX team, please use the Q and A function. Now I'm going go ahead and introduce our speakers.

So first, we have Amanda Bowman, our General Counsel for Apptegy. She'll be talking through why we're here and what you can expect. Then Mitchell Wilson, the Group Product Manager for Apptegy. He'll be talking to you about how platform is ready to meet this moment. And then finally, Sarah Berley, our senior client success manager, will be talking to you about how you can make this work on your end.

Amanda Bowman: Hi everyone, welcome. As Brittany mentioned, I'm Amanda Bowman, General Counsel here at Apptegy. We know there's been a lot of conversation lately about the new ADA updates and what they mean for school communities.

We understand how much accessibility matters to you, and we've been working hard behind the scenes to ensure our platform is a tool that truly supports your goals. Our team's focus is on giving you the right tools so that you can focus on what you do best, communicating with your students and families. Back to Brittany. Alright.

So first, I'm gonna kick it off to Mitch. He's gonna be talking about how our platform is here to meet this moment. Thanks for joining us, Mitch.

Mitchell Wilston: Hey thank you. Glad to be here. Hi, everybody. We can jump right into it on the next slide.

At a really high level, what are we talking about here? This new compliance focuses on digital spaces. And I think, digital spaces can seem inherently more accessible than physical spaces. With physical spaces, you under I mean, there's just visual cues for what ADA compliance mean with ramps by stairs, having railings, and things like that.

With digital spaces, the same amount of intentional work is required, and sometimes it's less visible. So I hope in the process of this webinar, we can show, like, some visibility into what it means and how we are going about it intentionally. With these changes, we've always measured our accessibility, and we've tried to be a very accessible platform. This now names the standard.

And there are different standards, different levels of WCAG compliance. It is very, very clearly WCAG two point one level double a, and we communicate our compliance to you and to OCR, whoever needs to see it, through VPATs. This compliance also this change also does give districts a deadline. So for districts serving communities of fifty thousand people or more, compliance begins or the need to be in compliance begins April twenty fourth this year.

And for smaller communities or for schools serving smaller communities, they have until April twenty six twenty twenty seven. Next slide, please. So why does it matter? A a lot of people in the global population and the populations that we serve have some sort of disability.

Accessibility is incredibly important, especially with our cohorts where we're becoming more and more tech minded in education. If those platforms are not accessible, it puts these populations at a a really significant disadvantage. It's not about edge cases. It's not about finding every line in the code and making sure that, I don't even know what you'd be making sure, but it's about making sure real people can navigate the products with the tools that they typically use.

So for us, that means designing and building with accessibility as a responsibility and not an afterthought. And we've, throughout the last couple of years, started to make really significant changes in how we build software using design systems, using axe core tooling to make sure that it's accessible, but also will be accessible long in the future as we kill keep building more and more features. If we go to the next slide, please. So what does it mean to have a disability?

There are all sorts. It could be requiring a wheelchair or having limited movement. It could be visual impairments, blindness, but also things like color blindness. All of these things change how you can use digital software.

And there's a lot of invisible impairments like deaf blindness. And when we talk about compliance, we mean all of the above. We're trying to make this a platform that is usable for everybody. And next slide.

And and I don't need to speak to the importance of this, but if it is not accessible, it puts our users at a disadvantage, and it puts people in the classroom at a disadvantage or guardians who are helping their students at a disadvantage. And we wanna make sure that everybody is set up to succeed. Next slide. So what specifically are we doing to prepare?

Let's jump into it. We've always worked to be an accessible platform. We've always had accessibility tooling, and we've we've really invested in that. It is a positive for a very vulnerable user base, and it's also just a sign of a well built platform.

It helps with SEO. It helps with automation, and it helps with QA testing. Next slide, please. So we've had a self made VPAT for the CMS product, the public facing websites, since twenty twenty four.

With these new regulations, it does change a little bit about how we communicate that compliance with the VPATs, and we're producing more VPATs to make sure that every part of our platform is covered. Next slide. So when it also means that we're working now with a third party accessibility vendor, Levels Access. We've been working with them since late twenty twenty four.

When we began auditing this third party auditing, it's great. It introduces a lot of external expertise. We were already very compliant. So I feel like we're in a very strong spot to meet this moment, but we're now making sure that we're fully, compliant across all platforms.

Next slide. So how exactly does a VPAT communicate compliance? We have this standard, the w WCAG two point two report, and it has a really long list of criterion that it will evaluate. And we have third party manual reviewers that go in and test the platform and see how each criterion does, and it will say it supports it.

Like, it works. It partially supports it. It it kinda works, or it does not support it. It's not applicable, and it's not evaluated.

For to to say that the platform supports it for a particular user flow or criterion, it means they must be able to complete the task accessibly even if every possible path to that task is not accessible. And I have a good example of that next. But these accessibility requirements apply to outcomes and making sure that end users can use the path the platform. So file upload is a really good example.

There are two ways on the platform if you're making an announcement to at attach files. There's a drag and drop uploader, which is a really great usability feature. People like to use drag and drop uploader, it's nice to have. And there's also an upload file button.

If we look at the accessibility outcomes of those two paths, the drag and drop just does not meet accessibility standards. It doesn't work with a keyboard, and it doesn't work with screen readers. But the upload file button is fully accessible. So when it's going through the audit or, a manual reviewer is looking at this, this criterion would be marked as supports because users have at least one accessible way to complete the task.

Next slide. And then this is a snippet of one of our VPATs. A VPAT is typically a twenty to thirty page document. It evaluates a lot of criterion.

So in this one, you can see in this screenshot, it's looking at focus order. Does it make sure that you can focus on the specific components and tab through components? We are looking at link purpose that supports it. So there will be a very long list of criterion that get evaluated, and it is common to see some partially supports ratings.

We're constantly building and evolving our platform, and not just our platform. If you're looking at VPATs for other platforms, you'll see some partially support ratings. It is complex. There are different edge cases.

What matters most is transparency and progress. A VPAT is not a pass fail test. It's a tool to communicate how a product currently performs and the plan to remediate any gaps. And that intent is the most important important part of this compliance if we have, a remediation process in place.

And when we create new software and maybe there's a rough edge case or we find a really unique edge case that we need to better support, it goes through our remediation process and we move it from partially supports to fully supports. And as part of this compliance, that remediation plan and transparency is really what we're trying to do and what the compliance or the regulations are trying to to force. So a little bit of nuance here. We make the platform capable of compliant pages and screens when used as intended.

We cannot guarantee custom code, PDFs, or user color choices stay compliant. So for us to have completely accessible platforms, it is gonna be a combination of us and you, and we try to create more and more tools and training to help you guys enforce this as well. We're gonna have some more content on this in a little bit. But to be really compliant and to create the best accessible experience for our users, it is gonna be a relationship where we create the the framework for a really built out technically compliant space, and then you guys work on making sure that we're making the best content choices to stay in compliance.

Brittany Keil: Alright. So now thank you so much, Mitch, and to pass it on to Sarah, who's going to talk about this content and how we can partner together to make sure that we are building accessible school websites.

Sara Berley: Absolutely, thank you. So hi everybody, excited to chat about this and I love that Mitchell touched on the piece of this is an us thing as well as a you thing.

So I'm here to touch on the you side of things and talk about how we can really make sure that we're not running into any issues or trouble when it comes to ADA. Something important to note right out of the gate, ADA compliance is not just something for the super to keep an eye on or for your comms directors. This is going to be something that all of your staff need to be aware of so that you can best support your community. Since we've talked about ADA a little bit, let's look at some best practices in regards to interface design and user experience.

Starting that out, we do hear a lot from school leaders who are working to cultivate hospitality in their districts or really who are thinking about customer service and great user experience is in that same vein of things. Let's jump right into it on the next slide and take a look at POR. The current WCAG standards focus on four key principles that we're going to look at together when it comes to accessibility. You've got perceivability, operability, understandability, and of course, robustness.

Let's talk about perceivability Right? Is our content perceivable? Do images have really strong alt text? Audio only content like podcasts?

Do they have descriptive transcripts attached to them? Do videos have synchronized captions? And then does text contrast match with the background that you're trying to use? Those are all important things to make sure that people are able to perceive your content.

On the operable side of things, is your content easy to navigate when people visit the site? Users have to have access to all functionality using only a keyboard, so that's an important thing to note here. Do pages have descriptive information and page titles? Do those match what you're clicking on when you go to the menu space?

Then, of course, can users determine where a link will take them by looking at that link alone? Understandable is going to be the next piece of course. Digital content that your district shares should always be easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. This is going to make things a lot easier for your entire audience, but especially people using adaptive technology to navigate any of your digital spaces.

Some examples of this would be a web page's code that needs to indicate what language and content is written into it. Elements that remain consistent throughout a website, like your top navigation, your menu pieces should be labeled the same way, presented in the same order on every page that somebody goes to. And then online Forbes, those have to be clearly identify identifiable, and they have to be able to identify potential errors like skipped input and provide easy access to a problematic element as well as indicate how errors can be fixed. And then we have one more piece on that one.

So the robust piece. When we think about being robust, your digital content has to be able to be reliably interpret interpreted by a variety of different browsers and assistive technologies. Content should remain accessible even when people are looking at it from a mobile device, from a normal web browser, or even using a screen reader to read that. Examples for that would be your content has to be coded correctly and have complete start to end tags in it.

Then your content should be accessible even if someone is using an older version of an operating system. Sometimes we forget about that piece. Let's jump into contrasting colors. So I am a fun fact girl.

And when I start out contrasting colors, just a couple of fun facts for you. Did you know that one in twelve men are color blind? So if you are on this webinar and you're having trouble seeing this and you're a man, may have some color blindness going on there. And about one in two hundred women are also color blind.

So that gives us a startling roughly three hundred million people that experience some form of color blindness. So this is a really good example. When you're looking at texts that have colored backgrounds, if things get too similar, it all very quickly looks like a big block of nothing. So when in reality you're trying to get across this important information, people are taking nothing away if they cannot read it.

So this example specifically comes from Colorado State University's Assistive Technology Resource Center. And if you're squinting at some of these boxes on the screen right now, then you can easily see how this could be problematic for any of your community members, stakeholders that are visiting your website. You'll sometimes see this happening in website menus or footer areas, and if people can't read it, they're not going to interact with the content, which defeats the whole purpose. Fun with font.

Font is another big area where two things have to be clear. A, you want font to be clear to read, but it also needs to be the right size. Looking at this, I like to think of font and being almost like a Goldilocks zone. It's too little, people can't read it.

It's too large, it looks clunky, it doesn't feel right. You really want to make sure that your font is in that sweet spot of readability while also not being too overwhelming when people come to the website. Another font example we've got here. Can anybody read what this says?

I know you guys can't answer back to me, but take a good look at this. So would you want large chunks of your website to look like this? The answer is probably not. Right?

So although this is a really, really pretty font example, this is actually from Purdue University's Writing Lab. It's beautiful, but it is not always easy to look at. And when somebody comes to your website or is reading the content that you're taking in, we want it to be an easy and quick experience. Sometimes really trying to pay attention to that font choice, avoid these beautiful fonts, save them for something else, and make sure you're using clear, concise font that is easily readable.

You got to be able to convey that information. Let's explore this even further. Talking about alt text. Alt text is a very, very hot topic, but people that are considered blind and are able to navigate computers and web through different things typically are using assistive technology.

Right? So we're talking about screen readers. It's really incredible and really exciting that people have access to tech that can do these things. But screen readers, for example, will take text from a web page and read it out loud to somebody.

So what we're seeing here is alternative text that would pop up on a screen reader. Let's go to that next slide. All right, so this is an example of text that a screen reader is going to grab and pull from a photo. The previous photo you saw was actually the Barstow Memorial School marching band.

Of course, you can see the alt text here is telling you Barstow marching band. Now, this could be crucial for a blind website user or somebody that does have visual disabilities when visiting your site. They can't see the photos. They're relying on that screen reader to tell them what's going on in that image.

Another role of alternative text is to display when an image fails to load. So if they're on a website and even somebody that is visually able comes across an image, if it's not loading, they can rely on that alt text to tell them exactly what's going on in that image. If implemented correctly, nothing can be lost to any user when it comes to the alt text piece. Make sure you're putting strong alt text out there.

Ideally, you should provide an image description every time you upload an image to your site so you don't have to worry about going back and doing it later. If are one of our Apptegy users, this looks very familiar to you. You do have to put alt text in when you add an image on the site. So Apptegy ThrillShare users are prompted for a description whenever they upload an image, it's about making it really, really easy so you don't forget to do it later on.

An important thing to note here, image one, three dot JPEG is not an alt tag. You want to stay away from those very generic tags that you can add to photos and make it as descriptive as possible. As a common accessibility issue, it's worth keeping this in mind. Captions for video content.

A lot of content on the web right now is video content, which is great. Who doesn't love to hop on a district website and watch a cool video of something going on, you telling your story? But video content has a big area to watch out for, and that's gonna be your captions. So people with auditory issues issues need to be able to access the same information that everyone else is accessing when they go to that video.

If you're a school leader who likes to use a lot of video messaging to reach out to your school community, or if you work with somebody that does, so maybe you're in comms, don't neglect your captions. Your audience would miss out on really important information when it comes to this. There are a lot of tools out there, including YouTube. It's really great to auto generate captions for your video content.

But how does auto generation for captions truly work? If we go into this next slide, this is an example of audio captions can be your best friend or your worst enemy. In this case, you're going to see the image here shows how important captions really can be. Obviously, you don't want anybody to get the wrong information from what you're putting out there.

Here we see a video of somebody broiling something in the oven. The spoken audio reads this to people as broil on high for four to five minutes. You should not preheat your oven. Whereas the automatic captioning added after the fact says broil on high for forty five minutes, you should know to preheat the oven.

So we have some differing information there. Right? And some potentially dangerous information as well. We want to make sure even though automated captions are fantastic, check those captions after the fact.

Make sure that they still are relaying the message that your spoken audio is getting across. Documents. Documents is another huge piece that lots of people have been chatting about when it comes to ADA compliance. It's super important to make sure that your documents are accessible for anybody who visits that website.

A few things that we can do here to ensure that document accessibility, pay attention to your structures and your styles. Are you using built in headers? You're using heading one, heading two, as opposed to coming in and just adjusting your font size. Is important to do when you're working in a Word doc, a Google doc.

It creates a logical outline rather than just, like I said, increasing font size. It's going to make it easier for screen readers to follow through. Another big thing is going to be PDF tagging. So PDF tagging is essential when it comes to accessibility, providing a hidden structure layer.

So for your headings, lists, tables, all that good stuff you have in the document to inform your community that allows screen readers to interpret and navigate documents. Lots of PDF tools like Adobe Acrobat, for example, have accessibility tools you can use to auto tag. That way you can manually correct the reading order later and then, of course, add your alt text to images and then fix improper tagging that the system does in the background. If your document includes hyperlinks, make sure your hyperlinks are descriptive.

If I see a hyperlink that says it's gonna take me to a board agenda from January first twenty twenty six, that is exactly where it should take me. Or if it's going to be a annual report, we don't ever wanna just put click here. That can be very deceptive. Right?

And that doesn't give me enough information. So even if you've talked about it up above, avoid click here and label that hyperlink as exactly what that document's gonna go to. And then, of course, don't forget all these other things we've talked about so far in regards to ADA compliance. You still gotta pay attention to things like your color contrast, your font choice, and then all of that good alt text that you're adding to photos.

Just some additional tools, Microsoft Word and then Acrobat, of course, have built in accessibility checkers and they can help you vet your document to make sure that it's accessible for everyone. ADA scavenger hunt. This is a great slide to go ahead and take a little screenshot of, take a picture of your phone. This could be a really great exercise to take back and do with your staff where you come in, you can open up your website and look at one thing you could think that you could approve from an ADA standpoint.

It could be images that you've shared, text on the website, alt text that's been placed, and let us know what you find. What are ways that you could make your website more accessible to everybody? ADA compliance is for everyone. It definitely helps you hone in on that user experience.

When we talk about user experience, it's also good to just talk about how easy is it, how usable, how desirable is our website and how quickly can people find the information that they are looking for. That being said, we're going to hop right into some examples on finding information. Let's start by looking at homepage navigation. This slide is going to be a great example for good strong homepage navigation.

This is Maple Run Unified and they have parked some really important links under their picture gallery here on the homepage that you can see in the form of buttons. These are things like info for the board or document section, budget information. All of these high discussion items are right here where the community can easily get to those. You really want your menu and your page layout to be ordered logically on the page as well as in the code of your website.

So besides making things easier, logical page construction makes it easier for those who lack fine motor skills to control or navigate your website. Apptegy websites are structured for keyboard navigation, so we got your back on that using the tab and enter keys to navigate up and down the screen or on a keyboard because there are plenty of users who navigate web without the use of a computer mouse. We've taken that into account. Search functionality.

This is another big one. What if someone knows what they're looking for on your website? They come and they know exactly what they want to find, but they don't immediately see it linked, say in your button bar or in that top section. They need to have a reliable way to hop in there and find that.

Enrollment is a big topic of conversation right now. I've got a kindergartner. I want to come and enroll them. Is there a search bar or functionality I can use to quickly find that information?

This is an example from Bennington Rutledge supervisory union. If someone is searching for enrollment information, for example, they're able to quickly and easily find the useful information that they need. Booth navigation. We talked about I'm coming to the site, I got a kindergartner to enroll.

I know what I'm looking for. Sometimes people are going to visit your website and they may have no idea what they're looking for. Maybe they're just perusing. We want to make sure that we have it accessible and information easy to find and navigate for those people as well.

Having an orderly menu, not sections within subsections, but a menu that very clearly lays out, here's who we are, here's what parents need. If a staff member, here's what you might need for employment. So we clearly order those. This menu is an example Essex Westford School District and it is a very clear presentation of what I'm talking about here.

An orderly menu with nested options that make finding information really easy, as well as easy to explore if you come in just wanting to know more about the district. All right. Responsive websites. Another hallmark of a well constructed website is responsiveness.

That is to say, as you change screen dimensions, the website adjusts and it's going to adapt. Adapt. You want to look good on any screen people are visiting you from. So if you're on a phone, a cell phone, a computer, try visiting this first website, that w w w dot weather dot gov.

And once you pull that one up, then I want you to try this next website, the dot sbschools dot net. If you don't have access to look at these, we've got them pulled up for you on this next screen so we can see some massive differences here in regards to responsiveness on our websites. One of these very, very pleasing, right? Very easy to utilize.

The other one, not so much. We're looking at very small font. It's harder to navigate. This is what we mean by a responsive website, and hopefully your website can be responsive to any device that your web visitors are viewing it on.

Finally, let's talk about interactions and brand touch points. Every interaction that someone has with your school is a brand touch point. That could be their experience in your carpool line, their interactions with their kiddos teachers at an open house, or it could be their experience coming to your school website. That could be the only brand interaction they have with you.

So you want to make sure that it's a good one. Schools more often than not, as you all know, are a hub for your community. And you very much want everyone's experience to be a great experience. A frustrating or bad experience isn't just a wasted opportunity to impress somebody.

It can actively harm your brand and unintentionally drive away prospective students, parents, and staff that are looking to plant roots there in your community. So we really wanna take that accessibility and that openness seriously when it comes to the website piece. So what we're seeing here, this is Peter Moorville's user experience user experience honeycomb. He's done a lot of very influential work in the field of user experience and design.

And all of the things make up this honeycomb or all of the things that make up this honeycomb are aspects of things that can delight a stakeholder or could truly infuriate them when it comes to a site. I do want to note here that you will see accessible is listed. You'll also see that usable and usefulness are listed. So if your design approach isn't fitting into these buckets in Subway, it's probably not a good user experience.

When your school community is on your website, they're forming an impression of you and of your district, much the same way that they would in those carpool line interactions or in those open house situations. So we want to make sure that each interaction people have with your school is truly an opportunity to strengthen your brand and build trust with your district.

Alrighty. So if you'd like to study the accessibility standards a little more in-depth, you can scan here and it's going to give you a great reference guide. Definitely recommend you pull those phones out and scan that QR code.

Brittany Keil: All right, thank you so much, Sarah. That was fantastic. Thank you to Sarah and Mitch and Amanda for taking everybody through our ADA presentation.

We are just about to wrap up, but I have a few key takeaways that I wanted to make sure I left everybody with. First, Apptegy has always committed to accessibility and we're going to continue to do that work. We're going to do everything we can to ensure our platforms meet the needs of your entire community. We've talked about this before, I'm sure you've followed along, but all means all to us.

And that means taking accessibility very seriously every day. We are collecting the FAQs that we get from this webinar, and we'll send you an email update once we have the recording and some of those FAQs later this week. If you still have questions, please go ahead, continue to use the Q and A. We have a dedicated team who's manning that right now.

And then finally, if your district needs a VPAT, which not every district does, but if your district is one, we expect to have updated versions available in the few weeks to share out. Thank you all so much for joining us. I couldn't be happier to have you here and happier to be working on this with you. And please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, we're excited to partner with you.