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. We'll focus on practical steps districts can take to begin addressing accessibility across their digital presence. We’ll also 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. Register to reserve your spot!

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Transcript

Brittany Keil: Alright, let's go ahead and get started. As I said earlier, welcome to our webinar. We are excited to talk about the 2026 ADA update, and how Apptegy can partner with you to meet this moment. I'm going to go through our agenda, and then I'm going to introduce myself.

Brittany Keil: So, my name is Brittany Keil, and I'm the Senior Manager of Research and Media, and I'll talk about myself a bit more in a minute, but I wanted to make a few housekeeping notes and talk about what we're going through today.

Brittany Keil: So first, we'll be introducing what the ADA Title II updates are, and we'll be learning how Apptegy's platform is prepared to meet the moment, and going through some tips and tricks, to help your district prepare for success.

Brittany Keil: And then, as for housekeeping tips, I have two quick notes to share. First, we will be sharing the webinar recording after, later this week, so if you have to hop off early, or you're interrupted, don't worry, we will send this content to you.

Brittany Keil: Along with a set of resources, that will make navigating the ADA Title II changes even easier.

Brittany Keil: And then second, and this is an important one, our client success team is currently manning the Q&A function for this webinar. So if you have questions, we ask that that's how you submit them. We are not monitoring the chat for this webinar, so please use the Q&A, and our client success team will work as hard as possible to get an answer to you.

Brittany Keil: If they are not able to get an answer to you during the webinar, they will follow up afterwards, so don't worry, your questions will be answered. We'll also be sharing an FAQ after this webinar that goes through some of the most common questions that we hear in the chat.

Brittany Keil: Alright, so just to recap that, we will be sharing a recording, and please use the Q&A function to ask any questions from our wonderful client success team.

Brittany Keil: So, as I mentioned, my name is Brittany Kyle, and I'm the Research and External Relations Manager for School CEO Magazine. I've worked with School CEO for 5 years now, and a big part of that time, I've been working on research and some of the best practices for school leaders.

Brittany Keil: On this slide, you can see, you know, a couple important points about me. First, I have my wonderful daughters. The smaller one here, who is in the Seahawks jersey, is turning one next week, which, seems impossible to me. She feels like a newborn.

And then I have a first grader in public schools here in, the Edmonds, Washington area. She's a big K-pop Demon Hunters fan, and she's also very, very proud. She wants everyone to know she reads at a third grade level. Very important. Third grade.

Brittany Keil: Something that is unique about me, that changes the way I approach, ADA, compliance and ADA updates in general is that I spent, nearly a decade as a special education teacher. My first year teaching was actually in Batu Pahat, Malaysia. You can see me dancing the Zapin, in one of

Brittany Keil: In the picture on the bottom, that's a local Malaysian dance. If you have a Malaysian connection, please reach out to me. I'm actually taking my family to visit my village this summer. I'm really excited to get to, you know, show them off and introduce them to a culture that's very important to me.

Brittany Keil: So in that work as a special educator, I experienced what the ADA means and where it lapses many, many times. And I'm excited to dig into the content around ADA updates, from this lens, and then also through the lens of the good work that you do and the Apptegy does with you.

Brittany Keil: So first, why are we here? So, we know there's been a lot of conversation lately about the new ADA updates, and what they mean for school communities.

Brittany Keil: 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 supports your goals and your community.

Brittany Keil: Our team's focus is on giving you the right tools so that you can focus on what you do best, which is communicating with your students and families.

Brittany Keil: Alright, so let's jump in. What are the 2026 ADA updates?

Brittany Keil: So, at a high level, what does this mean? The new compliance focuses heavily on digital spaces, which is a new, a new thing, somewhat, for the ADA.

Brittany Keil: People often assume that digital spaces are, naturally more accessible than physical ones, because physical ADA compliance is super-duper visual. You think ramps, you think railings, you think elevators. However, digital accessibility requires the same amount of intentional work, but it's a lot less obvious to the eye.

Brittany Keil: So, in this webinar, we'll clarify what digital accessibility entails, and share our intentional approach to achieving it.

Brittany Keil: We've always measured and prioritized our platform's accessibility, and these new guidelines finally provide a concrete standard for that work that we're excited to share with you today.

Brittany Keil: So when we're talking about the 2.1 update, it's important for us to be specific about the technical requirements.

Brittany Keil: We are aiming for WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance, and this is the clear industry-recognized benchmark.

Brittany Keil: To remain transparent, we communicate our progress to you and to the Office for Civil Rights, probably you know as the OCR, through VPATs, which are Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates.

Brittany Keil: which serve as our officially official accessibility report card. I'm going to return to VPATs later, so if you didn't catch that, don't worry, feel free just to stay tuned.

Brittany Keil: With this update, there are also firm deadlines to keep in mind, and this is something that I think is pushing a lot of the conversation. For districts serving more than 50,000 people, the compliance deadline is April 24th, 2026, so that's this year.

Brittany Keil: Smaller districts, who support communities of fewer than 50,000 have a deadline of next year, April 2026-2027.

Brittany Keil: I think that it's really important to note, that this is not based on your school population, but rather the community you serve. And that community is defined, in interesting ways, and I, you know, really,

Brittany Keil: encourage you to work with your legal team to see which of these deadlines apply to you. Even districts who serve, you know, a small population, but are in a county, that serves much more have found themselves in the 2026 deadline.

Brittany Keil: So, why does this matter? Beyond the legal requirements, this is about people.

Brittany Keil: A significant portion of the global population, and the students and families that we serve every day, live with some form of disability. And when people talk about ADA compliance, there's sometimes this idea that it's about edge cases, and that's just not the truth. It's about real people every day, people that we interact with all the time.

Brittany Keil: This is personal to me. So, as I mentioned, before I worked at Apptegy, I worked, as a special education teacher. And in that work, I saw again and again hundreds of instances of when people were denied spaces where they needed to be.

Brittany Keil: Sometimes this was physical. Fun fact, I once took a student who used a wheelchair to the DMV to get her state ID, and they were doing painting, and we were not able to use the accessible entrance, and so there was no way for her to get into it.

Brittany Keil: But a lot of the other instances that I saw were digital. So, I saw students whose screen readers wouldn't allow them to take online standardized tests because of the lockdown mechanics. I have never seen, and I have been out of the classroom for 5 years, so hopefully this is improved, an on-screen calculator that is navigable by joystick.

Brittany Keil: These are important, you know, things to consider as we think about access to our spaces, and I'm so excited about the work in this update that helps us to be even stronger when it comes to accessibility.

Brittany Keil: But, and I think this is something that, you know, is important to consider, this isn't just about students. Because when we work with students, we often have the ability to step in and make it right, or assist them when they have a poor accessibility experience.

Brittany Keil: When it comes to families and the broader community, however, this is not the case. A poor experience with our website or an inaccessible part of our website could be the only instance or experience that they have with the district. And, you know, we already have very few touchpoints with the broader community. We don't want to make any of them negative.

Brittany Keil: So I probably don't need to emphasize why this matters so much to the people on this call. I hope I'm preaching to the choir here, but simply put, inaccessible digital spaces put all of our users at a disadvantage. So whether it's a student in the classroom or a guardian trying to support their child at home, we want to make sure that we ensure absolutely everybody in our community is set up to succeed when it comes to our digital spaces.

Brittany Keil: So, what specifically is Apptegy doing to meet this moment?

Brittany Keil: So first, accessibility has always, been important to us. It's not a new initiative for us.

Brittany Keil: We've always invested heavily in accessibility tooling because it's the right thing to do for all of our population, but especially our vulnerable users. And beyond the human element, it's also just the hallmark of a well-built website. Strong accessibility naturally improves SEO, streamlines automation, and enhances Q&A testing.

Brittany Keil: So to track and communicate this progress, we've maintained a self-generated VPAT for our CMS project, our public-facing websites, since 2024.

Brittany Keil: But what is a VPAT? And this is something that, is going to become, I think, very quickly in the vernacular among school communicators and leaders.

Brittany Keil: So a VPAT is a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It's a standardized document used by vendors to report how their IT products, such as software, hardware, and websites, conform to accessibility standards like WCAG.

Brittany Keil: Aptaege has partnered with a third-level auditor, Level Access, to evaluate how our tools address each accessibility standard, and we're currently finalizing our VPATs and will share them soon whenever they're available.

Brittany Keil: I like to think of a VPAT as a digital report card for a product, and I think that this is, you know, something that's especially helpful for educators.

Brittany Keil: Before we go deeper into VPATs, I did want to give a little bit of background about Apptegy and accessibility. So, as I mentioned, we've always valued accessibility. We know that this goes beyond, as they put it, edge cases, and more in view accessibility more through the lens of universal access.

Brittany Keil: Furthermore, we've continued to grow and develop our products as ADA updates have come to the market, and as they've been published, and as accessibility online has become better understood.

Brittany Keil: As I mentioned earlier, to help us do this, we've partnered with an industry-leading third-party accessibility vendor called Level Access. We've been working with them since 2024, but we believe that bringing in a third-party auditors has been fantastic because it introduces a deep level of external expertise to our products.

Brittany Keil: We were already prioritizing… because we were already prioritizing accessibility, we were in a very strong position. We began this process, and now it's just about ensuring that every single touchpoint we have are officially compliant across the board.

Brittany Keil: So what Level Access does is this. They do manual reviews and produce the VPATs, the Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates, on all four of our platforms. Web, iOS, Android, and CMS Public.

Brittany Keil: None of our VPATs are self-prepared, and this is important to us. We love having that third-party expertise.

Brittany Keil: That matters for regulations like Colorado's. And currently, we're working on a 20… Our web has a 2025 VPAT, and CMS Public is on the way, as are our other products.

Brittany Keil: So, how exactly does a VPAT communicate compliance? It evaluates our platform against a comprehensive list of WCAD criteria, and if you've looked into this criteria, you know just how nitty-gritty it can be.

Brittany Keil: So third-party manual reviewers test our platform and assign one of five statuses to each criterion. Support, which means it works. Partially support, which means it works with some caveats. Does not support, not applicable, not applicable, excuse me, or not evaluated.

Brittany Keil: What's important to understand here is that accessibility is ultimately about outcomes, so to earn a supports rating, a user must be able to complete a task accessibly, even when not every single path to the task is perfectly accessible.

Brittany Keil: A great example of this in our product is file uploading. So if you're making an announcement, there are two ways to attach a file. You can use the drag-and-drop uploader, which is highly popular for a lot of folks, or you can use the standard upload file button.

Brittany Keil: If we look at the accessibility outcomes here, the drag-and-drop feature actually isn't accessible. There's no way to do it with a keyboard or screen reader. However, the upload file button is fully accessible. So when a manual reviewer audits this, it's marked as support, because there's one prominent, accessible way to accomplish a task.

Brittany Keil: This is actually a snippet of one of our VPATs. So a VPAT is typically 20 to 30 pages, they're very in-depth, like, man, what a report card.

Brittany Keil: So in this one, you can see, that this is looking at focus order. So, does it make sense that you can focus, does it make sure that you can focus on specific components and tab through components on the website? We're looking at a link purpose and whether it supports it.

Brittany Keil: So there's a very, very long list of criteria that get evaluated, and it's common to see some partially supports ratings.

Brittany Keil: We're constantly building and evolving our platform, and if you're looking at VPATs from other platforms, you'll see some partially support ratings as we rebuild different aspects of our products.

Brittany Keil: So what matters most to us here is transparency and progress. So a VPAT's not a pass-fail test, it's a tool to communicate how a product currently performs.

Brittany Keil: And then a plan to remediate any gaps. And the intent is the most important aspect, aspect of this compliance, because we want to make sure that we have remediation in place for anything that we're still working on.

Brittany Keil: This is, of course, a collaborative process. So while we can guarantee that our tools are accessible, we can't guarantee that any custom code, PDFs, or user color choices stay compliant.

Brittany Keil: For us to have completely accessible platforms, it's a combination of us and you. And as we create more and more tools, we're gonna continue to reinforce this as the norm.

Brittany Keil: So we have some content to go through what the best practices look like for you, but to be really compliant and to create the best accessible experience, this is a relationship where we provide the framework for you to be accessible, and then you make the choices, to make sure that you stay in compliance.

Brittany Keil: So now that we've talked a bit about the ADA and what the process looks like, let's take a look at some common best practices, and some troubles, you know, some trouble areas to avoid getting in trouble with the ADA.

Brittany Keil: So what you'll find is that these are not just best practices for people with disabilities, but also for everyone in general. We hear a lot from school leaders who are working to cultivate hospitality in their districts, or who are thinking about customer service, even through the lens of their website. And great user experience is great customer service.

Brittany Keil: So even if the ADA didn't exist, or if there was no OCR looking over things, you'd want to make sure that your schools feel welcoming to everyone, and ensure that everyone can find the information they need, no matter who they are or how they use digital spaces.

Brittany Keil: So, as we go into the Title II updates, I'm going to introduce this idea of poor.

Brittany Keil: Por is a mnemonic device to help remember, how the current updates want you to think about adding content to your digital spaces. So the current WACAG standards, focus on four key principles. Perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness.

Brittany Keil: So, this is something to keep in mind as you are auditing your own website. So, when we look at perceivable, is your content perceivable? Do your images have strong alt text? Does audio-only content, like podcasts, have descriptive transcripts, and are they accurate?

Brittany Keil: Do videos have synchronized captions? And then, does text contrast with background?

Brittany Keil: Operable? Is your content easy to navigate? For example, users have access to all functionality of your website, only a keyboard. Do pages have descriptive and informative page titles, not just like PDF 378?

Brittany Keil: Can users determine where a link will take them from the link text alone?

Brittany Keil: Understandable, digital content, that your district shares needs to be easy to understand and presented in a logical way. This makes things easier for your entire audience, but especially people using adaptive technology to navigate your digital spaces.

Brittany Keil: And then finally, is your content robust? Does the code start and end with tags? Is it accessible to older browsers, which is something that's difficult? And is it accessible to a variety of devices?

Brittany Keil: Contrasting colors. Did you know that 1 in 12 men are colorblind, and about 1 in 200 women are colorblind as well?

Brittany Keil: This is always a statistic that I think surprises people, especially educators as we, you know, present to so many people. I actually have somebody with colorblindness who lives in my house, so this is a frequent topic of, conversation, especially for my young daughters who don't understand why daddy can't tell the difference between green and red. Go on, it's not that hard.

Brittany Keil: But, when you're colorblind, it can mean that a lot of websites, and a lot of visual elements in general are no longer, you know, visible to you at all.

Brittany Keil: So here is an example, from Colorado State University's Assistive Technology Resource Center. So if you are squinting at some of the boxes on the screen now, it gives you an idea of what can happen if you're not careful with your color contrast.

Brittany Keil: I often see this with menu items in the footer of a site, like, if people can't read it, they're not going to be able to act on the information that it's displaying.

Brittany Keil: I think that this can also happen sometimes when there are various overlays, like maybe you have an athletics website that uses specific colors, but, you know, in general, this is something you just need to keep, an eye on with a color contrast.

Brittany Keil: There's a little bit more to text than just color contrast, though. So you also need to look and ensure that your font is both clear and easy to read, and the correct size.

Brittany Keil: So there's a wide range of visual impairments that can make, small text a really difficult thing for a lot of users. Things are made worse, too, when you use an irregular color or odd font choice.

Brittany Keil: For me, I think a lot about senior citizens. We know that there are a lot of grandparents, who are acting as caregivers, and if our websites are not accessible to them or difficult to read, it only creates a barrier that shouldn't be there.

Brittany Keil: This is also true of really interesting font choices. Can you read what this says? I will say that I can, but having been a high school teacher, I know that many people who are, you know, younger than 25 probably can't. It's also just difficult to read.

I probably wouldn't want one to read an entire, you know, webpage written in this font.

Brittany Keil: This is an example from Purdue University's writing lab, and it shows that while fonts can be pretty, and we all know the secretary, or the PTO person who loves to create flyers with really beautiful scrolling fonts, it often defeats the purpose if it becomes a barrier for somebody to actually ingest the information you're giving.

Brittany Keil: So everything we've talked about so far is a best practice for every single user, regardless of if they have a disability or not. And then in the next session, we're going to look at a few examples where certain segments of your school community really rely on you to get it right.

Brittany Keil: So, the first is alt text. So people with visual impairments navigate computers through the web and through the power of assistive technology. It's really incredible, what some of this tech can do. I've seen some absolutely, you know.

Brittany Keil: mind-blowing, instances of watching people with visual impairments access the website. Sometimes it's, through audio. I had a teenager who could listen to a website faster than I could read it, and it was honestly difficult for me to hear. It was just like, da-da-da-da-da, it was incredible.

Brittany Keil: But screen readers, take text on a website and read it aloud. But what does this mean if your text isn't clear?

Brittany Keil: So this is the alternative text, that's on this picture of the Barstool Marching Band, and you can see, that it, though it identifies who's in the picture, it doesn't identify the action that is happening. My best practice is you want to have a who and a what, at least when it comes to building alt text.

Brittany Keil: So can you think of, you know, something that's a little more descriptive here, if you were creating alt text for this photo? I can, like, obviously the kids are playing, the Barstool, you know, school marching band is playing. It looks like they're also dressed up for Halloween. I think I see a Batman in the front, so there's definitely some context that's being missed in that alt text.

Brittany Keil: So ideally, when you provide alt text, you should provide an image description every single time you upload an image, so you don't have to worry about going back and doing it later. So this image will be, or this, layout will be familiar to Apptegy users, but you see that we prompt, for you to give a description whenever you upload an image.

Brittany Keil: And it's about making it really easy so you don't forget to do it later. Again, when I think back to that partnership slide, we want to create the, you know, the platform that makes accessibility easy, but it's up to you to go the extra mile with the description.

Brittany Keil: So, for example, if you had put image123.jpg as the alt text, that obviously wouldn't be nearly as, you know, as helpful as Jack giving a thumbs up. I feel like the truck here is really cool, so I would add that if I were writing this alt text, but we want at least that, you know, subject in action.

Brittany Keil: A lot of content on the web nowadays is video, and this is great, but video content also has a lot of really big areas to watch out for accessibility. So people with auditory issues, or processing issues in general, need to be able to access any information that you present through a video, just as anyone else.

Brittany Keil: So if you're a school leader who likes to use a lot of video messaging to reach your school community, don't neglect captions, and you want to make sure that those captions are correct. Your audience could miss out on important information if those captions aren't there.

Brittany Keil: And there are a lot of tools out there, including YouTube, that can auto-generate captions, but you want to make sure, again, that these are absolutely accurate. And I have a good example of what that can look like when it fails.

Brittany Keil: So, these are automatic captions, so you can see the spoken audio is broil on high for 4-5 minutes. You should not preheat the oven. But then the automatic caption that it generates is broil on high for 45 minutes. You should know to preheat the oven.

Brittany Keil: I hope that nobody's broiling anything for 45 minutes, at least in my house, that would just cause a whole lot of smoke, but when we think about how, you know, spoken language is heard, and articulated.

Brittany Keil: We want to make sure that the AI tools that we're using are, you know, reporting accurately. And I will say that these have been getting better. I remember having to do, you know, transcripts

Brittany Keil: for YouTube videos maybe 10 years ago, and the suggested audio was almost never right, but things are getting better. However, when you're working with children, or people with, you know, who use English as a second language, you especially want to make sure that, what they're saying is being represented accurately.

Brittany Keil: So it's also super important to make sure your documents are accessible to everyone. And here are a few ways that you can do that. We get a lot of questions about whether or not PDFs are accessible, and the answer is yes, but. So you want to make sure that you do a couple of things to make sure that your, your PDFs are accessible.

Brittany Keil: So you want to structure with styles. So use built-in heading styles, such as Header 1, Heading 2 in Word or Google Docs to create a logical outline, rather than just increasing font size or changing the font choice. This makes it easier for screen readers to follow.

Brittany Keil: Pdf tagging is absolutely essential for accessibility, because it provides a hidden layer of structure that you don't actually see with your visual eye.

Brittany Keil: So, a lot of PDF tools, such as Adobe Acrobat, have accessibility tools that you can… that use AutoTag, and then manually correct the reading order, but you need to, again, make sure that these are correct, and fix any improper tags.

Brittany Keil: If your document includes hyperlinks, you need to make sure that the hyperlinks are descriptive. People should know, by looking at the hyperlinked words alone, exactly what the link will do when they click it. This means linking something like download annual report is better than just saying click here, or see here.

Brittany Keil: And then, while you're dealing with PDFs, don't forget about all the other ADA guidelines we've talked about. You still need to keep up with color contrast, font choice, and alt text for photos in mind.

Brittany Keil: So many tools like Microsoft Word and Acrobat have accessibility checkers built in, and they can help you vet your document, although I wouldn't view them as a catch-all. Human eyes are always better for bad.

Brittany Keil: So, now that we've shown some common ADA issues, I'm going to ask you to take a picture of this slide as a bit of homework to do later.

Brittany Keil: So later I want you to open your website and look for one thing that you think you could improve from an ADA standpoint. Maybe it's a recent image that doesn't have very descriptive alt text, maybe it's text on the website itself, maybe you're looking at fonts, there are a lot of opportunities here to make your spaces even more accessible.

Brittany Keil: And then, you can share with your team what you found. So, like, what are ways that you can make your website even more accessible for everyone?

Brittany Keil: So sometimes ADA compliance can feel like checking a box, and that's understandable, but I think what we want to get across today is that user experience is for everyone. ADA compliance gives us an opportunity to refocus on the same user experience.

Brittany Keil: And how some things really do pay a huge role in your school community's ability to get the most out of your school website.

Brittany Keil: Ada compliance is customer service. It is, hospitality. And when we look at this as, checking a box, I think we miss the people aspect of this.

Brittany Keil: So, a few more things we want to walk through, is we want to talk about navigation and how we can make it easier for everyone, anyone and everyone, to find information on your school website.

Brittany Keil: That's why people who are navigating on your site, they want to answer a question or find a particular resource, and we need to make sure that we're not creating barriers so that they cannot do this easily.

Brittany Keil: So here's an example of what this can look like on your homepage. Mabel Run Unified has parked some really important links, under their picture gallery here on their homepage. Things like information further on their board, their document section, budget information, it's all right here and easily to find.

Brittany Keil: You want your menus and page layout to be ordered logically on the page, as well as the code of your website. Besides making things easier, a logical page construction also makes it easier for those who lack fine motor skills to navigate your website with a keyboard, joystick, or else, or something else.

Brittany Keil: Apptegy websites are structured for keyboard navigation using the tab and enter keys on the keyboard, because there are plenty of users who navigate the web without the use of a computer mouse.

Brittany Keil: What if a resource, what if somebody knows that a resource exists, but they're not seeing it on a link to your homepage? This is where having a good search function comes in handy, especially one that allows you to really dig into your site's content.

Brittany Keil: This is an example from Bennington Rutland Supervisory Union, so if somebody's looking for enrollment, for example, they're able to quickly and easily find that information.

Brittany Keil: What if somebody doesn't have a particular page or a section of their website in mind, but is looking for something more in general? If someone wants to manually look through your website, it should be easy for them to do so, whether they're using a computer mouse, keyboard, or something else.

Brittany Keil: Having an orderly menu, so, like, not sections within subsections within subsections, makes it easy for any, website user.

Brittany Keil: So this is the menu from the Essex Westford School District, and it shows what I'm talking about. They have a very beautiful, orderly menu, with nested options, they make finding information very easy. It's also easy to explore if you're just trying to understand more about the website in general.

Brittany Keil: Another hallmark of a well-constructed site is responsiveness, and that is to say that if you change screens' dimensions or devices, the website adjusts and adapts.

Brittany Keil: You want to look good on any screen. So if you want, you can go ahead and take your smartphone and look at these two websites. So we have weather.gov, which seems like it should be important and very accessible, and then sbschools.net.

Brittany Keil: If you don't have, your, you know, phone on you, or are just following along, which of these do you think it was made, to be accessible and adaptable, and which of these is not responsive? And this is what we mean by responsive website. How hard would you have to scroll to actually understand what is going on in this weather map?

Brittany Keil: pretty hard. I joke with my team a lot that, you know, things are not set up for old eyes. Like, I feel like I'm always, zooming in, even when I'm wearing glasses. But that is not the case for the South Burlington School District website.

It is big, it is beautiful, and it is viewable on any kind of screen.

Brittany Keil: So every interaction someone has with your district is a brand touchpoint. This could be an experience they have in the Caribel line, or their interactions with their child's teachers. But there… this also means that, it includes the experience that your families and students have on your website. And you want everybody's experience to be a good one.

Brittany Keil: So this is Peter Morville's user experience honeycomb. He's done a lot of influential work on the field of user experience design, and all of the things that make up this honeycomb are aspects that can either delight a customer or infuriate them.

Brittany Keil: So note that accessible is on here, as is usable and useful. If your design approach isn't fitting into these buckets, it's not a good user experience.

Brittany Keil: So when your school community is on your website, they're already forming an impression of your district, even if it's their very first interaction.

Brittany Keil: So what are they, you know, what is the message they're getting? Is your website accessible? Is it easy to navigate? Is it not?

And how can you change that to get there?

Brittany Keil: So, if you'd like to study up on the accessibility standards in greater depth, you can scan here for a very handy reference guide. I will keep this… I will pop back to this QR code in just a minute, but I do want to touch on some takeaways before we wrap up.

Brittany Keil: So the two most important takeaways are this. Apptegy has always been committed to accessibility, and we are here to partner with you to continue doing everything we can to make sure that the platform meets the needs of your entire community. That's our whole thing. We want to help you be a better communicator, and we know an accessible website is part of that.

Brittany Keil: And then the second, follow-up is this. We want you to keep an eye out on your inbox, because we'll be follow-ups… following up soon. If your district needs a VPAT, which not all districts do, we expect to have updated version of those available in the next few weeks, and those will be communicated by your CSM.

Brittany Keil: And then we're collecting FAQs from this webinar, so we'll send you an email update with those later this week. We'll also send you the webinar recording as well.

Brittany Keil: So thank you, thank you so much for partnering us on this journey. I'm excited to… for all of our websites and digital spaces to be even more accessible.

Brittany Keil: I'm gonna pop back to that QR code, and we're gonna keep the webinar open for just a few more minutes as people's questions wrap up, but if you haven't heard an answer to your question, then don't worry, you will be getting, some reach out from our team.

Brittany Keil: So, thank you, and have a wonderful day.