Staff at Wichitia’s City Hall weren’t happy with their virtual footprint. In 2022, they described the city’s website, www.Wichita.gov, as “suboptimal,” “outdated” and “confusing.” So the city spent $312,000 on a website refresh intended to flip that description and create a welcoming and easy-to-use virtual gateway to local government. The city’s communications staff say the project worked. The new version of the Wichita website debuted in December 2023, and staff point to one algorithm’s rating of the website as among the top 3% percent of accessible municipal websites as a success. Local accessibility advocates give the city some credit for the change, saying it’s closer to where the site should be. Though they say it still falls short in accommodating people who are blind or using assistive devices like screen readers to access the government online.Tom Page is a board member for the National Federation of the Blind, the president of the organization’s Kansas affiliate and a member of the Wichita and Sedgwick County Access Advisory Board. He said sounded the alarm on access issues with the city for the better part of a decade.“The city went from a completely unusable website to at least a half usable website now,” Page said. “That marks some improvement and some concern.”What’s changedIn late 2022, Wichita contracted with CivicPlus, a Kansas-based web development company focused on government agencies. The city’s in-house team had built the original website and it hadn’t undergone a major reboot since 2015. CivicPlus promised to streamline what had become a series of confusing web pages. City staff ran Wichita.gov as a space for basic government activities and document storage and offered a separate site, AccessWichita.com, as a place to report and learn about common issues. CivicPlus merged the two into one site, spruced up the page’s aesthetics and helped streamline the website’s navigation to something more intuitive.The company integrated a Google Translate button. Now, the city’s website can be translated into nearly 30 languages and dialects. It’s a change that Tyler Schiffelbein, the city’s communications manager, said was a particular benefit for the city’s outreach to Spanish-speaking and Vietnamese-speaking communities. The latest American Community Survey data for the city estimated that about 68,000 Wichitans — about 18.2% of the population — speak a language other than English at home. Wichita added an accessibility program called AudioEye to its contract with CivicPlus, at a cost of $11,000 a year. AudioEye adds code to the city website that allows users to adjust content for common accessibility features like responsive page elements, color shifts and navigation tools.Adding accessibilityClick on the blue button with the image of a person on the website and you’ll open a panel that offers to tweak text, images and animations. There’s a button that turns off animations that could trigger epileptic seizures. A color shift option increases the website’s tone or hue, so it’s easier for people with color blindness to see the contrast in images and graphics. A font option designed to help people with dyslexia switches the text to characters with thicker bottoms and thinner tops.Features like an enlarged cursor, highlighting and adjustable text size make viewing the page easier for people with low vision. U.S. Census data suggest that about 10,600 Wichitans — or about 2.7% — have vision difficulty, low vision or blindness. CivicPlus also trained city staff on basic accessibility principles — like adding alternative text to images. Schiffelbein said that writing descriptions for images, which screen readers use to convert visuals into audio, is now a formal part of staff onboarding.A city’s responsibilityPage regularly visits the city’s website. He’s often on the ADA transition plan pages, reading about what the city’s doing to make its physical spaces more accessible.He usually avoids navigating from the homepage, using Siri to do a targeted search for whichever page he’s looking for and take him directly there. When he does end up on the city’s homepage, Page said, he finds progress and potholes. Using his screen reader, Page noted improvements to the alternative text. “Here’s an example of a tag that’s working better,” Page said, pausing on a link about restoring suspended driver’s licenses. “It says ‘man in car holding keys.’ OK. So I’ve got an idea. There’s a picture of a man in a car holding keys out a window — good enough.”As he scrolls, the problems pop up. Page’s screen reader is caught in a loop. It keeps jumping to the top of the page, trying to tell Page about a graphic that keeps updating. He then tries the search bar, only to find it won’t let him type any text. Most frustrating of all, on some pages, the AudioEye toolkit trips up Page’s screen reader and blocks him from navigating to the actual content. “You almost have to be a bit of a hacker to use this thing,” Page said. Page and Schiffelbein have talked about how to fix some of the site’s bugs. There’s been some improvement, Page said, but the city needs to do more. “Part of the problem here is that it is a burden to put all of the testing on the customer,” Page said. “Most of us have jobs, other community responsibilities, family responsibilities that prohibit us from being full-time web testers.”This story idea came from notes taken during a meeting of the city’s Diversity, Inclusion and Civil Rights Advisory Board by Wichita Documenters, a program that pays local residents to attend and cover local meetings. To learn more, visit Wichita Documenters.The post Some say Wichita’s new city website still poses problems for people with disabilities appeared first on The Beacon.