A new standard for digital accessibility and inclusion

At the end of 2021 the City published a new Digital Accessibility and Inclusion Standard. This is a big step forward in helping departments understand what the City expects from digital products, and in broadening the conversation to encompass other forms of inclusion beyond disability access. It was also a highly collaborative effort.

To get to a workable standard, we formed an internal working group with subject matter experts from Digital Services, the Mayor’s Office on Disability (MoD), and the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA). The development of the standard was spearheaded by The Committee on Information Technology (COIT), the City’s IT governance body, who helped navigate the challenges of getting 57 siloed departments to agree on a single City standard. We also spoke to a range of representative community based organizations to get their input on our draft standard.

San Francisco cares deeply about the principles of equity and inclusion. All departments immediately understood the need for a standard, and agreed that the measures we detailed were the right ones. Our challenges came with the question of implementation — what scope did the standard encompass, how long would it take to implement across everything, and what resources would be needed to get there?

The City already has a Language Access Ordinance that requires ‘vital information’ to be provided in the City’s four main languages (Chinese, English, Filipino, Spanish) but that’s mostly only applied to printed material. The new Standard expands that to include digital material, and makes it clear that vital information should be written at a 5th grade reading level. We are also requiring that content be translated by humans, because the quality of machine translations is not good enough.

The City also already complies with its legal obligations for disability access, but we wanted to go further and make it the City’s standard that we comply with the most recent WCAG Level AA requirements as a minimum.

We added some other elements to our standard that are specific to San Francisco. We want to make sure everyone can access digital information and services, no matter how old their device or slow their connection. Images make pages slower and more costly to load, and this also negatively affects people on limited data plans. With 60% of visits to the City’s main website, SF.gov being made on mobile devices, it’s critical that anything resident-facing and digital should be affordable, secure, and mobile-first.

The standard sets out the timeline for implementation — some departments were concerned that it would take them a long time and cost a lot of money to get things translated and re-written, so we reached an agreement that felt fair and would still ensure that most departments comply with the standard within 2 years. Any new digital resident-facing content or tools must comply right away. Any department that moves their website to SF.gov will automatically be compliant because the web platform embodies the principles of accessibility and inclusion that are written in the standard.

We hope this standard will serve as inspiration for other cities and local governments that are working on redesigning their websites and digital services. We also want the public to expect better from their City interactions, no matter their background, technical abilities, or access to hardware and connectivity. Everyone should be able to access City services quickly and easily on any device, in their own language.