Each department will be able to make specific information public. Those who subscribe to that subject material will receive periodic updates by e-mail.
The software checks the selected subject-matter pages for changes, including PDFs, on a regular basis, and then forwards an e-mail to a subject-matter administrator to check for accuracy. E-mails can include graphics. And the system allows departments to get demographic information from users. A content management system makes it so that a non-IT person can manage the information.
ePropTax
Another service unveiled at a recent Sacramento County e-Government workshop provides additional property tax information. Since April 2003, the county has processed 417,000 property tax bills totaling $1.1 billion in revenue through its Web site, and it gets 15,000 visitors per month. The system allows a user to check a property tax bill by entering the parcel number. Names and addresses are not required to help ensure privacy. A user can find out the current balance and how much will be due in the next billing cycle. By the end of the year, the county hopes to make it easier for citizens to pay their property taxes online and to obtain more information on the levies connected to a parcel. The update to the ePropTax system will also include a Web-based front end to the mainframe system that houses the property tax data.
Because of privacy concerns, the system will not allow users to view past property tax bills paid on a particular parcel nor be connected to the county's planned e-mail notification system.
Mobile Services
Because of a new mobile services contract, county staff can access information via Blackberry. Those gathered for the session were briefed on the capabilities of Blackberries and learned how to send and retrieve e-mail, look up names in the address book and schedule meetings with the devices. Staff at the session, who were given a test drive of the devices, were very excited about this new capability.
Currently, six county departments are using the devices including the Assessor's Office, Board of Supervisors, Coroner's Office, the Office of Communications and Information Technology, the Sac County Airport system and Voter Registration and Elections.
Accessibility
In a session on designing county Web pages for accessibility he strengths of accessibility validators were discussed, including Cynthia Says, Its accessibility report is very similar to Sacramento County's accessibility checklist. The presentation of accessibility information with Bobby is more visually oriented with its use of hard hats and question marks to denote areas of the site that may present problems to handicapped users. It also includes support for checking Web sites against Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
WAVE is another graphical accessibility tool, the strength of which is that it indicates the order in which the page would be read to a visually impaired person by a page reader. Vischeck allows a developer to see how the page being checked would look to a person who is colorblind.
Things to Check
The first thing that one should do to ensure accessibility, said Kristin Echols, a senior IT analyst with the MIS Web Engineering Group of the Municipal Services Agency, is to ensure the Web page is written using valid HTML. If the HTML is valid, the page is much more likely to be accessible. Other things to ensure are that images contain meaningful "alt" tags, form controls have labels and PDFs are handicapped accessible. If your PDF converts to HTML, chances are it's accessible, Echols explained. Additionally, Acrobat contains other tools for testing the accessibility of PDFs. Echols recommended the book Designing with Web Standards to further help Web designers tackle accessibility issues.
