The state is nearing the end of a pilot project involving the Aria ASL (American Sign Language) app, which enables people to access a trained interpreter when interacting with Colorado Department of Labor and Employment officials, and at museums, historical sites and the state Capitol. The service is free for up to 30 minutes a session.
That program “will soon be expanded to all state agencies and buildings, mirroring the availability of the Explorer service,” Karen Pellegrin, senior program manager of the state’s Technology Accessibility Program (TAP) in the Colorado Office of Information Technology (OIT), said via email.
The Aria ASL app is similar to the Aria Explorer app, which is available statewide to people who are blind or have low vision.
TAP established agency-specific digital access adoption plans, Pellegrin said, and its team is “now shifting focus to continuous improvement and monitoring.”
To measure accessibility efforts, TAP is developing an updated accessibility maturity model, officials said.
“We aren’t sure what this new model will look like yet, but we are currently gathering feedback from our agency stakeholders and will likely have a new model template and dashboard to manage and track this ongoing work,” Pellegrin said.
Another feature of Colorado’s accessibility journey is the state’s Empathy Lab, which educates state agencies on how people with disabilities use accessible and inaccessible technologies. The Empathy Lab added 12 new members to its Community Steering Committee, which contributes to the Lived Experiences Library, allowing agencies to hold sessions to review products and service accessibility, and to gather insights into how people with specific disabilities would use them, Pellegrin said.
A report released earlier this month by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers offers guidance and assistance for CIOs as they develop plans to meet looming federal digital accessibility requirements. The U.S. Department of Justice has mandated, generally, that all local and state government websites — and mobile apps — be compliant with digital accessibility standards.
The office of the Colorado attorney general and OIT have been working to update guidance around meeting federal and state digital accessibility requirements — namely, officials said, by reconciling the federal regulations mandate and the state’s requirements.
Federal requirements state that all public web and mobile content be fully accessible, while Colorado’s requirements “extend accessibility requirements to other digital products, including internal-facing websites, applications, documents and service kiosks, but they offer other ways to comply with state statutory requirements,” Pellegrin said.
