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Google Accessibility Advances and Challenges 

Google Accessibility Advances and Challenges 

Homework is a drag for any high schooler, but for the class of 2006’s Laura Palmaro Allen, even starting an assignment required a laborious, multistep process. She and her family had to strip her textbooks from their bindings, run the pages through a high speed scanner, and digitize them — all before she could use text-to-speech software to actually ingest…

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Citizen Engagement, Accessibility, Cybersecurity Are Top Smart City Priorities

Smart City Engagement, Accessibility, Cybersecurity Are Top Priorities

 If you asked a ballroom full of government leaders what keeps them up at night, what do you think they would say?  According to our latest “What’s Next in Digital Communications for Local Government” survey results, expanding citizen engagement, increasing digital accessibility and minimizing cybersecurity risks top their to-do lists. Nearly 370 municipal and county government officials across North America…

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Accessibility awareness remains low as deadline approaches

Accessibility awareness remains low as deadline approaches

Beginning Jan. 18, 2018, government agencies across the U.S. will be required by law to make their websites accessible to the more than 60 million Americans with visual, hearing or other disabilities. Yet more than 87 percent of 430+ local government respondents to Vision’s 2017 What’s Next Survey said they have moderate, weak or no knowledge of federal web accessibility requirements.

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Scant progress on federal website accessibility performance

Scant progress on federal website performance — GCN

Americans depend on more than 4,500 federal websites to access critical government services and information, but a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation finds of 91 percent of the most popular agency websites are failing to perform well in at least one key performance metric.

The second edition of ITIF’s “Benchmarking U.S. Government Websites” report follows up and expands on the initial ITIF report released in March. The organization tested 469 websites using publicly available tools for page-load speed, mobile friendliness, security and accessibility.

“As more people go online for public services and as security threats continue to evolve, it is important for federal websites to be more convenient, accessible, and secure,” ITIF research fellow Galia Nurko said. “This report shows a significant amount of work left to be done to modernize federal websites and ensure that, as technology advances, federal websites improve in turn.”

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