Report 2017-102 Recommendation 25 Responses

Report 2017-102: California Community Colleges: The Colleges Reviewed Are Not Adequately Monitoring Services for Technology Accessibility, and Districts and Colleges Should Formalize Procedures for Upgrading Technology (Release Date: December 2017)

Recommendation #25 To: Los Rios Community College District

To ensure that its website complies with accessibility standards, by June 2018, American River should develop procedures to monitor website accessibility and incorporate steps to prevent instructors from publishing inaccessible content on the college's website. These procedures should include a tracking mechanism to demonstrate how many accessibility errors the college identifies and how long it takes to fix those errors.

Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From October 2023

As mentioned in #24, the District's ICT Plan and ARC's DE Plan address procedures to address website accessibility (both Plans are attached).

In the District's ICT Plan, remediation activities are highlighted on page 34. The remediation section of the plan identifies issues such as broken links, browser compatibility issues, etc., and outlines a process to fix these issues. Page 39 of the ICT Plan creates a policy to track remediation process and activities by applying key performance indicators at periodic milestones.

The District also has a dedicated Technology Accessibility website where students and employees can request for reasonable accommodations and report accessibility issues with any website or content. The Technology Accessibility website serves as a resource for all students and staff, and can be found here: https://losrios.edu/about-los-rios/our-values/technology-accessibility. The link for reporting website accessibility is: https://losrios.edu/about-los-rios/our-values/technology-accessibility/report-accessibility-issue

In addition to the District's efforts, ARC's DE Plan specifically identifies website accessibility as a priority under Priority #2, with the goal of improving online communication and access to timely education. The DE Plan recommends to simplify website content across support services to increase accessibility (see page 29 of 39). With the support of the District, ARC and its staff can ensure that it is monitoring its websites for equitable access.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Fully Implemented

Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From October 2022

Shortly after Los Rios' last response on October 25, 2019, the district entered into remote operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to shifting all its operations online, the district adjusted its accessibility standards in the past three years.

As the pandemic ends and the district shifts to being fully on-ground again, the accessibility standards will be amended to reflect the current needs of students and employees. The district will finalize the formal documentation and forward it to you within a reasonable time.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Pending

Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From October 2019

The process is in place. The College is still working on the formal documentation. It should be ready by December 2019.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Pending

Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From June 2019

Below is the Site Improve procedure to ensure ADA compliance on our web site.

On the first of the month the Media Design Specialist runs the Site Improve accessibility Tool which generates a report. The Specialist can choose to run the accessibility tool more often if page construction in a given month requires it.

A report is created with issues found ranked A, AA, AAA.

The Los Rios Standard is to maintain a AA clearance rating (which means AA and AAA are priorities)

The Media Design Specialist fixes the issues.

This can require working with the CMS vendor (Ingeniux), or the page content owner but usually the issues can be solved by the Specialist

The Accessibility tool gives a percentage ranking for completeness of all rankings of issues. Currently ARC's site is running at a 98.3% of completeness.

Issues that will take longer than 2 weeks to solve are escalated to the IT Supervisor and PIO Supervisor for evaluation.

The American River College Website migration occurred in June 2019.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Partially Implemented

The procedure American River describes does not incorporate steps to prevent instructors from publishing inaccessible content or describe a tracking mechanism to demonstrate how many accessibility errors the college identifies or how long it takes to remedy those errors, but it does include procedures to monitor website accessibility.

1-Year Agency Response

By the end of Spring 2019, the IT Department will have documented the Site Improve Process. Migration to the new College Website is expected to be completed in Spring 2019.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Pending

6-Month Agency Response

The Website Design remains underway. American River College has also implemented the following, which will be documented by the Fall of 2018.

Through the Distance Education (DE) department, American River College now offers standardized Canvas faculty web pages. The College runs Siteimprove against the Canvas pages to ensure accessibility compliance. The goal is for the majority of faculty to use the new Canvas Faculty template for their individual site presence since the template is compliant.

Also, the work the DE department is doing on Recommendation 24 to ensure that the LMS content created by faculty remain ADA compliant assists in this work.

The main site is monitored with Siteimprove by the Education Web and Media Design Specialist regularly and a monitoring system has been established.

1. Specialist runs Siteimprove once a month and saves report results in an archive.

a. Specialist fixes issues maintaining Double A compliance or better for entire site and then re-runs report and saves that to archive

b. Specialist documents issues that take more than a week to fix by entering them into the Helpdesk system

i. Specialist fixes issues or escalates them up to web team after two weeks for resolution.

2. Student reported accessibility issue

a. American River College is implementing the Los Rios Procedure for Accessibility Issue Requests

i. Campus Help Desk staff will act as the Intake staff and the Specialist and Web Programmer will act as the resolution staff

3. The most common accessibility issue for students is the ability to log into website resources and the Los Rios wireless network.

a. American River College has implemented a Student Technology Center designed to help students with those issues. A student can request help by phone, email and in person.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Pending

60-Day Agency Response

American River College currently has software that tracks the accessibility of its website and identifies issues that need correcting and is also in the process of redesigning the website with the goal of addressing these issues. The College will document its practices as suggested by the recommendation.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2017-102

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.