Documents disappear due to California disability law
Dozens of wildfire reports disappeared from Cal Fire’s website as this year’s fire season began.
Thousands of water science reports vanished from the Department of Water Resources website.
More than 2 million documents, ranging from environmental impact reports to internal human resources guides, went missing from remote corners of Caltrans’ website.
The documents are disappearing from public view as California state departments work to comply with a 2017 law aimed at improving compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The law was meant to ensure all Californians could apply for jobs and find vital information on the state sites. The overhaul has proven costly and labor-intensive, with the result that some departments are choosing to permanently take down documents rather than pay to make them machine-readable or otherwise accessible.
Some researchers say removing the documents diminishes state government transparency.
“You certainly want to have documents being accessible to the disabled and the blind, but if doing that causes these documents to become unavailable for many years or even permanently to the public, I think there’s a tradeoff there that’s pretty large,” said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.
State officials say the changes are making it easier for members of the public to find what they want on the sites without having to sort through as much clutter.
In 2015, a state audit found serious accessibility problems on four government websites.
Neither the CalHR website nor the California Community Colleges website were equipped for screen readers that read questions aloud for visually impaired people, so some of them couldn’t take job exams online or apply for college.
People who couldn’t use a computer mouse couldn’t create an account to file taxes on the Franchise Tax Board’s site.
Based on the audit, former Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, proposed a law to revamp the websites.
Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed Baker’s bill into law in October 2017. The law gave departments until July 2019 to bring their sites into compliance under a process that would be set by the California Department of Technology.
Some departments are running late, but Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has made the updates a priority, said Technology Department Director Amy Tong.
Tong said the changes are not just aimed at making the sites ADA-compliant; they’re meant to make the sites more user- and business-friendly.
“The message from the administration has been very clear,” she said. “Transparency in high-interest business items has to be preserved.”
Caltrans, one of the state’s largest departments, has removed nearly 2.5 million documents from its website as part of its accessibility overhaul, according to information provided by spokesman Matt Rocco.
The department is updating about 13,000 documents — containing about 350,000 pages -— to ADA standards and plans to repost them, said Mike Nguyen, the department’s chief technology officer.
The department used Google analytics to identify which documents people were looking at. If anyone opened a document from Nov. 1, 2017 through Nov. 30, 2018, the department scheduled it for ADA updates, Nguyen said.
The department also selected documents it is required to post by law and documents that program managers considered essential for operations, he said.
The department made popular features, such as traffic cameras, more frontand-center on the site, Nguyen said.
“We treat this as a very important initiative to make sure we meet the intent of the law, and it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
The department has paid about $6 million to contractors to make the documents and thousands of Caltrans web pages accessible under the law, Nguyen said.