Online.

This is not a joke.

I would like to call the April 1st, 2026 meeting of the information technology board to order.

We have most of our members here.

We're missing Alderman Van Trieste and Citizen Member Burgers.

Both of them did contact us and let them let us know that they wouldn't be here.

So appreciate that.

The rest of the board is present, so we do have a quorum and we will continue with the meeting.

Item two on our agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance.

Thanks.

It takes us to item three, which is public comment.

We don't have any members of the public with us other than board members and staff.

So we'll move on to item four, which is approval of minutes.

We're playing catch-up.

We have two uh two of our last meeting minutes available to us.

Um I didn't have the attachment, the minutes attached at our last meeting for the January minutes.

That's why we have two.

Correct.

Um I did have a chance to look at them, they look good to me.

Did anybody else on the board have any concerns or complaints about either of the minute minutes?

Is there uh um any objection to approving the January 2026 meeting minutes by unanimous consent?

Hearing and seeing none, we'll approve those by unanimous consent.

And same question with the February 2026 meeting minutes.

Any objection to approving those by unanimous consent?

Hearing and seeing no objection, those are also approved by unanimous consent.

Item five on our agenda is our one business item for this evening, and that is to uh review and approve uh contract for PDF remediation with recite me.

Um Andrew, you want to take this?

Sure.

Some explanation of what we're looking at here.

Yeah, so um coming up at the end of April, uh the uh Americans with Disability Act, Title II comes into effect.

So that basically says that any municipality, be it federal, state, um local, anything like that, has to be in compliance with the um accessibility guidelines set out in the WCAG 2.1 um up to a standard of double A out of a possible triple A.

Um, as part of this, uh we are just kind of struggling a little bit to make sure that our PDFs that we have on our website are meeting or exceeding those standards.

Um for the most part, I'm able to handle the smaller, you know, one to ten page PDFs, but we have quite a few, you know, 200 to 400 page PDFs that are much more difficult to remediate, uh, which is where recite me kind of steps in and helps out.

So they have a um software that they have on their end that they are not publicly releasing at this point, but basically they're able to crawl our website, um, see what PDF documents we have that are not meeting or exceeding those standards, um, and then they can go through and take those documents, um, manually remediate them with their software, um, and then send them back with a document that says this this is uh by our standards and by the standards set out for by the ADA should meet or exceed those standards.

Um so we kind of get a fallback document and the actual document to put onto our website during our time of trying to figure out what vendors we could possibly go with.

We did some demos with um other vendors where um they have something that is more of a plug-in onto your website that kind of overlays onto your PDFs that can possibly do things to improve them, but it doesn't help the raw PDF.

So if someone still downloads it, they're still getting a junk PDF that may not be accessible.

Um when it comes to the pricing of those kind of overlays or tools that would be more um user-intensive on our end, they are in the realm of like 20 to 30,000 a year just for a single tool, or they have hefty licenses that come with them.

So when looking at recite me, they're able to do this um by sending it off to their staff, and then they'll send us back a document.

Um it's more of an a la carte kind of a service where if we have certain documents we want to send off to them, we can do that with for them.

Um it was much more affordable at uh about 5,000 a year.

Can you give us some examples of what the accessibility guidelines are?

Are they like font sizes or it's a little bit, yeah?

So it's a little bit of everything.

So basically, if you think about when you try and access a website, um you're able to generally go about the website by using a mouse, using a keyboard, seeing what's on the screen, hearing what's happening.

So the accessibility guidelines are really looking at people who don't have those abilities, those abilities may be it, you know, a cognitive disability where someone doesn't learn as well.

It could be something like you know, blindness and deafness are usually the two most common ones that are looked at, but people with learning disabilities are or even people with um photosensitivity kind of issues where if things are flashing too much, that kind of a thing.

Color blindness is another big one that um usually gets addressed.

So it's making sure that your color contrasts are good, making sure that a screen reader going through your document knows what the title is, what are the subtopics of it, um, and making sure that the structure of of those documents are uh in a way that a an assistive tool can go through it.

So if you're going through a form, hitting tab and it's going through in a logical order to go through items.

So basically the more you think about how you you can access a website now, try taking that away from yourself.

So try and go through a website with your eyes closed, and does it make it easier or harder?

Try you know, navigating through a website if you were missing an arm or missing a hand, kind of going through those kind of things, um, and making sure that anyone, regardless of their ability, can access uh digital content.

I started to go down the uh rabbit hole of looking into that when I saw this, and it's it's pretty significant.

Oh, yeah, there's a lot of a lot of standards and guidelines in there that you know a fully able-bodied person doesn't even consider.

I mean, I used to do web development in the infancy of the internet, and you know, none of that was even table.

The guidelines that the federal government are enforcing now is actually WCAG 2.1.

There's already a 2.2 that's already out that goes above and beyond there, and we're reading and exceeding most of those standards as well.

Um, and within the next few years are going to 3.0 as well.

So they're constantly evolving with the evolving technology.