The meeting of the Social Services, Disabilities & Human Rights Committee of the Westchester County Board of Legislators was called to order at 11:00 AM on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in Committee Room, 800 Michaelian Office Building, White Plains, NY. Chair Nancy Barr presided, with Vice Chair Jewel Williams-Johnson participating remotely. Legislators Imamura, Puja, Williams, Gashi, and later Pierce were also present. The sole discussion item was a presentation titled "Practical accessibility guidelines for flyers, emails, and social media posts," delivered by Carin Horowitz, LMSW, Director, and Jeff Zitofsky, Program Administrator, from the Westchester County Office for People with Disabilities.
Okay, this is the committee on social services, disabilities, and human rights. Chair of the committee. We have with us our vice chair of the committee, Joe Williams Johnson. Hello. And we may be joined by others, but if not, we know we're being recorded, and so anybody can watch this at any time, which is really a nice, nice feature. Okay. So today we're lucky to have with us um two members of the department for people with uh disabilities. We have the director, Karen Harwitz, and we have the but is it the let's see, what's the pro program administrator? Okay, Jeff Satowski. And we're really um looking forward to hearing this presentation, which is really about um you know how we can be more um accommodating and mindful about how we uh we present things so that those in our community who have maybe are hard of hearing or can't see very well or at all are able to appreciate you know and and see the things that we um we share. And I know that there's you know a law in place that require us to do certain things that we got a little bit of an I guess an extension on that, but we're still hoping to roll everything out. You know, it's department by department. Um so if that if you could talk uh at all about that, that would be helpful, but also just things that we can be doing, you know, ourselves to make things easier, like I noticed um Carrie me have used a bigger font on your emails. Yes, I can't completely look for that from Jack. Okay, all right. Signature and says I use 14 point aerial to everyday accessibility. Yes, yes, and I like that. And so you've you can talk about that too. I mean, those are the kinds of things that we we just many of us don't think about that could actually make a difference for people. So yeah, people are just like, why are you yelling at me? I'm not there. People who need this, including myself as I get older, and as we talk about during this, it's this is just not accessible for people with disabilities. If we make things accessible for people with disabilities, they're actually more than people realize making them accessible to all of us. How many of us are in between with hearing and seeing? Oh, I'm just gonna get a new pair of readers, but this helps a lot more people than people with disabilities. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. So you brought uh you brought a PowerPoint okay, how Thema can set us up. Thank you. Nice. All right, so digital accessibility. We're building an inclusive Westchester in many ways. Um, I just want to say social media accessibility is you know, we can post things as the county, but for those of us who have social media accounts, for my personal experience being a peer in the mental health system where I'm coming from, people who are constituents are my peers using services like I do. So often people join my Facebooks and Instagrams and follow me. Um, so when I'm posting as Jeff Jeff Zotowski, I'm posting digital accessibility as me as well. And I think we love to say that the county can be a model for a distance. This is exactly how we can do it for ourselves and have others do this as well. Next slide. So why does this matter? You know, one in four of us have a disability that can affect how we use social media, and um equal access people who have screen readers or captions can get the same information as all of us as long as we use them. So it's there, and we know we can do it, it's just a matter of learning how to use this, and um as I said earlier, it's for all followers. We need this, and some people may ask, like, oh, this is all true with text and explains this in the picture. That's pretty cool. We're gonna talk about that later. And then also, if you know, public trust. We're committed if we are truly committed to serving every resident, as I know that we all are. This really helps us do that visually. Okay, next slide. Okay, this is probably we've all heard this from our language arts teachers anyway. But clearly concise language, avoid jargon abbreviations, only technical terms when we're using uh posting to the public.