Education Week - August 3, 2016 - 7

Advocate Moves Needle
On Website Accessibility

Marcie Lipsitt, of Franklin,
Mich., has filed some 500
complaints with the U.S.
Department of Education's
office for civil rights
advocating for web
accessibility for students
with disabilities. She
reviews school districts'
websites one by one using
her iPad software, looking
for barriers that would
prevent access. Her
frustration goes all the
way to whitehouse.gov
and disability.gov-
websites that are not
accessible to users with
disabilities.

By Christina A. Samuels
Every year, thousands of complaints
flow into the office tasked with investigating disability discrimination for the
U.S. Department of Education.
This year, Marcie Lipsitt, a special
education advocate from Michigan,
has been responsible for about 500
of those complaints-and counting.
Lipsitt's focus is on the websites
of school districts and other educational institutions, which she says
widely disregard the needs of users
who are blind or visually impaired,
or who cannot use a mouse to navigate a page. Other website problems
she has spotted include videos with
no captions, or text and background
color combinations that are a strain
for people with low vision.
Her letters have gotten results. In
June, the Education Department's
office for civil rights announced
that it had entered into settlement
agreements over website accessibility with schools, districts, and
departments of education in seven
states and in Guam.
All of those complaints originated
with Lipsitt, who fires off at least a
couple of letters a day from her home
in Franklin, 20 miles outside Detroit.
"I have nothing to lose but time and
sleep," said Lipsitt, who squeezes in
the letters in addition to her work as
a lay advocate, helping families with
special education disputes.
But Lipsitt, who is not visually impaired, said this is about more than
being a prolific gadfly.
The proposed regulations for the
Every Student Succeeds Act say that,
in many cases, placing information on
a website is sufficient for states and
districts to meet public reporting requirements. But what use is it to the
public if that essential information
can't be read by everyone? Lipsitt and
other advocates want the regulations
to state that if states and districts are
allowed to use their websites as the
equivalent of a town crier, then those
sites should be usable for everyone.
"If those final regulations don't include web accessibility, then shame
on everyone," Lipsitt said.

Crucial Elements
Some of the elements behind accessible web design are clear to any
user, such as well-organized sites
that feature obvious navigational
pathways and multiple ways to access information.
There are also some technological
requirements that might be invisible
to users of standard web browsers,
but are essential to those who use
screen readers-software that converts text into synthesized speech.
For example, imagine using a wordprocessing program to type a block
of text with a title. To distinguish
the title from the text, a user might
enlarge the font and make it bold.
Those changes are visual clues that
those words should be considered
separately from the text that follows.

But those visual changes on a website mean nothing to screen-reader
programs without embedded codes
that tell software that certain words
are meant to be a header. Without
such coding, screen readers only see
an undifferentiated block of text.
Images present a similar problem.
An accessible website would include
a specially coded image description.
Without that coding, a screen reader
will only spit out a file name, such
as "school_123.jpg."
School districts and educational institutions are hardly alone in having
poorly designed websites, said Marla
Runyan, the lead accessibility consultant with Perkins Solutions, which
advises government agencies, retail
outlets, and educational institutions
on website usability. Perkins Solutions
is under the umbrella of the Perkins
School for the Blind, the oldest school
for the blind in the United States.
"The intent of your website is that
you have something you want to share
or sell," Runyan said. "Why would you
shut out that many people?"
No one would think of physically
slamming the door in the face of a
blind person, but impossible-to-navigate websites are the computer equivalent of the same action, she said.
"There's nothing more frustrating than being a fully capable individual, but yet I have this barrier in
front of me to keep me from doing
what I'm able to do," she said.

Slow to Change
But entities have been slow to
change unless they've been hit by
legal action, Runyan said. Both Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of
1973 and the 26-year-old Americans
with Disabilities Act set guidelines
for technology accessibility, but those
rules have stagnated while internet
use has grown in leaps and bounds.
Experts in the field are waiting for
the government to release refreshed
guidelines. But in the meantime, the
Education Department and the Justice Department have said that websites should follow the accessibility
guidelines published by the World
Wide Web Consortium, an international standards organization.
Lipsitt's letter-writing campaign
started back in February 2014,
when Michigan proposed some
changes to its special education
regulations that she protested. She
was also angry that the monthlong
comment period required people to
either mail a letter to a post office
box, or to navigate a complicated
web portal. Without knowing anything about website accessibility
at the time, she filed a complaint.
Michigan ended up in an agreement
in June 2015 to revamp its website.
After filing a few more complaints
against other entities, in 2016 Lipsitt started her campaign in earnest,
using computer software that evaluates websites for their usability. At
the request of another advocate, she
checked the site of the New Mexico

Brian Widdis for Education Week

School districts among those targeted

Department of Education. Then she
checked the New York City district,
because she was unhappy with an
article she had read about the city's
mayor, Bill de Blasio.
At that point, Lipsitt decided to
check the website of every state's
department of education. Then she
moved on to the education websites
of the territories, such as Puerto
Rico and Guam. Next came the
country's 100 largest school districts.
She has filed complaints against
charter schools, virtual schools, and
schools for the deaf and blind. She
has also turned her attention to
other entities, such as the New York
Public Library and PBS, the public
broadcasting network.
Lipsitt said the Education Department told her that the office for civil
rights has assigned a disability expert to oversee all of her complaints.
Officials at the department would
not confirm this, saying that privacy
rules prevent it from revealing information about complainants. But
a department spokesman said that
anyone can file a complaint, that all
complaints are evaluated to see if
they warrant further investigation,
and that it's not unusual for several
complaints to come from one person.

The Juneau, Alaska, district is
one of the school systems that entered into a settlement agreement
with the Education Department in
June. (Lipsitt's complaints have also
included school districts that serve
state capitals.) Kristin Bartlett, the
district's chief of staff, said that the
complaint came at the same time
the school system was looking for a
new website vendor.
In better financial times, the district had a dedicated web manager.
In recent years, it had outsourced
that work to companies that it
thought were providing accessible
pages, Bartlett said.
The new web vendor is providing
services at a lower cost than the
previous web vendor, Bartlett said,
and the district is in the process of
training employees in accessibility
guidelines. Employees in the district
who use screen readers and other
assistive technology will also serve
as monitors, Bartlett said.
The complaint and investigation "has created a lot of awareness
about something that we want to be
doing anyway, and that we thought
we were doing," she said. "But now
we're doing it better. It's a benefit for
us to be looking at this more closely."

I have nothing to lose
but time and sleep.
... If those final [Every
Student Succeeds Act]
regulations don't
include web
accessibility, then
shame on everyone."
MARCIE LIPSITT
Disabilities Activist

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