With the digital evolution, equity in accessibility is of utmost importance

When historians write the history books of tomorrow, they’ll note a sharp divide in the timeline: Pre-pandemic and what came after. This chasm spans industry and locality, impacting just about every aspect of society, such as the way governments interact with constituents in the digital realm.

Before stay-at-home orders and mask mandates were issued, residents conducted business just about exclusively at their local town office. A clerk or administrator would give them the correct form and guide them through the process. Then everything shifted online, and many municipalities realized their websites lacked an important aspect: engagement.

“Prior to the pandemic, a lot of agencies saw the website as a file repository,” said Chris Wollesen, web content management supervisor at the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology during Adobe’s annual Experience Makers Government Forum earlier this month.

“Or if they did organize it, they did so in a way that made sense to them … not to citizens who were looking for information.”

Now two years on, government websites have become an integral part of public business—and their focus has evolved into more of a service mindset. Instead of a one-directional tool, they’ve become a comprehensive means to help constituents in a tangible way, according to Chris Lim, national practice director of state and local government at Adobe, and moderator of the round-table discussion “Bridging the digital divide with effective content strategy.”

For the last few decades, “government websites have been more of a monologue,” Lim said. But the pandemic delivered “a shift in how (constituents) expect the government to deliver information to them.”

And with this change, there’s also been a shift in the way internet technology managers quantify success. Before, success was tracked the same way businesses in the private sector determine success: by documenting website clicks. The pandemic revealed a key difference between the public and private sector.

“Oftentimes, that is a horrible metric, because it means people are lost and just clicking around,” Wollesen said. “Now, they use things like how many forms have been submitted.”

At its heart, the change has put end-users into the forefront—and that doesn’t just mean residents looking for the latest parks and recreation event.

“It wasn’t just the public who only had the digital channel to access online services, but government colleagues, equally, were accessing their work through the digital channel,” said David Thorpe, vice president of strategy and consulting at Publicis Sapient, a Massachusetts-based digital consulting firm. Digital tools suddenly had to work two ways. 

“Citizens, the public, they wanted outcomes,” Thorpe said. Beyond engagement, the public expected a transactional interaction with government websites—they wanted to easily pay their excise tax, update local voting and register their new pandemic-puppy.

Government websites became portals for an emerging interface of public administration, which experts expect will be increasingly digital.

At this unprecedented precipice, as governments grapple with the best way to enhance their agency’s digital presence, Christina Adams, digital accessibility software engineer at Siteimprove, a multinational software-as-a-service company, noted an overarching goal that should guide all other implementations: accessibility.

“We need to make equitable content for our end users—adding inclusive strategies and techniques,” Adams said. “We need to communicate that information in an inclusive way, so we need to move that arc. Just like you’re thinking about engagement, you need to think about access for all of your users.”

Inclusivity in accessibility needs to permeate every decision, and it needs to be implemented as early in the process as possible—to ensure equity as much as to save taxpayer’s money. As an example of why it needs to be thought through from the get-go, Adams used as an analogy an organization that commissioned a video project. Paying for a third-party company to add closed-captions and a transcript after the fact would be much more expensive than if they were included from the start.

“Accessibility and inclusion is not something that is an add on or another thought, it sound be a hallmark of good content—making your content accessible and available makes it better,” said Wollesen.

As governments continue to evolve into the digital era, making sure that every voice is heard, and that websites are equally accessible by everyone, is of utmost importance.

“There’s nothing that degrades a user’s confidence more than a bad user experience,” Adams said.