Montgomery County Ohio documents posted in violation of ADA

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about a public record being posted out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, I wrote about it in 2008 when I found the Dayton City Commission out of compliance. They’ve since cleaned up their act.

Placing this document online- without complying with ADA requirements- and thus hiding it from Search- is also a step in the wrong direction.

via City of Dayton Commission fails to properly comply with ADA requirements on ordinance.

Recently, when looking at the Montgomery County Commission Meeting agendas, I found the same thing- scans of print documents that had not been run through Optical Character Recognition software to make the machine readable. This is critical for blind people who use screen readers to read them the content- as well as for search engines to find the content. It is also in compliance with State of Ohio Sunshine Laws- or Open Records act. If you pull up a PDF document and you can’t highlight and copy the text, it’s not in compliance.

This is a violation of the ADA and reeks of complicity to hide facts from the public since these documents can’t be searched.

The Montgomery County Commission should change their process immediately and begin the process of reposting corrected documents.

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