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.
I think an equally pressing question is why people still print then re-scan these agendas in the first place. These days, you can download a free program such as PrimoPDF and generate a proper PDF with the exact same amount of work it takes to click the Print button and get a dead-tree document.
But, God forbid a bureaucrat learn a trick that could actually make him more productive.
I think “complicity” presumes more intellect than is evident.
Before those PDFs opened, I expected to see hand-written documents, therefore needing to be scanned, but no….. They’re computer-generated documents !! I saw a hand-notation on the most recent one crossing out a few items as “Pulled”, so that does cause a problem with generating PDFs directly from the electronic document.
So David, are you just complaining on your blog or have you reported them ? And to who do you report this ?
@Hall, I’ve made the people at the “Help Desk” aware. As to reporting- sunshine laws in Ohio – and the ADA have no real teeth.
You made them aware …. how many years ago ? And if the ADA has “no real teeth”, calling the posting of these docs a “violation” is just a sensationalist headlines, yes ?