News

The WVNET Development Team has had a full spring and summer. We are currently working on website redesign and restructuring projects for the Science, Technology, and Research Division of HEPC, West Virginia State University, and the WV Geological and Economic Survey.  

An ever-present theme through every web project is accessibility. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an interim final rule extending the ADA Title II web accessibility compliance dates by roughly a year. Public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more now have until April 26, 2027, and smaller entities and special district governments until April 26, 2028. Because population is calculated at the state level, that first date effectively covers nearly every West Virginia state agency, public college, and university. What did not change is the substance: the technical standard is still WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the underlying ADA obligation to provide equally effective communication has been in force for decades, and DOJ has said it fully expects to implement the rule at the new deadline. The extension buys planning time, not relief. 

To put that time to use, WVNET has adopted Pope Tech as our accessibility scanning platform. Pope Tech runs automated WCAG scans across entire sites on a schedule rather than one page at a time, which means we can see how a site is trending instead of auditing it once and hoping it holds. We are using it alongside sitemap and crawl data to size remediation work accurately before we quote it, and to give content managers a running list of what needs attention on the pages they own. Automated scanning does not catch everything — roughly a third of WCAG criteria require human judgment — but it reliably catches the high-volume failures that make up the bulk of most sites’ problems: low contrast text, missing alternative text, unlabeled form fields, empty links, and vague link text. Alongside the scanning work, we are continuing our legacy PDF remediation effort and building a pre-export checklist covering Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and InDesign, because the fastest way to stop producing inaccessible PDFs is to fix the source document before it is exported. 

If your organization is working toward the 2027 deadline, the most useful thing you can do this summer is start with the content your own staff creates every day. One example, and one of the most common failures we find in client content reviews: link text. Phrases like “click here” and “here” tell a screen reader user nothing about where a link goes, and they fail a Level A success criterion, the floor of the standard your site has to meet.  

We have published a short standalone guide covering why that pattern fails, what WCAG requires, and how to rewrite links correctly: Stop using “Click Here” for Links. Questions about scanning, remediation scoping, or where to begin? Contact the WVNET Development Team.