eSCRIBE makes best efforts to adhere to accessibility standards for all public facing pages and documents created from within eSCRIBE. As accessibility standards evolve, eSCRIBE’s Product Management group continues to make best efforts to adhere to evolving standards.

As of the date of this document, eSCRIBE public facing pages are compliant with WCAG version 2.0, Level AA. This document outlines several areas of consideration for eSCRIBE Customer’s when gauging level of accessibility.

Public facing webpages:  

All public facing pages are compliant with accessibility standards. These public facing pages include, but are not limited to:

• Board Manager – board details, member details, application pages
• Internet Publishing – HTML agenda & minutes, meetings list view, calendar view, delegations request page, public comments page, social media sharing

Documents:

All templates created by eSCRIBE are built to be compliant with the WCAG version 2.0, Level AA accessibility standards. eSCRIBE uses Microsoft libraries to generate its PDF documents, as a result any document tags that are maintained in the Office to PDF conversion will also be maintained within eSCRIBE conversion. Further manual remediation might be required with a PDF authoring tools.

 A few exceptions to this should be noted:  

• Full agenda PDF packages (agenda cover sheet with attachments) - when publishing the full PDF agenda package, it cannot be made accessible without manual remediation, due to the high likelihood of conflicting document structures with the attachments. For this reason, eSCRIBE strongly recommends the publishing of the HTML agenda package for public use.
  NOTE: To the best of our knowledge, PDF agenda cover pages generated by eSCRIBE are WCAG 2.0 AA compliant.
• Attachments uploaded - Any PDF documents uploaded as attachments that are created from outside of eSCRIBE are not guaranteed to be accessible, as they are dependent on the way that they are created, however any accessibility tags are not removed or altered by eSCRIBE.
  Any other file formats that are uploaded into eSCRIBE as attachments are not guaranteed to be accessible.
• Reports - It is the Customer’s responsibility to ensure that the Report Word document template is accessible prior to sending it to eSCRIBE Onboarding team for initial configuration.
  When authoring reports using report templates, content added must also be created according to accessibility guidelines.
  In order to ensure 100% compliance with accessibility guidelines, upon completion of the report creation and approval process, reports need to be converted to PDF outside of eSCRIBE and manually remediated with PDF authoring tools to ensure accessibility and replaced in eSCRIBE for publishing.

IMPORTANT: Even using an accessible report template from within eSCRIBE, training for staff on creating accessible documents is critical. Using Word (or any other electronic document), by not following the proper steps in creating their documents, staff could potentially make errors that negatively affect the documents accessibility (ex: incorrect use of formatting tools or forgetting to add an Alt tag to images within the document).

Webcasting video files:

Through the use of eSCRIBE’s Closed Captioning add on to its’ Webcasting service, video files are deemed to be accessible.

Migrated data:

Historical documents, migrated from third party solutions will only be compliant if they were created as such, eSCRIBE does not alter imported documents in anyway.

Media streams imported from third party solutions will only be compliant if they were created as such.

NOTE: An optional service can be purchased to run any imported or legacy video files through the closed captioning service, additional fees apply.