Inclusive Government Access
Image from istockphoto.com and inclusive icons from Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit
Helping to Make Hawaii’s Digital Services Accessible to All
Digital accessibility for state and local governments has long been governed by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice strengthened these regulations, requiring public-facing web content and digital documents to meet the clear, measurable WCAG 2.1 Level AA standard by a specific compliance deadline.
Meeting this requirement starts with a comprehensive understanding of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Since 2025, Tyler Hawaii, Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), and Siteimprove have worked together to strengthen accessibility across the more than 150 public-facing websites, applications, and online services in Tyler Hawaii’s portfolio.
WCAG organizes its accessibility framework around four core principles — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR) — which guide the creation of digital content that is accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities.
Tyler Hawaii used Siteimprove’s automated accessibility tool to assess, identify, and remediate issues across its portfolio of services, focusing remediation efforts on four issue categories:
- A — the minimum accessibility requirement
- AA — the benchmark requirement for state and local governments, and the standard now required under the ADA
- Accessibility Best Practice — additional issues identified by Siteimprove that improve usability beyond legal requirements
- WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) — a technical standard for structuring website content
Beyond automated scanning, the team performed manual testing to verify skip-to-main-content functionality, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and visual navigation cues — surfacing issues that automated tools alone could not detect. Tyler Hawaii continues to work closely with ETS to deliver continuous improvements to the official State of Hawaii WordPress website templates, as well as its internal design system, to help ensure accessibility consistency going forward.
Tyler Hawaii also participated in Siteimprove webinars to build a deeper understanding of how accessibility is evaluated, how to assess and tag Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, and additional remediation practices that improve the user experience. As the April 26, 2027 compliance deadline approaches, these efforts and the lessons learned along the way will continue to support the goal of delivering digital government services that are accessible to all.