Are your public records accessible?
By Julia Métraux, Mother Jones
In mid-September, ProPublica and the Minnesota Reformer published an article about how Tim Walz and his office failed to meet the concerns of Black advocates after a police officer shot and killed Daunte Wright at a traffic stop in 2021. ProPublica published photos of transcripts of conversations and emails received through public records requests. But because there was no alternative text, blind people and others with low vision using screen readers were deprived of that information.
This is a problem bigger than any one publication or story. All journalists working with public records must be aware. Businesses that serve the public online, including news outlets, could be violating Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act if their websites are not fully accessible. The Department of Justice, where the ADA is housed, has web accessibility guidance online. Hence, making public records accessible for users is not only an ethical obligation but potentially a legal one. If you receive public records requests that you want to display on your website, here are some areas to note.
Alternative text
Alternative text describes what is in an image, which screen readers then use to tell people what is in it. Images of people are usually quite simple, with one to two sentences. But, when it comes to text, you should write out what the text says.
For example, if you receive emails from a public records request from your local mayor and plan to post photos of said email, you should write out what the email says. You are including those photos because it is noteworthy for people to know what is in them, so it is also notable for people who use screen readers to know.
Readable and tagged PDF
I’ve sometimes received documents through public records requests that have been scanned, which means that they are not technically considered to be readable by technology. So, screen readers cannot tell what is in the document and how things are structured, as it is not tagged either.
You can however fix this by using optical character recognition on Adobe Cloud or PDF Pro, then upload the new document into DocumentCloud or another platform your publication usually uses to put PDFs into articles.
Transcripts
Having an audio recording from a 911 call, received through a public records request, can be an important part of criminal justice reporting. But, if you do put the audio of a recording into an article, you should have a transcript available.
This benefits not only deaf and hard-of-hearing people but also people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder who may find it easier to follow a transcript while listening to audio that may have significant noise in the background.
Captions
In videos received through public records requests, you should put captions on them if they are included in articles. If people’s faces are obstructed, it should be mentioned in the captions when the speaker changes.
Section 508 compliance
Looking at the U.S. government, most federal agencies don’t post public records online in compliance with Section 508 (a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the country’s first major federal disability rights law). Despite being law, 508 compliance with regard to FOIA by federal agencies has languished. The federal FOIA Advisory Committee has urged Congress to fix this — said Dave Cuillier of the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment (who is also a member of the FOIA Advisory Committee).
But before we go after the government for being inequitable, it’s important to address inequities in our publications. It is not a great look to have content on one’s site that some disabled people are barred from being able to consume.
Making public records requests accessible means that disabled people can be shocked by the primary documents in front of them just like nondisabled people. For instance, blind people were able to do that with a recent KFF Health News article on a California official in cahoots with a digital mental health company, as the PDF placed into the body of the article — that showed the texts — was readable. Wouldn’t being blocked from that information suck?