Santa Monica outlines web-accessibility plan, will retire legacy sites and require vendor evidence of conformance

Faraz Mercia, the City of Santa Monica’s chief information officer, told the Disabilities Commission the city has launched a concentrated push to make its websites accessible to people with disabilities and to meet ADA-oriented web standards.

“We are looking to make sure that, all our systems are, accessible, in accordance with the ADA guidelines,” Mercia said during the commission’s December meeting. He and Jeremy Peterson, the city’s user experience designer, described a two-part evaluation approach that pairs automated monitoring tools with human validation and manual testing.

The presenters said the city has written accessibility requirements into vendor contracts so new and existing technology suppliers must provide evidence of compliance. Peterson described the workflow the city expects for content authors: staff must complete mandatory accessibility training, then work within standardized templates that limit the ability to edit raw HTML and force inclusion of alt text and metadata.

Peterson said the city has been consolidating more than 55 legacy domains and “upwards of 55,000 pages” under a single domain, santamonica.gov, and that legacy URLs will be redirected to the new, compliant site as content is migrated. He also said the Big Blue Bus site is in development with a target for migration in Q1 2026 and that finance pages were being moved the week of the meeting.

On difficult file formats such as PDFs, Peterson described an approach combining automated conversion to HTML with a live-assistance service (referred to in the meeting as ARIA) that can provide a real-time human guide for a scanned or complex document when automated tools fall short. He said the city will also include training, manual testing and occasional external consultant reviews in its plan to ensure ongoing conformance as technologies are updated.

Commissioners urged the city to leverage existing toolkits and interagency resources — including state resources — and to include practical instruction (for example, how to run Microsoft and Adobe accessibility checkers) in staff training. Commissioners also offered to collaborate on creating a curated accessibility resource page the public could use as a single point of entry for disability-related services.

The city did not present a formal vote or policy change during the discussion; staff described the initiative’s next steps as operational (tool selection, continued migration, training and a CIP funding request to support accessibility work).