County communications recommends $15,950 DotAccess purchase to meet DOJ WCAG 2.1 deadline

Communications and IT staff told Spokane County commissioners on Feb. 24 that a Department of Justice directive requires the county’s public-facing web content and documents to meet WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards by April.

Staff described the scale of the task: the county’s CivicPlus-hosted document center contains about 18,000 documents, and combined app inventories and web content expand the remediation need substantially. To avoid infeasible manual remediation, staff recommended procuring DotAccess (now part of Civic Plus), a cloud-based remediation/viewer tool that staff said can reformat documents for screen readers, provide keyboard navigation and AI-generated alt text for images.

Communications staff said the vendor offered a reduced first-year price of roughly $15,950 and that staff asked for a one-time approval to purchase and integrate the tool. They proposed IT manage the CivicPlus contract renewals and recommended allocating ongoing costs across departments that host documents.

Commissioners asked whether the purchase should be budgeted to IT or communications and whether renewals and tracking would be handled procedurally; one commissioner suggested delaying final approval until timing and related resolutions were clarified. No purchase vote was recorded at the briefing.