Intercultural Practice and Equity · Public-service practice

Digital Equity and Accessible Technology

Every online process is a set of requirements about devices, connections, sign-ins, privacy and reading speed. Four lessons on seeing the whole path a person travels, ending with a review you run on one real service.

40–45 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning

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Course outline

The whole path, not the page
Everything an online process quietly asks for before it gives anything back: a device, a connection, an account, a readable screen, private time, and a way to ask a question that is not itself online.
11 minutes
Assistive technology, and the ordinary things that break it
What the tools do, what stops them working, and how much of that is decided in the documents, decks and recordings staff make themselves.
11 minutes
Sign-ins, privacy and the words on the screen
Identity checks, security settings, shared devices and error messages decide who finishes an online process, and they are usually written by people who never get stuck.
11 minutes
Review one digital service for access barriers
A review anyone can run without tools or budget: walk the whole workflow, try it the way other people have to, make it fail on purpose, and write findings someone can act on.
11 minutes

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What you’ll be able to do

Explore and practice

Trace the whole path a person travels through one DSD digital service, from learning it exists to keeping a confirmation, and name the link most likely to stop someone.
Identify the ordinary choices in documents, pages, recordings and forms that make assistive technology work or fail, and fix the ones you control.
Explain how identity checks, security settings, privacy conditions and on-screen wording create or remove barriers, and describe a change that keeps the requirement and removes the barrier.
Plan who reviews a digital service and when, including compensated review by disabled Minnesotans and community organizations.
Run a digital access review on one real service or workflow and record findings with a step, an owner, a suggested change and what you did about it.

What you can take into your work

Four worked scenarios drawn from public comment, internal training, grant administration and stakeholder engagement, each with a recommended response and the reasoning behind it.
A knowledge check in every lesson with feedback that explains the usable answer.
Sorting practice that separates what removes a barrier from what creates one, and that separates findings you fix from findings you route or send up.
A completed digital access review of one real service or workflow, with what you changed and what you sent onward.

Choose one digital service or workflow you touch — a public form, an online comment page, a grant application, a registration, an internal process your team runs. Run the review on it, fix what you own, route the rest with suggested wording, and tell the people who raised the problem what happened to it.

Read the introduction

Most of what this division asks people to do now happens on a screen: find the page, make an account, sign in, read the form, send a document, wait for a confirmation. Every one of those steps is a requirement about equipment, connection, privacy, reading and time, and most of them were set by people who never got stuck. This module looks at the whole path rather than the page: what digital access actually asks of a person, what makes assistive technology work or fail, how identity checks and on-screen wording decide who finishes, and how to review one real service or workflow for the places it stops somebody. It ends with a review you can copy and run this month.

Digital equity and accessible technology

One page for anyone who publishes, buys, runs or checks something people meet on a screen

The standard covers the page. The person has to get through the whole path.

Keep the path, the tools and the review in view while you publish a page, post a recording, run an online process, or check a form before it goes out.

A digital service is a chain: finding out, getting on, getting in, reading the screen, finishing, and what happens afterward. Standards describe one link of it.
Completion counts describe the people who got through. Anyone the chain stopped is not in the number.
Structure is the accessible part: heading styles, real tables, described images, descriptive links, text that is actually text. Fix the template, not the copy.
Automatic captions are a first draft. Correcting them takes a fraction of the time writing them would.
Security and privacy requirements are not the barrier; how they are met usually is. Ask what the requirement actually needs.
Every online-only process needs a route that is not online, published in the same place, at the same size, and staffed enough to be real.
A staff review is not review by the people the service is for. Invite and pay disabled Minnesotans and community organizations early, while the design can still change.

Run the review on one real service this month, fix what you own, route the rest with wording, and tell the person who raised it what happened.

The review, in order

Service and the people it is for, with the two or three situations you will hold in mind while you walk it.
Step, barrier and who is stopped: one line per step, with what the screen actually says and what it costs the person.
Owner and the change requested, written as wording or a setting somebody can act on.
Fix, route or decide: three short lists, so the review becomes work rather than a document.
What changed and who was told, including the person who first reported the barrier.

Checks that need no tools or budget

Keyboard only: can you reach every control, see where you are, and finish?
Enlarged text: does anything disappear, overlap or force sideways scrolling?
A phone screen, including sending a document photographed on a phone.
Sound off, then captions on, checking the terms that matter.
A slow or interrupted connection: are the answers still there when you come back?
Make it fail: wrong entry, wrong file type, ended session, a password nobody has.
The route that is not online: call it in the hours a working person would call.

What usually breaks assistive technology

Headings made by enlarging bold text instead of using a heading style.
Scanned pages and images of text, with nothing underneath to read.
Images and charts carrying information with no description and no explanation in the text.
Link text that says “click here” or shows a bare web address.
Tables used to lay out a page, and data tables with no header cells.
Color as the only signal, and text that is too low in contrast to read outdoors or on an old screen.
Controls that work only with a mouse, and sessions that end without warning.

Wording that decides whether somebody finishes

Say what failed, where it is, and what a valid answer looks like.
Say what to do when the phone number or email on an account no longer works.
Warn before a session ends, early enough to act, and save the answers anyway.
Give a confirmation the person can keep, saying what happens next and roughly when.
Publish a named contact and a phone number a person answers, in the same place and the same size as the online route.

Who this helps

Communications, training and learning-design staff, whose pages, recordings and postings are where most of this is decided — a useful place to start.
Administrative and support staff, who run the registrations, forms, scheduling and routing people actually meet — a good place to go deeper.
Policy, program and operations staff, who decide whether a process is delivered online, on paper, by phone, or all three.
Quality, performance and data staff, who can see who finishes a digital process and are best placed to ask who is missing from the count.
Contracts, fiscal, grants and procurement staff, whose purchasing and application requirements decide whether a system is usable before anyone meets it.
Supervisors, who decide whether fixing a template counts as real work.

Related modules

Accessible public communications
Language access in state programs
Inclusive meetings and engagement
Program and service design
Responding to concerns and feedback

Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.

Sources and further reading

Minnesota IT Services, Accessibility
Minnesota's accessibility standard for state digital content, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines it follows, and practical guidance for documents, pages and purchased technology.
ADA.gov, Guidance on web accessibility and the ADA
U.S. Department of Justice guidance on why web and mobile accessibility is required of state and local government, and the technical guidelines the requirement points to.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, WCAG 2 overview
The international guidelines behind both the state and federal requirements, with the conformance levels named in supplier reports.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, Easy Checks
A first review of a page that anyone can run without specialist tools — the method behind the checks in this module's practical tool.
PlainLanguage.gov, Federal plain language guidelines
Guidance on audience, structure, useful headings and wording, including the error messages, instructions and confirmations people meet on a screen.
Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, Office of Broadband Development
Minnesota's broadband program and maps of where service is and is not available, the connection side of digital access across the state.
Minnesota Council on Disability
Minnesota's advisory council on disability policy, access and rights, including accessibility guidance for public bodies and a route to disability-led expertise.
Minnesota Framework for Universal Multicultural Instructional Design
The design reference for this curriculum: multiple ways to engage, culturally responsive materials and accessible instruction.

All research and sources across the program

Opening your page…

You can still use the navigation while it loads.

Course outline

The whole path, not the page

Everything an online process quietly asks for before it gives anything back: a device, a connection, an account, a readable screen, private time, and a way to ask a question that is not itself online.

11 minutes

Assistive technology, and the ordinary things that break it

What the tools do, what stops them working, and how much of that is decided in the documents, decks and recordings staff make themselves.

11 minutes

Sign-ins, privacy and the words on the screen

Identity checks, security settings, shared devices and error messages decide who finishes an online process, and they are usually written by people who never get stuck.

11 minutes

Review one digital service for access barriers

A review anyone can run without tools or budget: walk the whole workflow, try it the way other people have to, make it fail on purpose, and write findings someone can act on.

11 minutes

Sources and further reading

Minnesota IT Services, Accessibility

Minnesota's accessibility standard for state digital content, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines it follows, and practical guidance for documents, pages and purchased technology.

ADA.gov, Guidance on web accessibility and the ADA

U.S. Department of Justice guidance on why web and mobile accessibility is required of state and local government, and the technical guidelines the requirement points to.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, WCAG 2 overview

The international guidelines behind both the state and federal requirements, with the conformance levels named in supplier reports.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, Easy Checks

A first review of a page that anyone can run without specialist tools — the method behind the checks in this module's practical tool.

PlainLanguage.gov, Federal plain language guidelines

Guidance on audience, structure, useful headings and wording, including the error messages, instructions and confirmations people meet on a screen.

Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, Office of Broadband Development

Minnesota's broadband program and maps of where service is and is not available, the connection side of digital access across the state.

Minnesota Council on Disability

Minnesota's advisory council on disability policy, access and rights, including accessibility guidance for public bodies and a route to disability-led expertise.

Minnesota Framework for Universal Multicultural Instructional Design

The design reference for this curriculum: multiple ways to engage, culturally responsive materials and accessible instruction.