CivicActions, along with our partner Fearless, facilitated Drupal 10 upgrades across the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) suite of websites, bringing improvements for editors, better security and accessibility, and community contributions to streamline upgrades for large- scale Drupal. The new Claro administration theme is cleaner, clearer, and more accessible.

The new rich text editor CKEditor 5 provides many UI enhancements and an improved user experience. The most significant change from previous versions of CKEditor is that editors must now use a predefined set of elements to configure the content, which leads to fewer instances of invalid markup patterns making their way into the published site. Since invalid or non-semantic markup is often the cause of accessibility issues, this is a major upgrade. In addition, the improved Layout Builder experience makes it easier for content editors to control more complex layouts, while still keeping consistent with CMS Design System standards.

The 8 sites included in the upgrade, which occurred ahead of schedule, were: CMS.gov; Medicare.gov; Openpaymentsdata.cms.gov; Data.medicaid.gov; Data.healthcare.gov; SDIS.medicaid.gov (internal CMS site); PFS.data.cms.gov (internal CMS site); QIC.cms.gov (internal CMS site); and Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov/provider-data).

The challenge

To ensure products used by the government are accessible, vendors must submit accessibility conformance reports (ACR) to demonstrate their products meet Section 508 requirements. The most commonly used ACR follows the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), a templated Word Document or PDF that software vendors fill in manually, and often is not an accurate representation of product accessibility.

The ACR process is inconsistently structured, not searchable, static, and with no version control. For this reason, providing more accessible services can be complex and disempowering for vendors and procurement officers. The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages and supports the basic functioning of federal agencies, was interested in finding ways to modernize the ACR process. After requesting a Market Research Request for Information (RFI), we responded with the concept for OpenACR, a tool that simplifies the process of finding, sharing, and maintaining accurate and actionable data about product accessibility. After GSA reviewed potential solutions, CivicActions was awarded the contract for our innovative approach.

Our Approach

Our team, led by Senior Strategist and accessibility expert Mike Gifford, realized that the process of managing ACRs hadn’t kept up with the nature of modern software development. Leveraging the YAML machine-readable language, the team created a highly structured report format that can be easily exported to an accessible and readable HTML document.

OpenACR, Open Source

Our team was excited to do the development process in the open. OpenACR is open source, so other organizations and members of the open source community are free to generate input and build on OpenACR’s source code. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) worldwide have contributed to the development of this new tool, and all are welcome to visit the open issue queue to add feedback.

Foundational Accessibility

OpenACR sets a new standard for foundational accessibility. By building a machine-readable ACR, OpenACR allows for developing a central directory of accessibility standards for software used by the government. This is a significant milestone in standardizing accessibility practices and simplifies the process of communicating product accessibility for vendors and government IT buyers.