What’s Your Accessibility “Why”?
By Beckie Bean
She | Her | Hers
Digital Content Manager
Department of Revenue, Executive Director's Office
In his book, Start With Why, Simon Sinek asks us to begin with “Why.”
“WHY is the thing that inspires us and inspires those around us.” My accessibility “Why” isn’t borne of some inspirational tale, it comes from a life of near misses.
I nearly went deaf—twice. I had two severe ear infections that profoundly impacted my hearing for most of my early childhood. But thanks to the help from my family, the excellent care from my doctors, and an experimental procedure (at that time), I can hear at about 90% now.
I nearly missed debilitating injuries to my spine—also twice. A car accident and a simple gardening mishap both led to months of physical therapy and countless doctor visits to heal my back and be able to walk without intense pain from sciatica.
These near misses taught me that having to navigate the world with a disability is only a moment away for everyone. They instilled in me a sense of gratitude for continuing to be able to hear and walk, but they also gave me deep empathy for people with disabilities.
These experiences taught me that people with disabilities are not different—they are just like everyone trying to go about their daily lives easily and efficiently.
At the Department of Revenue (DOR), I have taken this gratitude and empathy into all of our work on IT accessibility. We began laying the groundwork for IT accessibility planning in June 2021, by inventorying our IT systems, applications, websites, and documents. We also met with the DOR business groups to raise awareness about IT accessibility.
By October, all of our public-facing HTML websites were added to Siteimprove, and we began our focus on remediating the content on our Colorado.gov websites. To date, DOR has remediated 25,128 occurrences of accessibility issues on our websites. We did this by changing how the websites were coded and by manually correcting issues in the content.
We launched our project to create our IT Accessibility Adoption Plan for HB21-1110 in February. I am excited to continue to assist in ensuring that utilizing DOR’s services is easy for everyone!
Now that you’ve heard my accessibility “Why” — what’s yours, and how will you turn it into measurable action?
 Best Practices for User-Friendly, Accessible Forms
Online forms can be complicated to understand and challenging to use, but through thoughtfully designed accessible forms, you can make the experience easier for everyone, including:
- People with cognitive disabilities can better understand the form and how to complete it.
- People who use speech input tools via voice commands can quickly navigate to the fields they have to complete.
- People with limited dexterity will benefit from large clickable areas like form fields, checkboxes and radio buttons.
- People who use screen readers can understand lists, options and command buttons more easily because they are labeled correctly.
How can you create accessible government forms that make people’s lives easier? Find best practices and resources for creating simple, accessible forms on OIT’s Accessible Web Services Guide to creating forms.
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