OHA Digital Accessibility Blog: February 20, 2026

With the deadline for the ADA Title II rule swiftly approaching, the Digital Accessibility Team at Oregon Health Authority (OHA) has been hard at work getting the agency ready for compliance. 

Our policy implementation project officially kicked off in Q2 of 2025. An overview of the project timeline is available on OHA Digital Accessibility Roadmap page. In this article, we’ll briefly describe the progress we’ve made since this project began. We’ll also talk about where we hope to go from here.

Early in the project, we organized an accessibility maturity assessment for OHA. The results of this effort are summarized on our 2025 OHA Maturity Assessment page. This initial assessment highlighted some areas where OHA was already performing well, as well as many areas where we had more work to do to improve digital accessibility. We hope that repeating this maturity assessment on an annual basis will help us to determine where we are improving, and also where we need to devote more energy in the future.

The Digital Accessibility Policy Implementation Project is divided into four workstreams. The following is an overview of what’s happening in each of these workstreams.

Automated accessibility testing with Siteimprove is ongoing across all Oregon.gov pages maintained by OHA. In addition, the Digital Accessibility Team has been providing design guidance and manual testing for high-priority websites and applications. We are fortunate to have three native users of assistive technology on our team, including two native screen reader users. With this expertise, our team has provided manual accessibility testing support on 18 websites and applications to date, including:

Accessibility remediations on all of these sites and applications have been completed or are currently underway.

At Oregon Health Authority, many of our documents are created and published by Publications and Creative Services (PCS). The Digital Accessibility Team has worked with PCS to review new document templates for accessibility. We have also provided training to help ensure that new documents produced by PCS after April 2026 will be accessible. 

We have identified many older documents still in use by the public that do not meet document accessibility standards. Over time, as these documents are archived or retired, this problem will be resolved. However, in the meantime, these documents must be accessible, per the ADA Title II rule. We are working with PCS to remediate these documents (most of them PDFs) in order of priority. To date, our team has remediated 544 PDF pages to WCAG 2.2 and PDF/UA standards, including the following high-use documents:

The Digital Accessibility Team has identified Division Accessibility Leaders in all of our divisions. These Leaders are receiving training and remediation tools to help ensure that documents created at the division level will be accessible, too.

Over the past 8 months, we have worked with Oregon Department of Justice to draft new contract language to ensure that Information Technology and services purchased by the agency is fully accessible. Moving forward, vendors will be required to provide Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) on request – a common practice in many states and public unversities. Solutions that do not currently meet WCAG will need to be remediated for accessibility. A “Contracting Playbook” for contract administrators is in final draft form and will be circulated soon. 

The Digital Accessibility Team published our “Getting Started with Digital Accessibility” course in January, 2026. This 90-minute Workday training module, created in Articulate, provides an overview of the fundamentals of digital accessibility for all content creators at OHA and ODHS. It was recently made available to all state staff with an interest in learning more about digital accessibility.

This course will be followed by additional modules on document accessibility in March of this year. We also hope to make these modules available statewide.

In addition, we have launched a public-facing blog (welcome!), as well as an internal-facing Knowledge Base to help communicate on widely discussed topics in accessibility. If you work for OHA or ODHS you can find the Knowledge Base on our DAT (Digital Accessibility Team) page on the OWL.

Oregon Health Authority is far better prepared to provide accessible digital content to the public now than ever before. That is due in no small part to the hard work and dedication of our partners at Publications and Creative Services, Office of Information Services, Office of Contracts and Procurement, and across the agency. In addition, it would have been impossible without the steadfast support of our agency leadership, and the skill and dedication of our project manager (thank you, Molly!)

However, our work will not end on April 24, 2026. In the coming months and years, we will strive to ensure that we are upholding compliance standards and continuing to mature as an organization. During Phase II of our project implementation, starting later this year, we will also broaden our focus to include more internal-facing content. With this effort we hope to ensure that not only members of the public, but also state staff, have their access needs met.

We will work to keep OHA staff and the public updated as we move forward toward greater digital accessibility into the future.