About the Committee

These are links to new pages added to the site during the last part of 2000. A narrative is in progress.

History:

The State of Connecticut was one of the first States to recognize the need for equal access for all its customers through the Internet. Connecticut established its first working group to develop guidelines to ensure HTML documents are accessible to persons with disabilities on August 23, 1996. The first Universal Website Accessibility Policy was adopted on December 27, 1996. Many of the State's Internet Policies and Standards that followed have consistently made reference to this accessibility policy which has been updated and revised several times over the past four years.

Our State's most recent commitment to accessibility has been in the formation of a new management subcommittee dedicated to the ongoing need for training and awareness on this issue. This subcommittee, known as the CMAC Accessibility Subcommittee, was formed in September 1999 and held its first meeting in October.

CMAC manages the Official State of Connecticut Website, known as ConneCT, at http://www.state.ct.us. This committee is a collaborative effort between agencies and organizations across all branches of government and Connecticut's institutions of public higher education. CMAC is coordinated by the Office of Policy and Management (OPM) and sponsored by the Department of Information Technology (DOIT). Rock Regan, the Chief Information Officer of the State of Connecticut, fully supports the mission and goals of CMAC, and is pleased that CMAC is taking such a proactive role in ensuring state government web site accessibility.

There are about 15 state agencies represented on the subcommittee. Like other CMAC subcommittees, the CMAC Accessibility Subcommittee meets face-to-face each month and conducts a lot of business and discussions through an E-mail Listserv. Our major accomplishments to date are:

Defining the mission of the subcommittee which is to ensure, through education and outreach, that ConneCT, the official Website of the State of Connecticut, is universally accessible
Continue to update the State of Connecticut Universal Web Site Accessibility Policy
Conducted a demo of state web site accessibility for state government webmasters using JAWS, Bobby and the WebTV Viewer
Established an Accessibility Testing Center for use by state agency webmasters, web designers, and content providers. The Testing Center currently has a personal computer running JAWS 3.51, Bobby 3.11 Build 7, Netscape Navigator 4.08, Opera 3.60, Lynx Browser, WebTV Viewer, and Internet Explorer 5.0. The Connecticut Tech Act Project purchased a Power Mac G4 for the Center and it will be connected to the Internet shortly.

In conjunction with the 10^th anniversary of The Americans with Disabilities Act being signed into law, the CMAC Accessibility Subcommittee will be kicking off a very busy year for Connecticut State government initiatives. The following are initiatives to be completed prior to July 2000:

Propose new policy revisions for the State of Connecticut's Universal Web Site Accessibility Policy to the ConneCT Management Advisory Committee (CMAC).
Develop a checklist with automated tools and manual evaluations to be used by all State agencies in evaluating their compliance with the State's accessibility policies and goals.
Design a logo for use on Connecticut government web sites that indicates their full compliance with the State's policies.

Other major initiatives include education and outreach, accessibility analysis and remediation and meeting our goal of becoming the FIRST Universally Accessible State government web site in the United States.