Overview
Alameda County supports more than 100 websites and web applications across 22 departments, building accessibility that lasts well beyond any deadline. By pairing automated scans with Siteimprove’s manual testing, the county is turning every review into a learning moment for the developers and content editors who keep its sites moving.
The Problem
Alameda County has been investing in accessibility for nine years, starting with an important goal: making its registrar of voters site work for every voter. The team earned certification, but as Theresa Desseaux, Web Designer, ITD Web Team, explains, the road was challenging. "It was a wall of information, and we were still learning what to prioritize and how to fix it."
Certification is also a snapshot in time, and the county’s digital footprint kept growing. Mike Dobbins, Technical Services Director, oversees a web team supporting more than 100 websites and web applications across 22 departments, each with its own mission, priorities, and small pool of web staff. Add more than 15,000 PDFs, and the question became how to scale accessibility. Automated scans catch code-level issues, but they can’t confirm whether someone using a screen reader or keyboard can actually complete a task.
A 2024 complaint sharpened the focus. The county’s documented plan and progress helped close it, and the team set a bigger goal: making accessibility a habit in every department. As Mike puts it, "Everyone will tell you accessibility is important, but when you ask them to go fix everything, that’s a very different conversation."
“Everyone will tell you accessibility is important, but when you ask them to go fix everything, that’s a very different conversation.”
The Solve
Alameda added Siteimprove’s managed service, Expert Accessibility Testing, which augments the Siteimprove.ai platform’s automated capabilities. The service deploys certified human testers and assistive technologies in a tightly unified reporting pipeline, creating a single workflow environment.
Alameda also enrolled its developers in Siteimprove’s training platform.
In spring 2025, they kicked off a countywide remediation project, with a lead from each department coordinating inventory, training, and content decisions. Manual testing became the engine. Every week, Siteimprove’s accessibility specialists test two templates or pages the way real people use them, with screen readers, keyboard navigation, and magnification. If automated scans are the spell check, manual testing is the editor, confirming the experience actually makes sense. Because the focus is shared templates and components, one fix can reach many pages. Every other week, the specialists walk Alameda’s team through the results, with the developers and content editors who own those pages in the room.
The sessions double as training. Everyone leaves knowing which fixes are theirs, and teams learn to build accessibly from the start instead of fixing the same issues twice. Developers have started asking to join other teams’ reviews. "I attend every one of them, because I learn something new every single time," says Theresa. Teams now fix issues before testing, and reviews come back with less to address.
Accessibility is also becoming part of everyday work. With Siteimprove, the county hosted an Accessibility Day for more than 100 agency staff, including a live assistive-technology demo that showed accessibility is a team sport. For PDFs, departments make a coordinated effort to delete, archive, or convert to HTML outdated documents, and remediate only what’s left.
The momentum shows: accessible pages have grown from 5,000 to more than 10,000, 238 users regularly track issues, 120 staff have joined manual testing training, and 72 pages and templates have been manually tested. Next up, developers will test their own work before launch. "Getting that knowledge into our staff is priceless," says Theresa.
