A new look for the Waltham city website

Users of Waltham’s city website will see a significant change to their experience this spring as the city updates the system it uses to manage its website’s content.

The new homepage will keep most of its structure but look “a little less overwhelming,” said Abby Auld, the city’s social media coordinator.

Most of the changes will come on the website’s back end. CivicPlus, the company that provides the underpinnings of Waltham’s website, is migrating to a new content management system to improve security and efficiency. 

Auld said the migration was scheduled for completion by May 1, but users won’t see its effects immediately: CivicPlus will spend time training employees on the new website before rolling it out to users. Auld did not know when the new website would be live.

This migration comes in the context of a push from the IT Department to ramp up accessibility features to comply with federal deadlines. And it coincides with the addition of an AI-based PDF accessibility tool called DocAccess, which creates searchable transcripts of all PDFs on the site and offers immediate translation options. 

In a March 16 presentation to the City Council’s Committee of the Whole, IT Department Director Donald Aucoin assured councilors that DocAccess cannot access personal documents such as tax information or bill payments.

The DocAccess update will cost $2,000 to set up and adds an additional $15,895 in annual website upkeep fees. Aucoin told councilors it was an important step in keeping the website compliant with evolving accessibility standards.

New ADA standards

The federal government in April extended its deadline from April 24, 2026, to April 26, 2027, for larger municipalities to bring their websites into compliance with the most recent standards of accessibility mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act. These standards, adopted in 2024, include requirements to ensure pages are readable to users with visibility barriers, include audio transcripts and captions and can be navigated by assistive technologies.

Aucoin told councilors that his department has been working to improve site accessibility for the last two years. This extension is still a welcome relief for the department: Aucoin said third-party services on the website still don’t comply with ADA regulations, and the city could potentially have been hit with fines for noncompliance with the original April 2026 deadline.

All the same, because the department has consistently worked on site improvements, and the website has been over 85% ADA-compliant for the past six months, Aucoin thought such penalties were unlikely. “We’re in good shape for the shape we’re in,” he told councilors. “We’re way ahead of [other communities]… If we’re gonna get penalized, there’s gonna be a lot of communities penalized.”

Auld later indicated the city is in better shape for the new April 2027 deadline. She said the city was in talks with all of its third-party website software partners, who provide functions such as  audit reporting and mapping services, about working toward full ADA, and nearly all were on track to meet the deadline.

Aucoin told councilors that switching to new service providers might be prohibitively costly and difficult but added in an email that the city might have no other choice if its partners are not able to meet accessibility requirements by the deadline.

Aucoin drew attention to the state’s recent announcement that it will distribute grants of up to $250,000 to municipalities in FY2027 under the Municipal ADA Improvement Grant program, which funds both physical and digital infrastructure accessibility projects. He said his department hasn’t applied for the grant previously, but could apply in the future to cover any further website accessibility costs.