[meta] I filed an Open Meeting Law complaint against the Chicopee City Council

 
On December 12 I filed an open meeting law complaint against the Chicopee City Council because it does not OCR any of its published meeting materials.

Here is the text of my complaint:
Meeting agendas and minutes are published to chicopeema.gov/agendacenter as pdf files created from scanned images, and do not contain any text.

This is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under the ADA governmental entities are required to provide effective communication that is accessible to individuals with disabilities. The Massachusetts Office on Disability explicitly states that electronic materials must be in an accessible format to comply with the law.
(mass.gov/info-details/effective-communication-as-a-disability-right)

This violation applies to all agendas and meeting minutes published on chicopeema.gov that I reviewed.

This violation prevents individuals with a visual impairment from accessing meeting materials.

It is also an unnecessary burden on those who do not rely on assistive technology  to access meeting materials, because the meeting agendas typically contain the url for attending a meeting through the video conferencing software Zoom. The problem here is these urls cannot be clicked on, nor copy and pasted, and a Zoom meeting link looks like this:
"""
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83976966008?pwd=rePBJ1 G8 YnclEmJzZaECBanX7DVIZv.1
Meeting ID: 839 7696 6008
Passcode: 450980

"""

I say that this violation is unnecessary because the agenda packets which members of the council use for themselves *do* contain text, because they were never printed, then scanned, as the versions published to chicopeema.gov are.

In addition to complying with the ADA, a text version of meeting materials would allow for basic searching of agendas and minutes, which would improve transparency. This can be trivially done at no cost to the city by either publishing the same agenda packets used by the council themselves, or performing optical character recognition -- a technology that is at least 30 years old -- on its scanned
documents. If the council is unsure as to the best way to convert its documents, Tesseract, and OCRmyPDF are both free and open source OCR software, are simple to use, and in my testing both converted  a meeting agenda in less than 30 seconds.

I requested the following remedy:

Immediately comply with the Open Meeting Law by doing the following:

- Publish text versions of all past meeting materials
- Do the same for all future meeting materials
- (preferably) publish the full meeting agenda packet before meetings