Chicopee begins optical character recognition of meeting materials

 

Screenshot displaying the metadata for two version of a Jan. 7 city council meeting agenda. Both were downloaded from chicopeema.gov/agendacenter. The top file contains text, while the bottom one does not.

Chicopee begins optical character recognition of meeting materials
By Jonathan Gerhardson on January 9, 2024.

The Chicopee City Council will discuss an open meeting law complaint filed by Jonathan Gerhardson (author of this blog), at a meeting of its Rules Committee on Jan. 16. The complaint alleges that meeting agendas and minutes were not made ADA compliant and that the Zoom link for council meetings was not clickable. 

The Massachusetts Open Meeting Law requires cities and towns to make certain meeting materials, such as agendas and minutes, publicly available. When a municipality posts these materials to its website, it is required to do so in a way that complies with state and local laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

In April, 2024 the United States Department of Justice updated its regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring state and local governments to make their web content and digital apps accessible. To do so, government content needs to meet the standards set by the Worldwide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, Level AA.  

One of the requirements to meet this standard is performing optical character recognition (OCR) on scanned documents to provide actual text. A text document which is scanned to PDF without the text being recognized by OCR is an image, with no fonts or text properties.

Going back to at least 2021, Chicopee published scanned versions of its meeting agendas and minutes to its website without performing OCR on them. Versions of both the Jan. 7 City Council agenda, and Jan. 16 Rules Committee agenda were  image-only until sometime around 3:30 PM on Jan. 9, with an updated version being published during the drafting of this article. 

Council president Frank Laflamme said that the software to allow OCR had already been installed by the IT department at the city council's office, and that it was "taken care of." 

Councilor Tim Wagner expressed his disagreement with this reporter for naming only President Laflamme in the complaint.

Wagner also addressed that the complaint requested the council preferably make the full agenda packets available for download. 

"I agree we should probably be uploading the backup material yes I asked about that but was told that there might be some sensitive materials in there eventually that we might not want people to see lord knows what that might be but it’s it’s a whole chain of people who touch these agendas," said Wagner.

While the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law does not require supplementary material to be posted alongside meeting notices, these documents provide useful context for the items on an agenda, and are routinely sent to members of the media ahead of scheduled meetings. The material for the Jan. 7 meeting is available for download here. 

In Massachusetts the Public Records Law creates a presumption that all
governmental records are public records.