In this SXSW 2018 presentation, Michael Fulvio, Director of Customer Success at SeamlessGov, explains the urgent need for local governments to provide 508 and ADA compliant digital services. He outlines how many existing PDF forms are inaccessible to people with disabilities and describes SeamlessDocs—a cloud‑based platform that transforms legacy PDFs into fully accessible, mobile‑friendly web services. The platform automatically detects form fields, adds attachment, payment, and e‑signature workflows, and offers a robust web form builder with conditional logic, all while preserving the original form’s look and process. Fulvio shares a case study from Austin, where a reasonable‑accommodation request form was digitized, made screen‑reader compatible, translated into hundreds of languages, and dramatically reduced citizen effort. He concludes by inviting the audience to consider which online services their citizens need, positioning SeamlessDocs as a scalable solution for hundreds of U.S. municipalities.
Chapters
Hey, good morning everyone. Good morning. Okay, let's get back to the beginning there. So my name is Michael Fulvio, I'm the Director of Customer Success at SeamlessGov. Today I'm here to talk to you about creating 508 and ADA compliant online services. Just a real quick definition for those of you who aren't hip to this hot topic in government right now. Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act and the American Disabilities Act simply state that any technology that is developed, procured, or maintained by the federal government must be accessible to those with disabilities. Now obviously state and local governments are following their lead. So at SeamlessGov, we believe that government is beautiful. It's okay to laugh. It's a little controversial, we get it. But we work exclusively with local governments to help deliver online services and increase efficiency. Now we're currently working with hundreds of governments across the United States. This is just a list of some of the cities that we're currently working with whose mayors said they would be here today. So thank you for being here and thank you for innovating with SeamlessGov and the way that your citizens and staff are communicating with your staff and admin. Cool. So there are 3 initiatives that we help local governments execute on. The first is going digital by bringing these forms online and then delivering them as online services. And then lastly, we help automate those business processes because we know that the form is just the first step in what could be a complicated business process. Now, the challenge that I'm here to talk to you about today is that these existing forms and applications simply are not 508 and ADA compliant. If I moved to your city and I want to register my dog, I would have to go down to City Hall, take time out of my day, find a piece of paper. If I'm someone with a disability, find someone to help me fill that out, or go to your website, download a PDF, print it out, fax it in, scan it in. Mail it in. I'm a millennial, so I don't even know where to buy stamps anymore. There's simply got to be a better way for governments to enable 508 and ADA compliance. You might have guessed that the solution is Seamless Docs. Seamless Docs is a cloud-based web application. That means it can be accessed anywhere, from any device, at any time. Now, if I'm someone with that same disability, I can pull out my phone on my couch, I can go to your city's website, find that form, have a screen reader help me fill that out, Take a picture of my dog Rusty, take a picture of my driver's license, enter my credit card information, and e-sign that all without leaving my couch and filling it out on my phone or tablet. Now one way that we do this is what we call a seamless doc. This is your existing PDF form that you've been using for years. You simply upload it to our system, we're going to help you auto-detect where those fields are, add requests for attachments, add requests for payment, add a signature workflow, And you're working with the exact same form and the exact same process that you have been for years, we're just digitizing it. We've also got a really easy-to-use web form builder. This is where I hear it a lot, believe it or not, forms are fun. So we've got hundreds of field options on there, conditional statements, and of course these forms are 508 and ADA compliant. Now the way that it works is you take that existing PDF and you upload it into our platform. We're going to auto-detect where we think you want information from whoever's filling that out. You're going to take another couple minutes to make fields required and add validations, because not only are we helping you get a completely filled out form, we're helping you get a correctly filled out form. Take a couple more minutes to add a signature workflow, to add requests for attachments or payments, and now in just a couple minutes you've taken a PDF and turned that into an online service that's 508 and ADA compliant. So I'd like to take just a minute to highlight a success story that we've had here in Austin. I got to go over on Friday and hang out with the Friends of Forms in Austin, that was really cool. But they came to us about 2 years ago saying that they need to make these PDFs 508 and ADA compliant, as well as they were looking to streamline that citizen interaction. So very quickly they were able to turn their reasonable accommodation request form into an online service that now is able to be read by a screen reader, translated into hundreds of languages, and it's going to increase the time that that citizen is able to communicate with their government. So now these citizens are spending less time trying to figure out how to do that communication and more time in the pursuit of happiness. So what online services are your citizens requesting? Thanks.
