SCHOOL SPOTLIGHT
Colorado Department of Education
Colorado has been ahead of many states in the country on digital accessibility, building a multi-year framework that raised expectations for how public entities communicate online—well before updated federal Title II requirements.
With accessibility legislation, HB21-1110, and guidance from the Governor’s Office of Information Technology, the state has continued to strengthen its accessibility standards, and that momentum has put the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) in a position to lead by example.
But CDE had to make it work at scale—its 25,000 documents and 8,000 pages of website content were managed across dozens of offices by hundreds of editors.
With accessibility and compliance as a priority, CDE’s team began a full workflow reset to support consistent, accessible updates at scale.
At a Glance
CDE'S vision is to create equitable educational environments where all students and staff thrive.
Bridgett Dailey, CDE’s Digital Accessibility Manager, and Michelle Gebhart, Communications Division Project Coordinator, shared how the team made that shift, launching a new process to organize resources, align content standards, and use Finalsite Composer to keep accessibility part of its everyday publishing workflow.
What sparked the need for a change at CDE? What did CDE’s website workflow look like before Composer?
The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) is a state agency of around 600 staff serving 870,793 students, 55,000+ teachers, 1,877 schools, and 178 districts.
CDE self-hosted and self-managed our previous CMS and servers under a decentralized model with content managed across 80+ offices and at times, up to 170 content editors. This allowed our subject matter experts to be the ones updating their content and on the timeline they wanted, but made it challenging to maintain consistency, clarity, and alignment across the site at scale.
As the website grew, it became increasingly difficult to ensure content was organized around user needs in a consistent voice and brand, and at times, the communications web team was scrambling to ensure web content featured in campaigns and news releases was aligned with messaging. Long story short: it was tough to be proactive.
These challenges highlighted the need for a more coordinated approach to content strategy, governance, and workflow across the agency.
As part of this broader shift, moving from a self-hosted CMS to Finalsite allowed our team to spend less time managing technical infrastructure and more time focusing on content, usability, and communication strategy.
"What once felt overwhelming or unclear became manageable and achievable ... Finalsite has saved us a lot of time in formatting and site management."
BRIDGETT DAILEY
COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
Which Composer tools became the backbone of your publishing and accessibility work?
We use Composer’s content management features and integrated tools to support consistent publishing, accessibility, and user engagement across a large, decentralized organization.
We rely on Composer features like:
- Content presentation and structure
- Custom templates and banners for consistent page structure
- Posts and filtered posts for news and updates
- Home hero images and featured content
- Branches and Resources folders to manage site organization
- Accessibility and language access
- Image accessibility features (alt text controls)
- Weglot for multilingual translation, with both AI translation and manual customization by our language services team
- AudioEye accessibility overlay as part of a broader accessibility program
- User engagement and communication
- Ask AI (“Ask CDE”) chatbot to support users in finding information quickly
- Calendars and social feeds for timely updates
- Data and integrations
- Embedded HTML for Tableau data visualization
- Embedded videos and linked pages
How did you set accessibility standards without creating a bottleneck? Did you put any guardrails in place?
While we don’t require approval before webpages are published, we rely on clear publishing standards, training, and ongoing review to maintain quality and consistency.
In Composer, we have procedures for image and document accessibility.
- We updated our Composer settings so that if there is no alt text, the image will not show publicly on the webpage, and editors will see a notice reminding them to add alt text. We review images regularly to ensure they contain alt text.
- We set up an “accessibility_checked” tag for Resources as well. All documents must contain this tag indicating that the accessibility has been checked and corrected to the best of their ability and that the document will be remediated or another version provided upon request. We review documents regularly to ensure they contain this tag.
How did you organize ownership across departments so the work stayed manageable?
Website
We transitioned from a decentralized publishing model to a centralized governance structure led by the communications team. We used website analytics to prioritize high-traffic and high-impact areas, allowing web editor access for those areas, and the communications web team took over updates for less active areas. We now have 11 document editors (they manage Resources only), 35 primary web content editors, and 7 site administrators.
Centralizing web responsibilities within the communications team increased the volume of work managed centrally, which required new systems for intake, tracking, and coordination. Ultimately, we were able to reduce web content editors by 75% with no service impact, and we now also have a standard web request form and metric tracking.
The new, smaller group of editors works in coordination with communications/web and with clear roles and responsibilities, and access to training and support. We have weekly office hours, a dedicated Teams group for updates and technical discussion, and ongoing updates to our Composer how-to guide with contributions from the editors and the communications web team.
This has allowed us to be more consistent and have more strategic oversight of content across the agency, offer self-service support models in addition to direct support, and be able to measure what is working, should we need to adjust the number of editors.
Accessibility
Early on, CDE identified Accessibility Division Champions to help advance accessibility efforts across the organization. These key team members serve as a bridge between the Accessibility Team and their divisions, sharing deadlines, identifying content that may need remediation, and highlighting relevant training opportunities.
Accessibility work at CDE is approached as an ongoing awareness campaign. Communication happens early and often through multiple channels — email, chat groups, all-staff messages, newsletters, and more. If there’s a platform to share information, the team uses it, ensuring accessibility remains visible, timely, and part of everyday work across the organization.
Separately from Composer, as part of the broader governance shift, we established clearer publishing standards focused on accessibility, plain language, and content quality, backed up by an official website policy and digital accessibility policy.
These standards helped ensure that content is consistent, user-centered, and aligned with communication goals across the agency, regardless of its origin.
What changed once the cleanup and new workflows were in place?
In Composer, we can schedule Posts for news items and field trips—and auto-remove them on a specific date! We can draft webpage changes and schedule publication for a specific date and time, which is a huge game-changer for getting ahead and planning around staff schedules.
It's been great having pre-formatted elements like buttons and cards rather than having to create those from scratch each time, and being able to clone pages and posts is a BIG deal because that was never a possibility before.
Just as importantly, the effort removed the sense of being “stuck.” Instead of wondering where to begin, staff had a clear path forward. The result was not only measurable progress, but also replacing uncertainty with clearer priorities, improved efficiency, and more predictable workflows.
What results or early ROI signals can you share?
Early data suggests reduced reliance on phone calls and emails to CDE’s main contact channels, supported by the Ask AI chatbot helping users find information more efficiently.
We don’t need data to know that we have improved translation quality through the use of Weglot combined with manual review and customization by CDE’s language services team!
To measure long-term ROI across all metrics, we plan to do a user satisfaction survey and we have anecdotally heard positive things about the website's look and organization from teachers and school district staff, as well as our own staff.
The cleanup process we went through, along with our shift in governance and the number of editors, brought much-needed clarity and structure to the work. By organizing content and identifying what needed attention, teams could clearly see priorities and take action with confidence. What once felt overwhelming or unclear became manageable and achievable.
In addition to platform improvements, the governance and content cleanup work significantly changed how the team operates. Finalsite has saved us a lot of time in formatting and site management.
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