according to npr, cal fire determined in join that pg&e equipment sparked 17 wildfires across north california in 2017. as of june this year, according to associated press, they agreed to pay a billion dollars to local governments in california for their negligence. this goes way back. i mean, over in september 9th, 2010, a gas line blew up in san bruno and killed eight people. and so there's a track record of this. from my personal experience, my care providers found a letter down my hallway this week. i have stairs leading up to my unit. there's no law forcing my landlord to make a ramp for me so i can't check my mail. fortunately my care provider found this letter and i looked at it and read it and it said that pg&e was going to cut off my power in 10 days and charge me to turn it back on because they had not been able to get

into my unit to do a routine power check. this was not an emergency. it was not anything. this is just a routine check. i e-mailed pg&e and said i'm a wheelchair user. i can't let you in very easily. i need help. there are multiple people in my building who are able bodied and can let you into check those meeters. and their response was, oh, we already tried them and we couldn't get a hold of them. i gave them specific instructions for how to get into my unit. [please stand by]

... handling our power infrastructure. i want to thank the council members for their questions and very well intentioned and very reasonable concerns here today. >> ms. senhaux (chair): thank you. we're going to take a we're going to proceed to -- hold on, i'm waiting for the panel. thank you. we're going to information item number 7. the dahlia housing portal. i want to thank our presenter maria benjamin, the deputy director of mayor's office and emily shore, dahlia manager, digital services. thank you for waiting. thank you so much for being here today. >> thank you. should i run the presentation? >> ms. senhaux (chair): yes. >> do i click the button to forward? okay. as you notice there is only one

person here today. maria has a family situation so she wasn't able to be here today. i'll do the presentation and take note of any questions that might not be in my expertise, to make sure you get the information you want. >> ms. senhaux (chair): thank you. >> my name is emily shore, i'm the product manager for the dahlia product. what that means, i work out of the digital services department. we're a relatively new division. we're the tech people. i work with engineers and designers and we partner with maria and her department to make sure we're helping her administer her program and helping members of the public get the information they need to apply for affordable housing. so you'll get a little more -- i'm going to try to go up the middle and make sure i'm talking about technology in terms of what value it's bringing. but if i veer over, stop me. in this presentation, we're

going to talk about the current processes we have on dahlia for enabling people who go to the website to look at listings and understand the information on there to complete an am indication. and then also to -- application, and then also to learn about units that have mobility, hearing and vision features. the process is in place for how those after the lottery happens for how the units are assigned during the process. i'll go to the accessibility audit we did this summer, to look at the ways we need to continue to remove barriers on the site. at the end, there will be time for questions. and i'm excited to learn from people in this room. thank you for having me. i'm not sure how many of you have gone to dahlia, but this is what our home page looks like. and this is where housing seekers can look for rental

units. they can look for ownership units and complete an online application, or print out a paper and fill that out and they can also find counselors that will assist them. my team maintains this dahlia website. we also maintain a sales force database behind it, and that stores not only the information you see here, but also private information on the back side of things to help the mayor's office of housing keep track of data, search it, run reports and understand if they're meeting certain goals. my team also makes a second web application, but that's only for the oecd staff and leasing agents, so the public does not see that. but this is to make sure rules are followed fairly. i'll go over those a little bit. the view on the slide right now

is if you go to dahlia and you click the rent button, you'll see a list of the open listings. open meaning they're currently taking applications. this is an example of one. this is where somebody who is looking at dahlia would understand the priority units in that building. so if you look at the slide, this unit has priority units for vision and hearing impairment and mobility impairment. so the person who is seeking housing would want to go down each listing and would have to look to read for that. and then if that person decides to click to learn more about a listing, they're able to go here on the listing view where you get all the information. they can look to understand the number of units in the building that are -- that have mobility impairment features and the number that have vision -- we lost our connection here for a second -- vision and hearing

features. and from there, they can hopefully -- the goal there is so they have enough information to understand if they want to apply. down at the bottom of the listing, sometimes we have more information, but i think one area we could have for improvement is to have more standardized information, understand better what people want to know, and then have a better way to show it up there. that's one of the ways we're aware we have room for improvement. and then after somebody applies for housing, if they do well in the lottery, they start to go through the lease process. and so i mentioned that second application that we're working on. if you look at the slide, what is showing in the top is the database, the sales force database where we're currently tracking for each listing if there are communication units.

communication units means vision and hearing features, or if there is mobility. what that means, ocd has been tracking to make sure we know what the units are and who should go into them. and below is the partners app. this is something we're rolling out this fall. it's relatively new. the purpose of the lease up function is to make sure that rules are followed. so things that they've been doing -- and i i'll step into what maria would have been presenting -- when you lease the process, you need to go through the entire lottery list fll you find someone, for example, for a unit with mobility features to make sure you have an appropriate person. you can't just run ott of time and -- out of time and put the first person in there. they've been training staff to

do that. they have staff at mohcd that are reaching out to the leasing agents saying, hey, what is the justification for doing that? did you have documentation? did something happen in the meeting, to make sure the correct people are going into the units. because we don't want those units filled with people who don't need those features. so the goal of the partners app is as we continue to build more features on it, it will be easier for staff to go and see that the proper rules are followed. and that no shortcuts are being taken. so we'll be rolling that out this fall. and continue to do more testing and figuring out what features we want to add to it next. the next thing i wanted to go over is the accessibility audit we've been doing in our department. as i mentioned, i work for the digital services department, so

there is about five of us that are -- four of us that are dedicated on the dahlia project, which means we work exclusively for the mayor's office of housing to implement the below rate programs. but we work with other people with expertise. one of the people i work with, christina, and she is a designer that has expertise in designing for accessibility. so she's come up with a document, 29-page document, which is her accessibility audit. if anybody is interested in seeing that, i'm happy to share it. she went through our site. of course, our goal is to not only identify and remove barriers, but we want to learn how to avoid the barriers in the future. and because we're committed to making sure that the dahlia site -- the dahlia site is accessible to everyone. especially those who rely on

assisted technology to access the website content. now that the audit is done, we're in the process of remediating the issues we identified. the good news, the audit found that overall our site is very easy for users to read the site content, including this color contrast. we have the alternative text provided for images so that screen readers can easily understand the meaning of images for a better user experience. but we did find some issues, which i'll go over in the next couple of slides. sorry, i was supposed to be showing it. this was the accessibility audit list. on the slide, it's going over the various things we tested for. so alternative tag descriptions, color contrast, making sure there is a logical reading order, skipping repetitive

navigation. making sure our data and tables is accessible. making sure our forms, pdfs are accessible. keyboard navigation accessibility. making sure when there is a message, it's easy to understand what the problem is. we didn't have any audio or video content, but that was part of audit to make sure we didn't have anything that was a barrier due to that reason. and then looking at how we write our content and making sure it's compatible with screen readers. one of the first issues we found, with the keyboard focus color, it was not providing adequate content. so on our slide at the top is an image how it was before. where you kind of have a blue background with a not too different blue keyboard focus around a button. so we're working right now, my engineers are working to improve that so there is better color contrast. another example is at the bottom

of the slide, it's an example of our footer. there is gray text on a black background, which doesn't have the proper ratio to ensure it's accessible. this might be a little geeky. so pardon me. but there is the heading tags and the html. it's really important that they have a proper flow. we found a couple of issues with ours. for example, we have pages that have two titles. two of the h1 tags. that is going to -- as many of you know, this can confuse screen readers since the h1 title tells the reader where the content begins. we found areas in the site where the h2 heading should have been h3 or vice versa. and essentially, this is kind of an example of something that is pretty easy to diagnose the problem, but there are technical

challenges to fixing it because the way headings are -- they have many meanings on our site, so they pull in the size of the font or the color, so we need to work with a designer to figure out how to fix it. so, yeah, that's something that our team is looking at, not just on my team, but we're bringing this to the digital services department so we can all learn how to do this for all the products we're making. and then i mentioned before, that with giving alert messages, it's important that we don't just focus on the color red. like the red can't be the only message that lets a user know there is a problem. what we learned through the audit, we should be having more of a specific message. hey, this is what the problem is and here's the link to fix it. if you look at the slide, for example, right there, there is just a red banner. nothing is written to tell you what the nature of the problem is or how to get to the field

that you need to fix. so an example here was he could say, have texts that said, please complete your date of birth. there was an issue with the year and then a link to get down. so lots of little things that our team is right now working with the designer and engineers to make the improvements we can. we also audit a site for how well it works with screen readers. i'm curious to find out if the audit is accurate. our research showed and what is on the slide, the screen reader is the most common and windows based and that could be -- most commonly used with internet explorer fire fox. there is few after that, voiceover. and we did some testing, that was kind of mixed results and we're still trying to figure out what the next steps are, because

there are different combinations, worked with different levels of success. i'm going to skip over the technical stuff, because i think it's too much. one example in the bottom we found, removing apprentice thinksies was important. ca for california instead of writing out the word wasn't working well. there are folks in the room i'm sure that know more way about it, and we're trying to get up to speed. we're going to continue to research screen readers. we're getting a license to put that part of your regular user testing before we make new releases. but we're turning this into best practices to share with the rest

of the department so as digital services is building other products, we can have this be part of our -- part of our -- we can share knowledge that is easier for all of us to do these things quicker. the last thing i'll say is that our next step this fall, we're working with a group called civic makers. we have a procurement with them. we're looking for an organization to test with. we have not identified an organization we can partner with yet, but i'll be interested if anybody in the room has a suggestion. what we want to do is go through all the things we found in the audit, but also go through the site in general. some of the things i showed in the beginning, such as how easy is it for a user who comes to dahlia to identify and find, for example, units that have mobility features? how easy is it for them to, you

know, is it for users to complete an online application? what are the most common screen readers that are being used to access the dahlia site. and figure out the things we don't know yet by having ongoing user testing. and the goal is to have it be an ongoing part of what we're doing. when dahlia was built several years ago, there was testing done. but there is a lag. before i was hired, they tested and learned what they want to make. they built them out, but now we want to start reassessing and figuring out what to do next. we'll take all these learnings and reassess them with the priorities we have for the dahlia products. we get a lot of different requests. so i'll work with maria and her team to figure out the order we can do this to get these things built. that's my presentation. >> thank you for covering both parts of the presentation.

i'm going -- >> through the chair, may i answer emily's question. >> ms. senhaux (chair): you may. >> nicole: in terms of user testing recommendations, mayor's office on disability does have a list of community organizations. and we're also more than happy to help with basic recruitment. i'm happy to hear any other recommendations that the council would have, but wanted to make sure you knew we had a community engagement resource list that we distribute regularly. >> okay. thank you, nicole. >> nicole: thank you for letting me go. >> ms. senhaux (chair): last time i didn't let you. council member questions. let's be brief. we have another presentation. >> mr. madrid: i have two questions. one is that i saw on the station

the message through jaws, right? >> could you repeat the question? >> so one question i have, i saw your department has a license to use jaws. >> a license for jaws, yes. >> mr. madrid: yeah. and one of your staff of your department uses jaws? >> she doesn't every day, but in her previous job before she came to digital services and then ongoing in our department, she has designed for jaws before. she understands to some extent how to use it. and she has a license on her computer, but what we decided over the summer, we needed a computer dedicated in our department that is only used for testing with jaws, so the rest of us in the department, a, can

gain the skill set so we can do testing. b, so that we can have user testing and have it accessible or available to more people. like it wasn't just enough for her to have it. because she only has so much time. and also, it's important for us to see this as -- this is a skill that everybody in our department should have, right? this is something we all need to get up to speed on and become proficient and hopefully good at. >> mr. madrid: thank you. i'm wondering if you can answer this question. where someone apply for dahlia?

categories that your department has to follow? >> categories that we have to file? >> follow. >> oh, like the rules. yeah. that might be a better question for maria, because what i get is certain like business rules and i have to implement -- >> mr. madrid: i.t.? >> the i.t., we do some service designs, so sometimes we take the existing process and be like, hey, what if we move this around or did this to create efficiencies for your staff? >> mr. madrid: okay. >> i'm not sure i answered your question. >> mr. madrid: have you experience experienced application that is not completed or not

efficiently, and how you guys connected to how do you guys do that? >> the question is, tell me if i understood, if they get applications that are not complete? >> mr. madrid: or errors. >> or errors? >> mr. madrid: you guys have a lot of ongoing updates on the website. >> yeah. the way that applications work, it's a short form. so anybody who applied years ago, it was a stack of papers this thick and the rules are different. now it's called the short application. it's the bare minimum information that they need to get someone into the lottery. if you hit the submit button on dahlia, then that's everything you need to get in the lottery. and what happens is after the lottery, if you do well enough you meet with the leasing agent,

they go through and vet. if something was -- typically, i can't say always, but if something is a little off in the dahlia application, let's say you put your -- i don't know data entry or something changed -- during that process after the lottery, the leasing agent checks and you have a chance to fix it. like for example, on the dahlia application let's say you say i olivia stefanoviliv live in san francisco. you uploaded a proof document, you meant to upload the lease, but you clicked the wrong thing, that's okay. you'll get to go into the lottery. they'll say, hey, you uploaded the wrong document, bring in the right one and we'll count that. >> mr. madrid: thank you. >> ms. senhaux (chair): council member? >> ms. sassouni: brief question.

have you ever -- is your website able to reverse color background, so it has a white back -- black background with white letters? the white background is more challenging. there is a high percentage of people who have vision impairment. that's one question. secondly, do you have access for other languages? because some people may struggle with english. it's not their first language. i'm wondering if it's available in other languages. >> excellent questions, thank you. i'm not aware if we have reverse color. i know that we have the color contrast that christina did the test for. so i'll look into that and get back to you. and then in terms of languages, there is, of course the city-supported languages, filipino, chinese and spanish.

we support all of them on our sites. historically, a lot of them were google translated and we did a bunch of testing earlier, may, june, april. and those were, of course, not adequate. some were in certain languages, for example, there was pretty, i would say, embarrassing problems with the chinese translation. so what we've done from a community perspective, or a research perspective is partnered with asian institutes, do testing over there and speak with their staff. and come up with better translations and then also removing a lot of the google translations, the automated translations from google and making them human translations. they are sent to a vendor, then mohcd staff and then that's my long winded way of saying the dahlia site always supported the

filipino, spanish and chinese, but it was not always the best quality. what did i miss? >> ms. sassouni: closed captions in terms of the audio component? because people would not have access to that information. >> i'm not sure we have -- i'm not aware of any audio content we have on the site. >> ms. sassouni: i saw it was on the list, audio content. >> i'm sorry, you're correct. that list was a list of things that was on the audit. so the 29-page document that christina has of all the things we should check, i probably shouldn't have listed, because in our case, there wasn't any content there. >> ms. sassouni: okay, great, thank you. >> i should have done that

better. >> ms. pelzman: hi, thank you for being here today. you actually did answer my question in terms of focus grouping, or putting this out and actually letting people interact with it. a group i'd recommend is the independent living resource center. i actually have your site up right here. one of the questions i have is, do you provide images of the actual residents? because right now, all that is displayed, from what i can see, is the exterior of the building? and particularly for people with disabilities, there could be multiple needs that may not necessarily be addressed in a generic -- what would be, i

would imagine a fairly generic approach to design. forgive me for making that assumption, but it would be really helpful to see what a studio looks like, or a one-bedroom. >> because you're saying it would help somebody who needs to look at certain features and understand if they'll work for their situation. >> exactly. >> that's so helpful to hear. we have enough features and requests to keep my team busy for five+ years, so it's a matter of figuring out what is going to help the most people, or help make everybody at least get to have the same experience on the site. that's really helpful, because we've had a lot of people ask for more pictures. right now, you're correct. we look at a listing and there is only place for one picture and it tends to be a picture of the outside, and maybe one on the inside. which is not sufficient. but that is really super -- that is very helpful for me to understand kind of a much more

meaningful important reason to have the pictures, rather than just to see what it looks like. >> ms. pelzman: and basic amenities. where is the garbage disposal? how easy is it to get to it? is there an automatic door that opens it? and if there is parking, how is that situated in terms of accessibility? >> okay. and i was just going to mention. i don't know. i'm brand new, so forgive me if i don't know the answer to this. but i was just wondering if maybe somebody on the council would be willing to participate in reviewing or auditing the system so we have somebody from our community here helping out? >> the last thing was just based on the presentation that we just had, are you coordinating with

emergency response planning around the design of these facilities for disabled people? is there some kind of enhancement that could be brought in? >> that is an excellent question. that is more for the mayor's office of housing. perhaps they're planning. >> you're trying to design and be proactive about addressing emergency preparedness, maybe there are elements that can be incorporated? >> that's an excellent question. could i get your card after and i'll follow up with maria benjamin and see if she can get you an answer. >> yes, thank you very much. >> mr. herman: just a follow-up to my own question. the other issue is the bathroom

accessibility. the ada bathroom in the units. people who need that. my question is, about the application and the use of the site. for people who are visually impaired. how is -- is there some way -- this was my question also about audio, is there some way to have somebody who is visually impaired fill out the application through a voice interaction? as opposed to having to have somebody sit there to help them fill it out? is there some way to design -- digitally design the application so that it's an audio application. and takes responses verbally from somebody who may have visual impairment? >> okay.

so just to make sure you understand, the applicant could speak an answer and then -- >> have the application ask a question, what is your name? and then the person speaks it. and then it gets filed into the application. >> nicole: through the chair, i think one of the things to check on christina's audit is what councillor herman is describing is something available through a voice dictation. and typically, if we're following the current accessibility guidelines when we're accounting for web accessibility, that is part of this audit. so my assumption is that we're also testing specifically for what you're asking for. but it would be good to cross-check that. >> okay. i need to follow up with you on

that. >> the only reason i brought it up, you said there was no audio content. and in response to the other council member. so i didn't feel there was any opportunity for anybody who was visually impaired to complete the application if there was no interactive audio content. >> not built in. >> that's why i asked the question. >> thank you. >> ms. yu: i think you can uncover a lot of this through user testing with people who are blind. my only thing is please pay your user testers. that's all. >> okay. >> ms. senhaux (chair): thank you. any questions from staff? >> nicole: thank you for being here, emily. i'm very sorry that our colleague maria could not join. i think there are other questions, but i think it would be good to, maybe collect those

and help get some of these other questions. one comment that i have -- and again we're happy to work with your team -- when you were talking about the slide that is not rolled out yet on the different disability categories that you're asking the agencies to account for, i guess my question is, let's see if i can be as succinct as possible -- if the unit has not been identified as a communication or mobility unit, are agencies still listing particular features? and what i mean to say is this, there is a certain number of units that we need to, by law, set aside for folks with mobility disabilities that have specific requirements and communication units, which are specifically for deaf individuals. right? and then with specific visual

features. there is not really in the code anything specific for low vision individuals besides requirements for external signage. so what i'm wondering is, if we surpass our number of available code-approved units, are we still allowing for that distinction of the disability needs for or units. i guess my example, thinking about council member williams, who was unfortunately unable to be here, but is blind and has talked several times in public comment about working with her constituents at the lighthouse around trying to find housing. and many times individuals don't need specific other accessibility. they just need access to a unit.

and so i'm wondering if the prioritization still happens if you technically run out of the code-required units? and how that rolls over? or if that is something we maybe need to take a closer look at? >> i think i understand your question. i think that is a conversation to be had with maria. >> i figured that, but i wanted to make sure [laughter]. the way that our categories are listed right now, there are other -- there are other disability types that we can account for, but don't match one to one to code unit, but that doesn't mean that that represents the number of people actually needing accessible housing. >> right. >> nicole: so we can be thoughtful, i think, about how we list those disability

categories. >> okay. >> nicole: so whatever we're representing is accurate to the actual inventory or not. >> right. >> nicole: does that make any more sense? i think we need more discussion. >> i agree. i want more -- i would love more discussion, too, because i think it's a conversation that could happen between yourself, myself and maria and then we could figure out the business side. the part between you two and then i'll implement it. >> nicole: right. i want to make sure we're not misrepresenting what is or isn't available. and when there is more available that could still be utilized by someone with a disability -- >> technically set aside unit for mobility, but it could still work. >> still work because it's an accessible building. i want to make sure, there are many people with disabilities

who, beyond navigating our website, just have difficulty navigating the process of finding housing. which i think we hear in every public forum, but people with disabilities in particular struggle with matching their particular needs to appropriate housing very often. >> okay. let's talk more. because there is other work we're doing to think about, a search feature. how to make it easier to figure out which listings are best. >> nicole: that sounds perfect. thank you so much. >> i'd like to [inaudible] add a point -- would it be possible -- [inaudible] >> ms. senhaux (chair): microphone, please.

>> again, i'm new, apologies. would it be possible for us to have the dahlia link on the council's website. so when people are looking -- you know, they go to the council on disabilities, for those seeking housing, the link would be right there. it would be easy for them to find. >> that makes sense to me, but that's -- you know. >> we've linked to other resources on the web page. that would be no problem, yeah. >> and dahlia will never be done, it's a process. so even some of the things we found in the audit, without getting too technical, we're going to have to do a full rewrite of dahlia because the language is being sun setted. so there are some things we can do now and some things that have to wait. i'm excited about starting from scratch.

the code we're in, it's like having a car where you can't find the replacement part. it's getting outdated. so i'm excited with the new rewrite we'll be able to do things better. we have more tools at a our disposal technically. >> ms. senhaux (chair): i want to thank you very much for doing both parts of the presentation. we look forward to a follow-up. >> thank you, all, appreciate it. >> ms. senhaux (chair): okay. so we have room for public comment. we have another presentation. i'm going to ask for public comment, you can speak for three minutes. do we have any public comment? i believe we have zack. >> nicole: and bruce as well. >> ms. senhaux (chair): and bruce. okay, thank you. >> my name is bruce morgan. i just turned 70 on tuesday. i have cerebral palsy and a

couple years back, i fractured my back. and i've been trying to -- i live in north beach. i have 22 stairs to climb. i've been climbing them for 40 years. but i need, as i get older, uglier, slower, i need to get more accessible housing. i spend several years as a -- doing social work in the tenderloin many years ago and i'm finding that, like with dahlia, when i was looking at the website this morning, because i just did a quick look, it was showing you had to be working to -- because there was how much money you had to be making and what your rent would be. but for me, i'm retired.

and so i couldn't -- it didn't do me any good. that's the information that it's giving. good for those who use it, but in my particular case, it didn't seem to be helpful. and this is more information i didn't see at the moment. i'm finding there are a lot of agencies in the city that deal with housing in one way or another, but a lot of times the information they have is outdated, or you know, it's such that even they're not sure if it's accurate. and a lot of times all they can do is put you on a waiting list. and i've been on a waiting list here and there for years. i was on -- i'm on one where

4,000 people applied for 92 apartments. i'm like 1,000 out of 4,000. and the thing is, it is getting harder to find housing, especially if you're trying to find -- because i'm paying 60% of my income to my housing as of right now. and that is pretty steep. and but you know -- [bell ringing] -- i don't know how much longer i'll be able to live where i am, until i can't afford to live there anymore. there needs to be more coordination among the agencies in the city that deal with housing, so that when someone is trying to find housing, especially if they're senior or disabled and they're on fixed income, like i am,