For those people that might need it, just want to clarify when you say this is not shelters with Homeless Population or people might just slip in, right . I want to reframe your question to make sure i understand. The question is, if we open a shelter, will it also include members of mr. Madrid no. My question was, i just want to make sure that when the shelter is open, or opened up, its not homeless shelters. Its just specifically for those people that need to be in there, right . When a shelter is opened in San Francisco, our intention is to serve the needs of the individuals that are coming to the shelter. We recognize that some individuals may have particular needs. There are many Resources Available for individuals who may already be homeless. They may already go and use or go to the locations where theyre already familiar, but they may come to any shelter in the city, if they need assistance. Mr. Madrid the reason i ask is that as you mentioned before, those places are accessible, but we had a meeting a couple of months ago that most shelters are not accessible. Just wondering information on that and possibly recheck your plan. And the second question is that for your outreach, it has the ability and i havent got any notices that i can sign up for this resources that you were informing us. How do you reach out to those people who might or might not know . I didnt mean to interrupt. I was just going to say in answer to that question, which is an important one, it is again our great dem colleagues that do our alert systems. Very important first step that all people in San Francisco can do. And if you feel like youre overmessaged, you can sign up just for your zip code. That is an important first step. Mr. Madrid i didnt get any information. Thats what i was saying. So if you dont know about it, how do you know what you dont know . The second, there are barriers to getting into the pg e medically dependent program. Many people dont even know about it. Their providers may not know about it. It is an optin program, so its another way which we want the message to get out, including important forums like this, that these are available. The third reason and the reason i sort of stepped in, we have found in investigating the empower database that people dont know theyre in it. It is pulled from their medicare medical records. Its tightly controlled by the federal government. Including whether they think its a significant enough emergency to release it, because it is hippa level information. So when we had the geary fire and we were worried about the power shutdown in that neighborhood and how long it would go on, we were told by the federal government that was not a significant or long enough disaster for us to get those names. And i believe that was true. And it was a reasonable control. I mention that because, if youre in the empower database, its because you have a medically qualifying need and youre on medicare. It does not, however, include peoples phone numbers. So we will and are creating a robust approach to contacting people who do not know their name may be asked for by the city in an extreme emergency. So you cant actually ask to be in the empower database. Mr. Madrid thank you. I hope that answers your question. Mr. Madrid it does. Thank you. Ms. Sassouni hi. Ill try to keep this brief. Just a few things. I just received an alert through the system about the outage this morning, so that was good. I use alert sf, but also for my sons school and other things. Next door, all of these neighborhoodwide events i try to sign up for all of these alerts. As much information as possible. And these are very general. But in terms of access, i dont know. For me as a deaf person, i do feel like were responsible to prepare ourselves in advance by having extra batteries at home and things that may last a minimum of 72 hours, so if the power does go out and were not able to access the news and so on, we may or if the gas goes off and we dont have enough food, so planning for the earthquake preparedness activities, can be part of preparing for a power outage. I think its also a good lesson for everyone, but in terms of the access part, not sure. I mean the Community Outreach and partnering with different organizations is going to be so important. Some deaf people dont bother to reach out because were so used to being on our own and taking care of ourselves in those regard. And deaf people may sleep through audible fire alarms. Others are barely alerted to their own house on fire, and barely able to get their three children in the car. Rental landlords often dont provide ada accessible alerts, even though theyre required under law. And there can be alert animals, but thats not always a flawless system as well. I think there are so many things that we can do to prepare ourselves, but i think having the battery backup is really significant. And again, not sure if people can carry it, what is convenient for people . So just another approach i encourage you to consider. Thank you, council member. I appreciate the comment. One thing about Public Safety power shoutoff and prepare willing shutoff and preparing for that, if we have a large earthquake, there will be a public outage with everything else, with debris, with many other issues. So the efforts that people are going through to prepare themselves for Public Safety power shutoff are the same things they need to do for any type of disaster. I mentioned earlier we had 22,000 people without power earlier today. We could have many more in a Public Safety power shutoff. If something happens to the phone pole in front of your house, like it did mine, five residences were without power for five hours. That was tough. I had my dog inside. My spouse who works from home. And i had a refrigerator that was off. Ive taken steps where she now knows how to turn on the generator and get it going, much to my chagrin as i keep drilling to her do so, but this is how we prepare for an incident that happens to us. But it was small. It was only five. So whether its five, 500, 5,000 or more, the same steps were taking are what help us prepare. Ms. Senhaux chair thank you. Three more Council Questions to go. Thank you for waiting. Ms. Pelzman thank you for your comprehensive approach to this. It makes me feel a little bit better about what is going to what we could anticipate happening in both the disaster and also in turning off the power. Im going to follow up again on outreach. Especially as it relates to pg e as a renter, i dont have a pg e bill. And im not sure how you all have incorporated renters or folks like myself who dont pay the utility into your calculus of how to get inform us. As somebody who has done a lot of outreach in the past, i would encourage you to report back to us to let us know how you are going to be expanding both the method and person to person outreach if thats what it takes. [please stand by] i think that alex and myself and a number of other people here are really primarily concerned about how were being informed. And i my personal opinion about pg es efforts to get information out is i havent known them to be particularly robust and so im wondering who is monitoring pg es approach to this . Is that your responsibility . How do we make sure theyre going to accomplish what they claim theyre going to accomplish in a comprehensive way . Our responsibility and ill speak for the larger Emergency ManagementCommunity Working with all of our partners. Working with nicole. So when the California PublicUtilities Commission is doing their rulemaking process, we have made explicit requests that theyre going to be notifying individuals on their data bases, although as jan mentioned there are limitations to that. Theyre notifying Public Safety, which is including Emergency Management, fire, law, health and this is something throughout the bay area, we are asking pg e to do. Where we see gaps and a psps was initiated in june in the clear lake area. It was pg e did as much outreach as they could. They used a different data base and information they had so residents in that area, there wasnt a lot of complaining about not being notified. That doesnt mean that the converse is true that everybody that got it. It seems to have worked in terms of the current plan that they have. But certainly, we still want to ensure that its going to be successful for here in San Francisco and in any populated region in the bay area. How are you going to do that . Its continuing to participate in the rulemaking process and i can only point up north of how it went. There was one in marine that was successful if i remember correctly. So, that i understand you correctly, were counting on pg e to follow through on the rulemaking and thats where we are right now, correct . Yes. The cpuc will set the guidelines for notification that pg e needs to follow. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Thank you for waiting. Just a couple of im learning how to use the microphone here. I just want to say, this is unrelated but with the climate strike happening today and us using fuel for back up generation, i just want to and San Francisco wanting to be a green city, i want us to try and be more proactive in terms of thinking about how we want to power our back up generators. Thats just a mini comment. So the other i have two mini questions. One is with the power outage that happened today, i did get the text which was great. It looked like it lasted about an hour. How do you think that went . Do you think there was total uproar or do you think you were prepared when Something Like that happens . I felt the response today went quite well from when the one of the first notices happened in tandem we got a call from our pg e representative direct low to our center saying i want to let you know, this power outage is happening around that same time, our dispatch center got notice. We got sense of the area impacted and we did some initial polling of departments to find out what the impact was and we sent out the notice and on the phone and did a brief of what e knew was going on because of the weather. Should it have been a much warmer day, not having power that would be an impact. We had different departments briefing including pg e about the cause and then what different departments were doing and then we identified actually a lot of it was d. P. H. , what are the medical concerns that we had and what would the next steps be if we did not have a quick restoration. So, we rapidly pulled all of the hospitals in the effected area to find out who was effected and on generator . They all were. Who was not effected . Interestingly, despite being in the middle of the power outage area, several hospitals were not effected at all. We also now know that Health Changes though and so they were out patient clinics that had elective procedures going on but their generators were working. We checked to make sure that important resources like vaccines that must be refrigerated were being safely managed in a Rapid Response manner and then we started the process again this morning of requesting our empower data base to figure out, because we didnt know how long this was going to last for a few hours. So we requested it and started looping in both our regional partners and the federal government to let them know we were going through this and that we might be asking them for that information. Great. Thank you. We just had pre prepared messaging around food spoil age that we prepared with Environmental Health under the circumstances when it happens. Thank you. My other question comment is around it sounds like reports were submitted on august 30th from the department. And it looked like a lot of what you were outlining in the slides with the different meetings that it happened. Were all potential needs or disruptions in business and so i was wondering what the timeline is for you and the businesses to come up with a public im not quite sure what its called. Like a public summary of when because were coming on to fire season, unfortunately, probably within the next month or two. So we kind of need to know what the information is or where these emergency shelters are located if people need to go to home. So we are finishing the executive summary right now on the private sector and then well have the more detailed information going to them in the next couple weeks. Unfortunately the one correction i would make is were always in fire season. There really no start to it its something that is always part of it and its any time the weather is going up and the wind comes up and theres that possibility. Were always preparing and you are right, we want to get that information and thats the intended executive summary is going to be. The things that many of you spoke about and this is what we encourage everyone to do because theyre private sector we cant necessarily require that they do all these things but the continuity of Operations Plan that is kind of the most basic thing they can do. One of the most important things and what would be impacted if there were a power shut off. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Thank you for being here and thank you for speaking. I found myself getting angry while you were speaking and i realized my anger is really directed at pg e. I wish they were here instead of us. Again, kudos for, as my colleague said, your comprehensive approach. Its reassuring to a certain extent. Although, a couple of quick questions. If the electricity is cut in the city, would it be city wide or would it be by neighborhood or it depends on what happens . Its the latter. It depends which i know makes it very difficult for the planning. We have asked pg e for explicit outage maps that if transmission is cut off in different areas, what will the impact be to the city . And they dont have a specific example for that often citing that each outage may be different and so they dont want to say this is the whole area that well be out when that may not be the case. Ok. It could be up to four days or it could be a few hours . It can. One of the things that pg e does emphasize is if the power is turned off, it may whether its for five minutes, five hours, five days they have their procedure to safely reenergize the system. They need to inspect the transmission lines to make sure the event that caused them to deenergize. They dont want to bring the system back up only to then have issues. Im sorry to interrupt. Its not just a fire has started or theyre trying to mitigate this spread of the fire . Or theyre trying to prevent a fire. It could be for something a tree falls down . It is for a windy day. My understanding is the intention of the psps event is when the conditions exist that may cause a tree to fall into a power line or some other continue that may increase the likelihood of a transmission line causing some type of power, thats when theyre going to turn it off. And so when they turn it off, they need to come back through and inspect to make sure that nothing is touching any of the lines or something happened so they can bring the system back up safely. And as they say, that takes time. They can do some of it with helicopters but in other areas they cant. They need to send line crews out in somewhat rugged terrain so they say it could be a minimum of 24 hours when the conditions no longer exist for psps for them to inspect everything to turn it back on. Right. It just strikes me as well, im worried because in the past, and i would think it was a year ago. I do kind of think of this as our fire season here, specifically. When it was the sanomanapa fires and air got so bad in San Francisco, you know, i have a medically fragile kid. Shes in a manual wheelchair. She is on a pulmonary machine. It shakes her lungs to keep them clear. And we also have an elevator. So thats how she gets access to and from our home. Those are our main concerns with that. With electricity. It was a relief initially to be able to stay in our home when the air was so bad. In the city. And now were saying huh, if the air is so bad we dont want to leave the house but we wont have electricity in our house. I mean, my first thought is we leave the city, right . We just get in our car and drive. Thats assuming though we get notification. We get some kind of warning. And a real life example of us not getting warning is i was one of the homes directly impacted by that geary explosion. I have signed up for sf alerts for the last two years, i didnt get an alert. The only way i knew about the fire, you would think oh maybe you heard it, right. It was an explosion. My house shook and im five houses, im seven houses down from the intersection where it happened. My house shook, what do you think i thought it was . An earthquake, right. Im facing west. I dont see the smoke. I hear some helicopters. I go outside my house and im on the top floor. I assume its a car accident on geary. Again, i dont smell smoke or see smoke. I hear the helicopters. I go back in my house and put on my music. Luckily, mother o neither of my 8yearold twins were home. I got text from friends to alert me what was going on. I walked east and looked out my third floor windows and run downstairs and open my front door and i see Police Officers in the middle of parker street. At this point, ive been in my house at least 10 minutes and im hearing the fire engines. I asked them, you know, what are we doing . Whats going on. They said you are being evacuated. And i couldnt go back to my house. I said my front door is open and were a family prepared for the 72 hours. Nope, maam, you cant go back in. So, that was our experience. And luckily no one was hurt, luckily i didnt have my kids. We got back in the next morning. My question later i thought, you know, i get all the alerts about traffic in soma, i get all the alerts about everything outside of my zip code even though i signed up just for the zip code specific once. I couldnt understand why i didnt get the alert for my own neighborhood. I realize maybe, maybe, although it doesnt make a lot of sense to me, i had a new phone with the same phone number but it was a new phone thats my Public Service announcement that you need to resign up for sf alerts and even if your phone number is the same. So anyway, my point is thats a real life example of where the system kind of i dont know if the system failed but we werent alerted and luckily nothing bad happen but it definitely makes me on edge and that so, i forget this other point, we talked about Emergency Preparedness for our population in the city and it was suggested to us by a police officer, sf police officer, to go down to our local Police Station and kind of let them know if you have a vulnerable Family Member in your home that might need assistance in a particular emergency. So i did that. Police station said no, we dont do that. Try the Fire Department. I went to my local Fire Department i love these men and women. No one is to blame. Im realizing more and more and i hope your agencies realize this, theres a huge disconnect between the needs of our population and what the citys current response is or what they can do. Our local Fire Department, the guys were lovely and they took my address and name and the name of my daughter and said we canf they can put it into a data base as an alert but they said well put it on the white board right here by the i said, ill take it and i dont mind. Low tech but its fine with me. Again, nothing th the day of the geary explosion. I cross my fingers. I wanted to relay my experience so you all know of the kind of the little glitches in the system that can occur that have occurred. I wish you luck. I feel like my takeaway from this is hopefully i get the notification, even though my daughters a child and i understand you are not getting pediatric information and even though while she has medical, she has private primary insurance. My takeaway is were going to leave town. Thats unfortunate. Thank you for sharing your story. One thing that you mentioned and i think this is what dr. Gurly wants to talk about, one of the things you mentioned is we may have three very important things happen at the same time. The power going off due to a wild fire causing air quality issues and if it comes at a time when we have a heat related incident, we have to manage all three of those and dr. Gurly has done a tremendous amount on that particular item and maybe you can share some of that. I just wanted to start by saying im sorry you and your family had to go through that. It is both traumatizing, i know until the moment but then you just described theres anxiety that just seeds. I did want to say that at a certain level, i think you also very accurately and in a very poignant way demonstrating something i personally feel is so important. Which is that in an emergency, it is trust that saves lives. Its the issue of where do you trust or not the information that you are getting. Also, that the most important thing that any of us can do is make our connections to people who care about us, which is also a challenge for many communities. Your friends are your safety net and they came through. It also demonstrates powerfully and what were trying to do is build layers of safety nets. All of them will have holes, thats why theyre called nets, right. And so our goal is to try to have multiple ways to attempt to reach people who need to be reached the most. And always do it in a way that includes the affected community and learns lessons from them. I mention that because, i dont think there will be a data base that is that accurate and that useable in the moment. As you and others find, when the bad thing happens our First Responders are so busy that theyre often not going out to try and help people but theyre trying very much to contain the situation. Or theyre triaging. So, connecting and creating a plan and the social network around you is important for everybody for any hazard. Also, realizing that you are right, for people who have needs, sometimes the best thing to did is to leave the area. That is not in my mind as a publichealth official sort of a failure. That is actual lo actually a wah those of us who have choices and means can allow the citys agencies to focus on people who may not have so many choices. If it is possible and if it doesnt have negative consequences for the people involved including you and your family. What he was talking about that were deeply concerned about is the triple threat of heat and power loss and air quality. According to mayors directive, both after the beaut campfires and recently as a result of these prolonged power shut down workshops, were trying to create a unified plan. As part of that we realize already that heat is the most important threat to people, our people. And if you think of it, heat kills people quickly. Air quality is scary and i was here everyday when you look at that color there it feels like you are breathing the airy whiff lenairy whifflentairequivalent. Is there a doctor that says its ok to smoke, no, never. Whether its burning things in your kitchen or having a bad air quality day, our hope is you can shelter and place and it will go away and you will have air exchange and just like someone who is quit smoking, thats a longer term problem we would like to address. What we want to do is save lives in the moment. And that important issue to take home is just remembering the heat. We making sending out weird messages like open your windows and turn on your fan even though the air quality is bad if you are overheated in your home. For people who are isolated and who depend on their airconditioning, so its important to think about in advance and create your Safety Network that is your circle and it can be very stressful to think about but its important to think about doing it not just for yourself but for others. Im sorry, i dont mean to interrupt you. We need to move on with the agenda and i apologize. Great questions, i wish i could get more in but we have to proceed from questions from staff and i have to get Public Comment on this item before we go inform break. We still have two other presentations. My apology. Thank you for your patients, staff. Do you have any questions for the presenters . I will forgo my time for today except to say thank you very much. Its clear we have a lot more work to do and that we, its also clear were very committed to doing it. I would suggest for the council as a followup to the primer that we had today that maybe the next item in a feature meeting would be the specific progress that the disability Needs Working Group is making and has made on these issues so we can do a little bit deeper dive no some of these questions that came up today. Multistorey evacuation is something were working on and the shelter data base and these important questions are on the agenda of that working group. I would suggest that we think about bringing this topic back so we can do an even deeper dive and thank you so much to my colleagues for being here today. Thank you. Were going to move on to thank you. You can sit down. Were going to move on to Public Comment on this agenda item. Who do we have . We have three Public Comments and i need you to please be brief so we can take a 10minute break. Thank you. I wanted to offer a comment about the pg e medical baseline program. My sister was enrolled in it and i think the number one issue is awareness. It took me two years to find out the program existed. My sister was healthy, she went into the hospital and came out with lung failure and was dependent on supplemental oxygen. Our electric bill went from 15e to an Oxygen Concentrator she needed to use 24 7. When i spoke to pg e on numerous occasions why my electric bill was so high for medical equipment, i wasnt offered the baseline program. Not one single physician or nurse that we saw over two years ever told us that the program existed. It was only after a lot of research and starting to talk to people that i found out the program existed. It was a onepage form. It required an oxygen prescription. It was very simple. It took about two weeks to get enrolled in the program and our electric bill went back down to about 350. It didnt cover 100 of oxygen usage but it tempered quite a bit of the bill. When i talked to pg e when we had a power outage a couple years ago, and the advice i was given was to go to the hospital. And so, we were able to get a generator and take care of that. So then i spoke with the oxygen providers. And i asked, can we have additional oxygen tanks . A part of the challenge there is that and im not sure if your office is aware, but there are about four to five oxygen providers in the city and they only make deliveries once a month. Medicare has changed the reimbursement and even if you are not on medicare or medical, private insurance is taking the lead for medicare. And so, i had to convince the National Director of a particular Oxygen Company to provide me with 25 large tanks so i could keep at home in the event of a power outage. Im not sure if other oxygen patients are able to do that. And so i just wanted to bring this to your attention. Once we were on the program, it was fine. I was able to get alerts. But the challenge was getting onto the program itself and its very easy to get on the problem is awareness and understanding it exists. Thank you. Thank you. Zack. Hi, id like to request an extra minute so i can talk slower for the sign language interpreters. Thank you. Council members, i really ask terrific questions and i appreciate that. Im disturbed at the very evasive answers to some of these questions such as the availability of shelters during the peak fire season right now. I also want to point out that pg e does not care about disabled people. They care about lawsuits. 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 theres 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. Theres no law forcing my landlord to make a ramp for me so i cant 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 emailed pg e and said im a wheelchair user. I cant 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 couldnt 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. Were going to take a were going to proceed to hold on, im waiting for the panel. Thank you. Were going to information item number 7. The dahlia housing portal. I want to thank our presenter maria benjamin, the Deputy Director of Mayors 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 wasnt able to be here today. Ill 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, im the product manager for the dahlia product. What that means, i work out of the Digital Services department. Were a relatively new division. Were the tech people. I work with engineers and designers and we partner with maria and her department to make sure were helping her administer her program and helping members of the public get the information they need to apply for affordable housing. So youll get a little more im going to try to go up the middle and make sure im talking about technology in terms of what value its bringing. But if i veer over, stop me. In this presentation, were 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. Ill 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 im excited to learn from people in this room. Thank you for having me. Im 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 Mayors Office of housing keep track of data, search it, run reports and understand if theyre meeting certain goals. My team also makes a second web application, but thats 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. Ill 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, youll see a list of the open listings. Open meaning theyre 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, theyre 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. Thats one of the ways were 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 were working on. If you look at the slide, what is showing in the top is the database, the Sales Force Database where were 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 were rolling out this fall. Its relatively new. The purpose of the lease up function is to make sure that rules are followed. So things that theyve been doing and i ill 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 cant just run ott of time and out of time and put the first person in there. Theyve 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 dont want those units filled with people who dont 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 well 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 weve 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 Mayors 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 shes come up with a document, 29page document, which is her accessibility audit. If anybody is interested in seeing that, im 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 were 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, were 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 ill 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, its 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, its easy to understand what the problem is. We didnt have any audio or video content, but that was part of audit to make sure we didnt have anything that was a barrier due to that reason. And then looking at how we write our content and making sure its 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 were 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, its an example of our footer. There is gray text on a black background, which doesnt have the proper ratio to ensure its accessible. This might be a little geeky. So pardon me. But there is the heading tags and the html. Its 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, thats something that our team is looking at, not just on my team, but were bringing this to the Digital Services department so we can all learn how to do this for all the products were making. And then i mentioned before, that with giving alert messages, its important that we dont just focus on the color red. Like the red cant 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 heres 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. Im 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 were still trying to figure out what the next steps are, because there are different combinations, worked with Different Levels of success. Im going to skip over the technical stuff, because i think its too much. One example in the bottom we found, removing apprentice thinksies was important. Ca for california instead of writing out the word wasnt working well. There are folks in the room im sure that know more way about it, and were trying to get up to speed. Were going to continue to research Screen Readers. Were getting a license to put that part of your regular user testing before we make new releases. But were 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 ill say is that our next step this fall, were working with a group called civic makers. We have a procurement with them. Were looking for an organization to test with. We have not identified an organization we can partner with yet, but ill 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 dont know yet by having ongoing user testing. And the goal is to have it be an ongoing part of what were 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. Well take all these learnings and reassess them with the priorities we have for the dahlia products. We get a lot of different requests. So ill work with maria and her team to figure out the order we can do this to get these things built. Thats my presentation. Thank you for covering both parts of the presentation. Im going through the chair, may i answer emilys question. Ms. Senhaux chair you may. Nicole in terms of user testing recommendations, Mayors Office on disability does have a list of community organizations. And were also more than happy to help with basic recruitment. Im 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 didnt let you. Council member questions. Lets 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