It’s not well known, but big changes are coming to the media world in Colorado. HB21-110 is the new law passed by the Colorado government to make all media accessible to everyone. Lauryn Bentley, Eaton’s Public Information Officer, said, “The law prohibits a person with a disability from being excluded from participating or denied the benefits or services of a public entity or state agency”, according to colorado.gov. Essentially, its purpose is to ensure public entities and state agencies are making themselves accessible for people with disabilities.” 

The laws only affect students in charge of media accounts and all media classes, and won’t impact regular students’ everyday life. But for the ones in those media classes, it will now change everything they do and can post. Usually, making posts can take 5 minutes but with these new rules, it adds a lot of extra steps, adding more time to each posting. Some of the requirements exile some fonts from being used and adding alt text to all postings and captions on all videos.

If all media postings are not acceptable by next year, anyone who has a disability and feels that the media posting was not fully accessible to them, can sue that agency for $3,500 per offense. It also can be sued by multiple people for the same offense to the new laws. The media laws are on what is called a “Grace Period Bill” or HB24-1454, which will end July 1st, 2025, putting the laws into full effect. Bently says, “ The key to this new law is making sure a state entity or public agency, like our school district, is accessible. This means our website will need to be accessible as well as what we post on social media. We are making great progress to get there!” It is a very long and tedious process to make sure that everything is all done and compliant with the new law and may take a long time but the Eaton district is doing amazing at keeping up with these state standards.