The Library of Congress is implementing updates to its Congress.gov portal to ensure accessibility and simplified operations for staff members and the general public.
Robert Brammer, head of the Law Library of Congress's Office of External Relations, said at a virtual event that the Library worked to streamline search functionalities for the website and improve language accessibility features for Spanish-speaking users, Nextgov reported Thursday.
He noted that the Library also added new features to simplify the presentation of Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data and provide more comprehensive information on committee hearing transcripts.
Andrew Weber, a legislative data specialist at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), said his team is also working on indexing elements to simplify search functions for more complex information.
“Congress.gov has a great help center now. But we know Congress is complicated, Congress.gov can be complicated, and we have [a] comprehensive amount of information in our help center,” he said. “So, we want to add search capabilities to the top of our help center.”
Other ongoing initiatives that Weber mentioned include the incorporation of “screen reader” capabilities and the digitization of historic records.