A running list of language access resources on the web
Visit Spanish Language Style Guides and Glossaries on Digital.gov to find more resources for improving how the government communicates with the public in Spanish.
Find more information about how the U.S. Department of Labor approaches plain language for UI on their Plain Language resources page.
To see more plain language definitions of UI terms produced by the Office of UI Modernization at the U.S. Department of Labor, please visit The UI Lexicon.
Learn more about Federal Plain Language Guidelines on plainlanguage.gov
See the Federal Plain Language Guidelines by PLAIN for more examples of how to use active voice effectively.
Visit this American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide to learn more about Bias-Free Language.
You can learn more about gender-inclusive communication in Spanish from (Re)Nombrar, created by the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity of Argentina.
Academic Spanish dictionary: Real Academia Española.
Grijelmo, A., & Merino, J. M. (2019). “More than 555,000,000 of us can read this book without translation”: Mas de 555 millones podemos leer este libro sin traducción = More than 555,000,000 of us can read this book without translation. Taurus. [This collection of essays portrays the richness of the Spanish language and presents a mix of historical, social, cultural, and economic perspectives.]
If you want to design better UI claimant communications, see this Unemployment Insurance Email Template Kit, created by the New Jersey Office of Innovation and Semicolon Design Group.
Gonzales, A.L. (2022, July 7). Why multilingual research matters. Code for America. https://codeforamerica.org/news/why-multilingual-research-matters/
For web accessibility guidance visit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
See the W3C's guidelines on “non-text content” and tutorial on optimizing images for the web.
Equitable Name Test: An open source list of names and considerations for names to make systems more equitable.
Promising Practices in State Unemployment Insurance Digital Service Delivery, Beeck Center Digital Services Network, January 2024
New Jersey's Worker-Centered Approach to Improving the Administration of Unemployment Insurance, September 2023
Three years after the pandemic recession, signing up for unemployment still isn’t easy, NPR Marketplace, June 26, 2023
A non-comprehensive list of the articles, reports, and publications that have been useful in developing our understanding of UI systems in the United States. Originally compiled by Alyssa Levitz.
"Pandemic Unemployment and the Social Safety Net" funded by New America:
"Barriers and pain points of applying and getting assistance" by Lindsey Wagner & Dana Chisnell
"Time spent applying and waiting for benefits" by Gina Kim, Lindsey Wagner, Rebecca Michelson, Grace Cho, & Dana Chisnell
"The Unemployment Pandemic: Addressing America's Job Crisis" by Michele Evermore
"Unpacking Inequities in Unemployment Insurance" from New America, by Monée Fields-White, Vivian Graubard, Alberto Rodríguez, Nikki Zeichner, & Cassandra Robertson
2020-10-05 The Century Foundation, National Employment Law Project, and Philadelphia Legal Assistance: Centering Workers: How to Modernize Unemployment Insurance Technology.
This report provides an analysis of states' pre-COVID efforts to modernize their UI systems in order to make recommendations on how to continue this effort with more success moving forward.
The recommendations they make are even more important to consider as COVID-era volumes underscore the existing limitations of UI systems; the recs are broken down based on stages: Planning, Designing, and Implementing.
Within the "The Role of Unemployment Insurance" section, they do the important work of sharing some of the ways in which systemic racism impacts both UI systems and the underlying unemployment that make the systems so critical. This is a fundamental piece of their argument for the inclusion of the affected populations in making major changes to the UI systems.
From Disrepair to Transformation: How to Revive UI IT and Infrastructure, Congressional Testimony from Rebecca Nixon, Executive Director, NELP
2020-06-08 NASWA, Upjohn Institute for Employment Research Study: Implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Workforce Development and Unemployment Insurance Provisions. (Also see: report pdf).
This report contains key lessons learned from the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) enacted in 2009.
From National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO): Chat with Us: How States are Using Chatbots to Respond to the Demands of COVID-19. This report isn't exclusively about unemployment insurance, but it includes information about UI chatbots.
2020-11-30 -- Government Accountability Office: GAO-21-191: Covid-19: Urgent Actions Needed to Better Ensure an Effective Federal Response. There were 4 key take-aways for UI in this report:
The Federal Department of Labor had been reporting the number of weeks of UI benefits claimed as the number of individuals claiming benefits. Given backlogs and multi-week certification processes, this has the effect of inflating how many people appear to be on unemployment.
UI Benefits are funded by taxes levied by states on businesses; these funds are completely used up in many cases. “As of November 9, 2020, 21 states and territories held about $40.2 billion in federal loans to pay UI benefits.” It will take years after this recession to re-establish the funds and pay back these loans.
Most states have been paying the minimum allowable benefit for PUA rather than calculating what folks are truly eligible for. The DOL doesn't know how many states are tracking, recalculating, and disbursing these payments, though California appeared to be doing so as of October 30, 2020
There are a lot of on-going fraud investigations. 14 investigations by DOL itself, nearly 150 by the US Secret Service, and unknown numbers through money given by the federal DOL to states.
2020-09-16 -- California Employment Development Department Strike Team: Detailed Assessment and Recommendations
This 100+ page report with appendices details the innovations and limitations within CA's EDD
Its primary recommendations were:
Measure and monitor every step of the claims process daily
Deploy a NIST IAL2-compliant identity proofing solution within the application process
For a period of time, delay new claims filed and redirect highest skilled staff to focus on processing claims
Complete deployment of mobile-friendly document upload solution
2021-01-28 -- Nevada DETR Rapid Response Strike Force Report****
Originally compiled by Alyssa Levitz with help from Waldo Jaquith
Many of the problems facing Unemployment Insurance agencies today are not unique. Each entity might have a different name, provide different benefit amounts, and require different things from its constituents to access those benefits -- but they can still learn a lot from each other's solutions.
US Digital Response's Unemployment Insurance team works with specific UI agencies on projects and investigations as requested (get in touch with us via our contact form!), and whenever possible, we share our learnings with approval from those partners.
We are also tracking the changes that UI agencies are making on their own or with the help of other organizations. We track these changes based on publicly available information (e.g., press releases, news articles, and website inspection with standard browser developer tools). We are sharing this tracking publicly in the hopes that everyone can benefit from knowing what others are doing.
We have also conducted deep dives on some of these topics:
Identity Proofing (updated: 3/11/21)
Chatbot (updated: 12/22/20)
Appt/call scheduler (updated: 1/21/21)
Online repayments (updated: 11/25/20)
Alabama
SSA cross-matching (2004 Press Release)
No
Yes - opens for the following week on Friday at 5, assigns you a time window for in-person appts
Alaska
None found (SSA presumed)
Yes - IBM's Watson Assistant
Arizona
ID.me implemented in Oct. 2020 (Press Release)
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
Arkansas
- None found (SSA presumed) - Unspecified algorithm added to their system in October 2020 (News article)
No
California
ID.me implemented in Sep. 2020 - Results from 1st week - Results from first 3 weeks
Yes - Astute Chat Bot
Colorado
- Experian implemented at some point (News article)
- ID.me implemented Jan. 2021 (article)
Yes - Google Chat Bot - 90% of Qs answered
Yes (youcanbook.me), bottom of the page News article
Connecticut
None found (DMV presumed)
Yes, toward the bottom of the page -- search for "Schedule a Callback"
Jan. 2021, News article
Delaware
None found (DMV presumed)
Yes - ServiceNow
Florida
No - saw an implementation with Google Chat Bot on 11/5/20 but it wasn't there on 12/14/20
Georgia
ID.me implemented in Aug. 2020 (article) - Initial results
Yes - MSFT
Hawaii
None found (DMV presumed)
No
Idaho
- DMV
- ID.me implemented Jan. 2021 (article)
No
Illinois
None found (DMV presumed)
Yes - Google Chat Bot. Some results discussed here.
Indiana
ID.me implemented Fall 2020 (Press release) - Contract link
Yes - In footer of all in.gov pages: faq and live chat through Zendesk - On UI login page: search function with Jira Service Management
Iowa
Using LexisNexis Risk Solutions (web site)
No
Kansas
SSA, backup by DMV - FAQ site
Yes - not sure of vendor (same as MD)
Kentucky
None found (DMV presumed)
Yes - Salesforce
Yes, via Telegov, an NIC Platform (new appts added daily)
Louisiana
ID.me May '21 (article)
No
Maine
ID.me
Yes - Google Chat bot, sometime between mid June and October
Maryland
None found (SSA presumed)
Yes - not sure
Massachusetts
ID.me
Yes - not sure
Michigan
New system of some sort implemented in Jun. 2020 (Press release)
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
Phone appt scheduler (10/21 launch) -- site here -- Acuity Scheduling
Minnesota
None found (DMV presumed)
No
Mississippi
ID.me
No
Missouri
ID.me
Montana
- Jun. 2020 added additional mesasures (press release) - Nov. 2020 implemented ID.me (Post)
No
Nebraska
None found (DMV presumed)
No
Nevada
Aug. 2020 began pilot program with ID.me (Article) - Contract - Sept. update
No
New Hampshire
None found (SSA presumed)
No
New Jersey
Yes - Google Chat Bot
New Mexico
None found (SSA presumed)
Yes - Salesforce
New York
ID.me
Yes - Astute Bot
North Carolina
Using multiple sources (article): - NC Data Analytics Center - NASWA Integrity Hub - National Directory of New Hires Wage Crossmatch
-ID.me implemented late 2020/early 2021 (ID.me help article)
Yes - MedChat. (Live chat during business hours, Q&A outside business hours)
North Dakota
- SSA
- ID.me implemented Dec. 2020 (press release)
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
Ohio
Oklahoma
Idemia, Dec. 2020 (Press Release)
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
No
Oregon
ID.me
Pennsylvania
ID.me implemented in Oct. 2020 (Press Release)
Yes - Genesys
No
Rhode Island
Yes - Twilio
No
South Carolina
ID.me
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
no
South Dakota
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
No
Tennessee
Yes - Zopim (now Zendesk)
No
Texas
ID.me implemented in Nov. 2020 (Press release)
Yes - AWS & Accenture
No
Utah
Yes - Live chat during business hours - uknown through whom
No
Vermont
Yes - Genesys - Live chat during business hours
No
Virginia
No
No
no
Washington
ID.me implemented Dec. 2020 or Jan. 2021 (website)
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
No
West Virginia
Yes - Twilio
No
Wisconsin
Google Cloud implemented in Oct. 2020 (Press Release, Article)
Yes - MSFT BotFramework/WebChat
No
Wyoming
No
No
Guam
No
No
Washington DC
Yes - Google Chat Bot
No