In September 2026 I ran an automated accessibility check on the home pages of a sample of small United States city websites, all of them in the population bracket that the Department of Justice has given until 26 April 2028. Fourteen official addresses were on record. Ten of them loaded. Seven came back completely clean. Not a single warning.
That sounds like good news and it is not. A clean automated report is the most common reason a city stops work on accessibility, and it is the weakest evidence in the whole field. This article sets out exactly what I checked, what came back, and the far larger part of the rule that no scanner has ever touched. If you would rather see finished work than argument, our web accessibility case studies show what full audits and remediation actually produce.
Table of Contents
What the ADA Title II rule actually requires
The DOJ rule published in April 2024 set the technical standard for state and local government websites and mobile applications at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Not WCAG 2.2. A number of vendors quote 2.2 in their marketing, and aiming higher does no harm, but the legal line is 2.1 AA.
On 20 April 2026 the Department issued an interim final rule (91 FR 20902) that moved both compliance dates back by one year. As matters stand today:
- Entities serving a population of 50,000 or more: comply by 26 April 2027
- Entities serving under 50,000, and all special district governments whatever their size: comply by 26 April 2028
The standard itself did not change, and nothing else in the 2024 rule changed. Two years sounds comfortable. The rest of this article is about why it is not. Our ADA Title II website compliance page covers the scope of the rule in more detail.
What I tested, and what came back
Cities were selected by population and by having an official website on record. Each home page was loaded in a real browser and checked for images with no alt attribute, visible form fields with no accessible name, visible links and buttons with no accessible name at all, text below the WCAG contrast minimum, a declared page language, and the presence of a top level heading.
Cities are anonymised below, and so are the two vendor platforms they run on, because the point of this exercise is the pattern and not any one city or supplier.
| Site | Issues found | Worst ratio |
|---|---|---|
| A | None | n/a |
| B | None | n/a |
| C | None | n/a |
| D | None | n/a |
| E | None | n/a |
| F | None | 4.72 |
| G | 1 image with no alt text, 6 text elements below contrast | 1.18 |
| H | No h1, and 1 control with no accessible name | 4.52 |
| I | No h1 | 5.34 |
| J | None | 6.12 |
Four findings are worth pulling out of that table.
- There is no such thing as a hand built small city website any more. Ten out of ten ran on one of just two vendor platforms. Anyone selling into this market is selling against a template, not against a bespoke build.
- Seven of ten were completely clean. The templates are not bad. That is a better result than our industry usually admits to.
- Three had real, findable defects. One carried an image with no alternative text and six text elements below the contrast minimum, the worst measuring 1.18 to 1 where the rule asks for 4.5 to 1. That is text very nearly the same colour as what sits behind it. Two others had no
h1on the home page at all, and one of those had a control that a screen reader cannot name. - Four of fourteen sites would not load at all from outside the United States, two of them returning an outright 403, and three more had quietly moved domain since the official record was made.
What an automated accessibility scan cannot see
Run honestly, a check of that kind covers somewhere around one third of WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The other two thirds cannot be measured by a machine, because the questions are about meaning rather than markup:
- Is this alternative text a useful description, or does it just repeat the file name?
- Does the reading order make sense when you cannot see the layout?
- Can a person finish this form using only a keyboard?
- Is the caption on the council video accurate, or did the software mishear every street name in the district?
- Does the focus indicator stay visible when you tab behind a sticky header?
So here is what my scan did not do on a single one of those ten sites. It did not open one PDF. It did not play one meeting recording. It did not press the Tab key once. It did not start JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver or TalkBack. It never went near the payment portal, the permit application, the job board or the map embed.
That list is not a footnote. For most cities, that list is the website.
The building behind the front door
A city home page is a front door. Behind it sit agendas, minutes, budgets, ordinances, bid packets, zoning notices and board applications, nearly all of them published as PDF.
A PDF is only a container. It can hold real text, structure, headings and a proper reading order, or it can hold nothing but a photograph of a page. On screen the two look identical. Only one of them can be read aloud. A 300 page budget exported straight out of a layout program has no tags, no reading order and no bookmarks. If it was scanned from paper it has no real text at all. A resident using a screen reader opens it and gets silence.
The DOJ rule covers that budget document exactly as much as it covers the home page. The free scanner reported green because it never opened it. This is the gap I want clerks and communications staff to see: the scan is a smoke alarm, not a fire inspection, and silence from it proves nothing.
Third party embeds sit in the same blind spot. Payment portals, permit systems, job boards and map widgets are usually supplied by somebody else, and they are usually where the actual transaction happens. A scanner that only reads your own markup will not tell you that a resident cannot pay a water bill with a keyboard.
The five exceptions, and why they are narrower than people hope
The rule does contain exceptions, at 28 CFR 35.201, and in my experience they are widely misread. There are five:
- Archived web content
- Preexisting conventional electronic documents
- Content posted by third parties that the entity does not control
- Individualised documents that are password protected
- Preexisting social media posts
Each one is tighter than its name suggests.
Archived content means content kept only for reference, not currently used, and clearly identified as archived. Moving a live page into a folder called Archive does not qualify it.
Preexisting documents stop being exempt the moment a resident still needs that document in order to apply for or access a service. So the 2019 permit application is very much still in scope, even though it predates the rule.
Third party content outside your control is not the same thing as content that a vendor you pay has built for you. If you procured it, you are responsible for it.
I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. But if your compliance plan rests on one of these five exceptions, have somebody read the actual text of 28 CFR 35.201 before you rely on it.
Contrast designed to the line, not past it
One more finding deserves attention. On two of the sites the worst contrast I measured was 4.52 to 1 and 4.72 to 1. The requirement is 4.50 to 1.
Those templates are built to scrape the minimum rather than to clear it. Which means that the first time a staff member picks a colour off the brand palette for a seasonal banner, or lightens body text over a hero photograph so the picture shows through, the page fails. Accessibility built exactly to the line does not survive contact with ordinary day to day communications work.
A platform can only hand you an accessible shell. Everything your own staff puts inside it is yours, and that is precisely where this rule bites. It is also why an overlay widget does not solve the problem: see accessibility overlay versus real remediation for what those tools can and cannot do.
Seven things worth doing in the next ninety days
- Count your PDFs. Search Google for
site:yourcity.gov filetype:pdf. Most clerks are surprised by the number. - Sort them. Which documents does a resident actually need in order to get a service or take part in local government? Those are your priority. The rest can be properly archived or retired.
- Stop the bleeding first. Make a rule that from today no new PDF goes up unless it is tagged, or unless the same information also exists as a web page. Publishing as HTML is nearly always cheaper than remediating a PDF afterwards.
- Caption the council video properly. Automatic captions are a draft. Somebody has to correct street names, surnames and the wording of motions.
- Tab through your own home page. No mouse. If you cannot reach the search box, the main menu and the Pay My Bill link using only the keyboard, you have found a real failure that no scanner reported.
- Ask your vendor for an accessibility conformance report for the exact version you are running. Our VPAT and ACR page explains what a useful one looks like, and get it in writing who is responsible for the content your staff uploads.
- Name one person. A deadline without an owner is a deadline that arrives unmet.
None of this needs a large budget. It needs somebody to look past the green tick.
Where to get help
I have worked in web accessibility since 2003 and hold the DHS Trusted Tester certification on accessibility. My team includes IAAP certified colleagues. We run manual website accessibility audits against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 Level AA and Section 508, test with JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver and TalkBack rather than with a scanner alone, and carry the findings through to remediation so that the report does not simply sit in a folder.
If you want to know what an audit costs before you talk to anybody, our accessibility audit pricing is published openly. If you would rather start on your own, the WCAG checklist is free to use.