Municipal Government Websites
Meeting the ADA Title II web rule across a sprawl of departments, portals, and decades of posted PDFs.
Title II turned WCAG 2.1 AA into a legal requirement, not a best practice.
The DOJ's ADA Title II web rule set a hard technical standard — WCAG 2.1 Level AA — for state and local government websites and mobile apps. Entities serving 50,000 or more people were required to comply by April 24, 2026; smaller entities and special district governments have until April 26, 2027. The hard part for most municipalities isn't the main website. It's the agenda packets, permit forms, GIS viewers, and third-party portals for utility billing and 311 that residents actually depend on.
What's at stake: Title II obligations don't stop at the pages you control. If a resident can't pay a bill, apply for a permit, or read a council agenda without sighted assistance, that's a program access problem — and the vendor hosting the portal is rarely the one who answers for it.
This is you if
- Council agendas and meeting minutes are posted as scanned PDFs
- Utility billing, permitting, or 311 runs on a third-party portal nobody has evaluated for accessibility
- Departments publish to the site directly, with no accessibility review in the workflow
- You've adopted a remediation plan but can't say what percentage of content is actually conformant
What we actually do, in order.
Inventory before audit
Catalog every public-facing property — main site, department microsites, vendor portals, mobile apps, document libraries — and rank them by resident impact. Most municipalities discover more properties than they expected.
Audit against WCAG 2.1 AA
Automated scanning for breadth, manual and assistive-technology testing for the roughly two-thirds of criteria a scanner cannot evaluate. Findings are written so a web vendor can act on them without translation.
Fix the access paths first
Sequence remediation by the services residents actually use, not by page count. A conformant 'About Us' page is worth less than an accessible permit application.
Push obligations into procurement
Accessibility language, VPAT requests, and acceptance criteria written into RFPs and vendor renewals, so the next portal doesn't recreate the problem.
Make it sustainable
Training for the staff who post content, an accessibility statement with a working feedback path, and a monitoring cadence that catches regressions between audits.
Deliverables, not a status update.
- A documented inventory and conformance baseline you can show a regulator or resident
- A prioritized, dated remediation roadmap tied to resident-facing services
- Accessibility requirements embedded in procurement and content workflows
- Trained staff who stop introducing new barriers
Services this draws on
Industry context: Municipal Government
Other situations we're brought in for.
Colleges & Universities
Coordinating accessibility across hundreds of department sites, an LMS, and course content nobody centrally controls.
Read the use caseHealthcare Patient Portals
Scheduling, intake, and patient portals that work for the patients most likely to need them.
Read the use caseE-Commerce & Retail
Making the path from product page to confirmed order work for every shopper — and closing the highest-litigation-risk gaps.
Read the use case