ADA Title II · Cities, Towns & Counties
Your city website has a federal deadline.
Every city, town, township and county website must meet WCAG 2.1 AA under the ADA. Agendas, permit forms, utility payments, alerts, all of it. A senior WordPress developer reviews yours for free and tells you what has to change.
Written findings, ranked. Nothing changes on your site until you say so.
Your date
Your date depends on your 2020 Census population.
Fifty thousand residents or more means April 26, 2027. Under fifty thousand means April 26, 2028. A department with its own site, like the library or the police, uses the population of the city or county it belongs to.
Compliance date
April 26, 2027
Countdown running
Public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more, plus state agencies and public universities
Compliance date
April 26, 2028
Countdown running
Public entities under 50,000 and every special district government, regardless of size
What the rule reaches
It is not just the homepage.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA applies to everything a public entity provides or makes available online, including what a vendor runs on its behalf. On a site for cities, towns, townships and counties, that means:
Covered entities
- Cities, towns, villages and townships
- Counties and county departments (clerk, assessor, sheriff, health)
- City libraries, parks and recreation, and public works sites
- Municipal courts and police departments
- Housing, planning and economic development pages
- Vendor-run portals you link to for bills, permits and records requests
Agendas, minutes and packets
Usually PDFs, usually scanned or exported straight from Word. They are web content under the rule, and the document exception does not cover a packet posted after the compliance date.
Permit, license and records-request forms
Fillable PDFs and web forms both need labels, instructions and error messages a screen reader can announce. A form residents must use to get a service is never exempt.
Utility billing and payments
Often a vendor's portal. If residents reach it through your site to pay you, the rule treats it as yours. The contract needs to say the vendor meets WCAG 2.1 AA, and someone needs to check.
Council meeting video
Recorded meetings need captions. Live streams need live captions under Level AA. Auto-captions count only if they are accurate enough to follow.
Alerts, closures and emergency notices
Colour-only warnings, scrolling tickers and image-of-text banners fail. The people who most need a snow closure or boil order are the ones a screen reader has to be able to read it to.
Maps and GIS embeds
Interactive maps are hard to make fully accessible. The usual answer is a text or table alternative for the information the map conveys: zoning, districts, closures.
Send the address. A senior developer maps every one of these against your site and writes up what has to change.
Where sites like yours fail
The same six problems, on almost every one we look at.
Most are set once in the theme or in how documents get made, which is why the fix is smaller than the list looks.
Low contrast in the theme
Grey-on-white body text, gold or light-blue links, and white text over photos. Contrast is the single most common failure on the web and the cheapest to fix.
PDFs that are pictures of text
A scanned agenda has no text a screen reader can read. Even exported PDFs usually lack tags, a reading order and alt text on the seal and the charts.
Menus that need a mouse
Hover-only dropdown menus with no keyboard path, and no visible focus ring, lock out anyone who cannot use a mouse.
Forms without labels
Placeholder text instead of a label, required fields marked only in red, and error messages that appear without being announced.
Images with no alt text
Every photo the communications office uploads without a description is a failure. So is a flyer posted as a JPEG.
Video without captions
YouTube auto-captions are a start, but the rule measures accuracy. Council meetings with names, motions and vote counts need corrected captions.
Find out which of the six are on your site, and on which pages, before a resident or an investigator does.
The full list of what WCAG 2.1 Level AA asks, in plain words, is on the ADA Title II page.
The free review
Three steps, no meeting, no charge.
A written review you can forward to the board, the clerk or the IT director, from a developer who fixes this for a living.
Send the address
Your site's URL and an email. That is the whole form. A senior developer replies within 2 business hours to confirm what the review will cover, including any vendor portals you link to.
We test it against WCAG 2.1 AA
An automated scan of every page, then a developer works the pages the public uses most (home, alerts, agendas, forms, payments) with only a keyboard and with a screen reader. A scanner catches the mechanical failures; the rest take a person.
You get a plain-language list
What fails, on which pages, why it matters to a resident, and what to fix first. Ranked, written so the board can read it, with a quote for the work. Free, and yours to keep whether or not you hire us.
Step one is an address and an email. A senior developer replies within 2 business hours.
What it costs
The review is free. The rest is a number, not a mystery.
The review
$0
No commitment
Automated scan plus a developer's keyboard and screen reader pass on the pages the public uses. A written, ranked findings list is the deliverable.
The fixes
Quoted
from the findings, $150/hour, or block pricing
Theme contrast and focus styles, form labels, alt text, menu keyboard access, PDF remediation, caption workflow, an accessibility statement page. You approve the scope before anything changes.
Keeping it that way
$89
/mo per site, month to month
Hosting, updates tested on staging before they touch the live site, daily backups, security, and the developer who did the work. An update can't quietly undo a fix.
Nothing here is legal advice, and no one can promise a legal outcome. What we can promise is a review against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, fixes done by a senior developer, and a site that stays fixed.
Start with the free review. What comes back is a ranked list and a quote you can take to the board.
Built for how public entities buy
No contract, no surprises, no waiting on a vendor.
Month to month, no contract
No multi-year agreement to route through procurement. Cancel any time and keep your site and backups.
Invoices and a W-9 on request
Billed monthly with a proper invoice. We are a US company and send the paperwork your finance office asks for.
US-based senior developers
The person who reviews the site is the person who fixes it. No offshore queue, no ticket tiers.
Veteran-owned and operated
Denver, Colorado. Working remotely with public entities across the country.
Nothing changes without sign-off
The review touches nothing. Fixes go on a staging copy first and you approve what goes live.
Fixes that hold
Updates are tested before they ship, so a theme or plugin update can't reintroduce a failure the board already paid to remove.
Other public entities
The rule reads differently for each of these.
Free accessibility review
Find out where your site stands before the date does.
A senior WordPress developer reviews it against WCAG 2.1 Level AA and sends a written, ranked list. Free, and yours to keep.
The audit is instant and self-serve; it includes basic accessibility checks. The review is the full WCAG 2.1 AA pass by a developer.
- Reply within 2 business hours
- Written findings, yours to keep
- Nothing changes without sign-off
Free WCAG 2.1 AA review · reply within 2 business hours