ADA Title II · School Districts
Every school website now has a WCAG deadline.
The district site, each school's site, the board packets, the enrollment forms, the lunch menu and the app parents use. All of it falls under WCAG 2.1 AA. A senior WordPress developer reviews your sites 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 the district's SAIPE population.
An independent school district uses its population in the Census Bureau's Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, which counts residents inside the district's boundaries, not students. Fifty thousand or more means April 26, 2027. Most districts are under that and get April 26, 2028. A district run by a city or county uses that government's population. Public colleges and universities that are part of the state use the state's population, so they are on the 2027 date.
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 public school districts, charter districts and community colleges, that means:
Covered entities
- Independent public school districts and every school site under them
- Charter schools that are public entities under state law
- Community colleges, technical colleges and state universities
- Boards of education and county offices of education
- Athletics, PTA-run and foundation pages hosted under the district
- Vendor-provided portals: enrollment, lunch, grades, the LMS
Board agendas and packets
Posted as PDFs, often hundreds of pages. Every packet posted after the compliance date needs to be a tagged, readable document, not a scan.
Enrollment, consent and registration forms
The forms a parent must complete to enroll a child are the clearest case in the rule: a form used to access a service is never exempt, even if it was posted years ago.
Individual school sites
A district with twenty schools has twenty sites, usually on the same WordPress multisite and the same theme. One theme fix repairs all of them; one theme flaw fails all of them.
The parent portal, lunch and LMS
Third-party software the district contracts for is covered as if the district built it. Password-protected does not mean exempt; only individualized documents about a specific student are.
Newsletters, flyers and social embeds
A flyer posted as an image is a page of text no screen reader can read. Social posts made before the date are exempt; embeds of new ones on your site are not.
Video of board meetings and events
Recorded video needs accurate captions; live streams need live captions. Graduation and concert recordings count too.
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.
Image flyers in the news feed
The most common failure on district sites: a JPEG of the spirit week schedule, the bus route change, the early-release notice. Text, or alt text that carries all of it.
PDF packets that are scans
A scanned or untagged board packet is invisible to a screen reader. Building packets from tagged documents fixes it going forward at almost no cost per meeting.
Colour and contrast in school themes
School colours on school colours. Gold on white, light blue on grey. The theme sets it once and every school site inherits the failure.
Calendars and sliders you cannot tab through
Event calendars, hero sliders and photo galleries that only work with a mouse, or that move on their own with no pause control.
Forms and buttons without names
Search buttons that are only a magnifying-glass icon, translate widgets with no label, and enrollment forms where the required-field asterisk is the only instruction.
Staff directories and tables
Layout tables with no headers, and directories built as images or as text with the phone number in a colour-only link.
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