ADA Title II · Special Districts
Special districts get the 2028 date. Not a pass.
Library, water, sanitation, fire, park, hospital, housing and transit districts are all covered by the ADA Title II web rule. The rule gives every special district until April 26, 2028, and a senior WordPress developer will tell you for free what your site needs before then.
Written findings, ranked. Nothing changes on your site until you say so.
Your date
April 26, 2028, regardless of size.
A special district government is a public entity other than a county, municipality, township or school district that provides one or a few designated functions with enough independence to be its own government. The Census Bureau does not calculate a population for it, so the rule gives every special district the later date. A department that belongs to a city or county is not a special district; it uses that government's population and 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 library, water, fire, park, transit and other special districts, that means:
Covered entities
- Library districts
- Water, sewer, sanitation and irrigation districts
- Fire protection and emergency services districts
- Park, recreation and open-space districts
- Transit and transportation authorities
- Hospital, health and housing authorities, and metro districts
Board agendas and minutes
Every special district posts them, nearly always as PDFs. After the compliance date each new one needs to be a tagged, readable document.
Bill pay and account portals
Water and sanitation districts usually hand this to a vendor. Content a district provides through a contractor is covered as if the district built it.
Service alerts and outage notices
Boil orders, burn bans, route changes, closures. These are the pages that must work for everyone, and they are usually the ones built in a hurry as a coloured banner or an image.
Library catalogs and event calendars
The catalog is vendor software; the events calendar is a plugin. Both are covered, and calendars are one of the most common keyboard-trap failures on WordPress.
Applications, permits and forms
Tap applications, burn permits, facility rentals, library cards. A form the public must use to get a service is never exempt, however old.
Maps and schedules
Service-area maps, transit schedules and trail maps need a text or table alternative that carries the same information.
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.
Untagged PDFs
Minutes, rate schedules, annual reports and forms exported without tags or a reading order. The fix is mostly in how the documents are produced.
Contrast in the theme
Light grey body text and low-contrast links are set once in the theme and fail on every page.
Alerts that are only a colour or an image
A red bar with no text alternative, or a JPEG of the outage notice, fails the people who most need to read it.
Calendars and sliders without keyboard access
Event calendars and homepage sliders that need a mouse, or that auto-advance with no way to pause.
Forms with missing labels
Placeholder text instead of labels, required fields marked only in red, errors that are not announced.
Vendor portals nobody has tested
The bill-pay or catalog vendor says it is accessible. The review checks the flow a resident uses, not the brochure.
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