Let me paint a picture: one day, you woke up with an inherited CMS, a few thousand pages, more PDFs than the county has parking spaces, and a backlog that quietly resets itself every time a department posts a new agenda. A backlog that got longer in the few brief moments you took to read this paragraph.
There are issues everywhere, and never enough time, money, or people to handle them. And yes, many of those issues are accessibility issues.
But chances are, I didn’t have to paint the picture. It’s one you’re already all too familiar with.
That’s not a dig. It’s the job. There are accessibility issues on every government website. We should know. We checked 4,718 of them. Accessibility isn’t a thing you finish, it’s a moving target you chase while doing nine other things. The standards get stricter, the site keeps growing, and “we’ll fix it next week” becomes next quarter becomes next fiscal year. Nobody’s caught up. You’re not behind; you’re normal.
But the people who can’t use your site aren’t a rounding error: they’re constituents. Someone using a screen reader to file for benefits.
A resident renewing a permit with a keyboard because a mouse isn’t an option.
A parent zooming in on their phone to check whether school is closed. When the site fails them, it isn’t a glitch, it’s a person unable to reach a public service they’re entitled to. And it’s the kind of failure that turns into a complaint, a demand letter, exactly the wrong kind of headline.
The Department of Justice’s updated Title II rule makes WCAG 2.1 AA the legal standard for state and local government. The deadlines were extended to April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more and to April 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. But your website is still being used, today, by people who need it to work.
That’s okay. We’re here to help all concerned parties: quickly and efficiently making your website more accessible (which, in this instance, also means a great deal less sueable. Sueable isn’t a word, but you get what we mean.)