SEO and content marketing specialist who started working in the field in 2011. I love all things content, search engines, web accessibility, design, tech, and AI.
When you evaluate vendors, look for a compliance program where scanning and manual testing feed one set of records.
Website compliance software for a city government is a WCAG 2.1 AA compliance program. It scans every page, PDF, and form, then routes each issue to the person who fixes it. Staff use it for manual testing. It also produces dated reports that show your progress under ADA Title II. It runs alongside the city’s CMS.
The harder part is writing an RFP that gets you both tools without paying twice.
Summary
- City website compliance requires dedicated software that scans pages, PDFs, and forms and routes issues to an owner.
- A CMS like CivicPlus, Granicus, WordPress, or Drupal records what was published but cannot verify WCAG conformance or assign ownership.
- Council packets, permit applications, and payment forms are frequently the riskiest content and fall in scope once used to access a city service.
- Dated audit trails, issue histories, manual test records, and accessibility statements form the evidence a city needs to defend against complaints.
- RFPs should score the CMS vendor and the compliance vendor separately to avoid paying twice for accessibility work already promised in templates.
Title II sets a fixed WCAG 2.1 AA target
The Department of Justice published its ADA Title II web rule on April 24, 2024. It made WCAG 2.1 AA the technical standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps. Cities now have a specific, testable target.
The original rule set two compliance dates by population. On April 20, 2026, DOJ published an interim final rule in the Federal Register that pushed both dates back by one year. Governments serving 50,000 or more people now have until April 26, 2027. Smaller cities and special districts have until April 26, 2028. The extension covers only the dates for meeting the technical standard. Title II’s underlying ban on disability discrimination still applies to your website today, and a resident who can’t read a council agenda can complain now.
Your site changes every day, and each new agenda or permit form can break conformance after an audit has passed it. Cities that run conformance as weekly work stay at AA, whatever the calendar says.
Verification needs a tool outside your CMS
Most city sites run on a government CMS such as CivicPlus or Granicus, or on an open-source platform like WordPress or Drupal.
Your CMS records what was published and when. Whether each item meets AA, and who owns each failure, is up to the compliance program. Accessible page templates in your CMS help, since a well-built theme gets headings and contrast right by default.
Owning a CMS leaves the compliance obligation open. You still need a system that tests every item and keeps the record. That system sits alongside the CMS and reads what it publishes.
One program tracks pages, PDFs, and forms together
A city’s riskiest content often sits outside its HTML pages. Agendas, minutes, permit applications, and payment forms are where residents get stuck, and the Title II rule covers most of them. The rule exempts archived content kept only for reference, along with preexisting conventional electronic documents such as older PDFs, but that exception disappears the moment people use those documents to reach a city service.
| Content type | Typical failure | What it blocks for a resident |
| Council packet PDF | Untagged scan with no reading order | Following or commenting on a public meeting |
| Utility payment form | Fields with no labels | Paying a bill online |
| Permit application | Error messages that don’t say what went wrong | Submitting the application at all |
An untagged scan reads as nothing useful through a screen reader, and that document may be the only route to a public meeting. The cheapest fix starts upstream, with accessible Word documents before they become PDFs. Retrofitting is slower, though it’s doable for council packets and other accessible PDFs already online. Forms need their own check. Make sure any tool you buy tests labels and error messages on city forms, because those failures block certain users outright.
Dated records make a city’s compliance defensible
When a complaint arrives, the question is what the city knew and when it acted. Four records do most of the work:
- Audit trail. When each scan or review ran, and what it found.
- Issue history. Every failure tied to an owner and a retest date.
- Manual test records. Keyboard and screen reader checks that software can’t settle alone.
- Accessibility statement. A public page naming the standard and known gaps, with a direct way for residents to report a barrier.
Every barrier report needs a logged reply and a resolution date. Over time, that log becomes some of the city’s strongest evidence of good faith. If your city runs its own school district or health department, the same records support responding to an OCR letter from the Education Department or HHS. For a working municipal example, see how the City of Bryan runs its program.
What belongs in a city’s compliance RFP
Split the RFP in two. Score the publishing layer (the CMS) on content management alone. Then write a separate set of requirements for the compliance vendor and score it on its own. The two parts can be awarded together or apart. Keep the scoring separate either way.
The split matters because bundled bids let a CMS vendor answer the accessibility questions with its own templates. Templates give you a starting point and leave the checking undone, and you end up buying the checking again later.
Your CMS choice also changes what you ask. CivicPlus and Granicus are hosted government platforms, so ask whether the compliance tool can crawl their pages and attached documents from the outside, with no vendor-side access. WordPress and Drupal are open source, and those sites lean on plugins and themes. The compliance tool should run independently of both, so a theme update can’t quietly break monitoring.
| Requirement | What to ask the vendor | Evidence to demand in the bid |
| Pages, PDFs, and forms in one place | Do all three report against AA in a single dashboard? | A sample dashboard from a public-sector client |
| Manual testing | How does the tool guide staff through tests a scanner can’t run? | An exportable manual test record |
| Remediation tracking | How does each issue move from owner to fix to retest? | A sample issue history export |
| Audit trail | Can you export scan history for any date range? | A sample audit trail report |
| CMS independence | Can you crawl our CMS without plugins or vendor access? | Crawl results from a trial on the city’s own site |
| Live demo | Will you demo on our live site? | A scored demo session |
Ask for that evidence in the response itself, before any shortlist. A well-built RFP gives you both tools: one to publish the agenda, and one to prove a resident can read it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the WCAG deadline for city websites now?
The DOJ’s interim final rule, published April 20, 2026, pushed both Title II compliance dates back a year. Cities serving 50,000 or more people must meet WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2027. Smaller cities and special districts have until April 26, 2028. The nondiscrimination duty still applies today.
Can a city’s CMS replace dedicated compliance software?
No. A CMS like CivicPlus, Granicus, WordPress, or Drupal tells you what content was published and when, not whether it meets WCAG 2.1 AA. Even accessible templates get broken daily by staff edits like missing alt text. A separate compliance program must test and record conformance alongside the CMS.
Why do automated accessibility scanners miss so many issues?
Automated scanners only catch code-detectable failures such as missing alt attributes or low contrast. In UK Government Digital Service testing, the best of 13 tools found well under half of 142 deliberate barriers. Criteria like focus order and captions require human judgment, so manual review must supplement scanning.
Are old council packet PDFs exempt from Title II rules?
Archived content kept only for reference and some preexisting conventional PDFs can be exempt, but that exception disappears once residents use the document to access a city service. A weekly council packet is new content each time it’s uploaded, so it falls in scope the day it goes live.
How should a city structure an RFP for compliance software?
Split the RFP in two parts. Score the CMS vendor on publishing features alone, and score the compliance vendor separately on scanning, manual testing, remediation tracking, and audit trails. Bundling lets a CMS vendor answer accessibility questions with templates alone, leaving actual verification work unpurchased and undone.
