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.
Tracking WCAG fixes after an audit means running a live backlog.
Georgia gave every state agency a deadline of April 24, 2026 to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, along with a checklist for getting there. That same April, the Department of Justice pushed the federal Title II date for large governments into 2027.
DOJ’s interim final rule set deadlines of April 26, 2027 for entities of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. The obligation itself stayed put.
Log every failing page, PDF, and portal screen as a ticket with its WCAG criterion, owning department, status, and the date someone verified the fix. A verified-fix log stays valid whatever date the regulator sets next.
Published Title II checklists from Georgia, BlueDAG, and CivicPlus tell you what to check before a date. For program setup, start with our accessibility guide for government teams.
Summary
- Regulatory deadlines keep shifting, but the underlying obligation to meet WCAG 2.1 AA never changes.
- Accessibility statements define the scope of required inventory, covering every public page, document, and authenticated portal the government promises to make accessible.
- Assets should be tagged as public, document, or authenticated, with any claimed exceptions noted.
- Clear ownership matters. Departments fix issues while a designated accessibility lead verifies each closed ticket against its WCAG criterion before marking it resolved.
- Despite growing attention to accessibility, WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of one million home pages found rising average errors and increased low-contrast text, reversing prior improvement trends.
Your accessibility statement already defines the scope
DOJ’s Title II final rule, issued April 24, 2024, applies WCAG 2.1 AA to the web content and mobile apps a state or local government provides. Your inventory lists every public page, every downloadable document, and every screen behind a resident login.
Your own accessibility statement sets the boundary. For example: LA County Planning’s statement commits to WCAG 2.1 Level AA and Title II across “our websites,” plural. Every site, subdomain, and portal your statement promises belongs on the inventory.
Applications for current city programs and documents listing current city ordinances probably need to comply, according to DOJ’s first-steps guidance. Both usually sit outside a standard page crawl, but are still required.
Export a full crawl into one inventory sheet. Tag each asset as public, document, or authenticated, and add a column for any exception you intend to claim, with the reason. Every future fix then attaches to a row on this sheet.
| Tag | What it covers | Where to find it |
| Public | Department pages, news, microsites, subdomains | A crawl started from every domain your accessibility statement names |
| Document | PDFs, Word and Excel files, ordinance lists | Linked files in the crawl report, plus a media-library export from your CMS |
| Authenticated | Permit, licensing, and billing portals | A route list from IT or the portal vendor, crawled with a test account |
Departments fix, accessibility leads verify
North Carolina’s state IT guidance treats assignment as a staffing question. Its digital accessibility planning document tells agencies to determine staffing needs and assign roles and responsibilities, then procure tools for accessibility evaluation and content management. Settle who fixes and who verifies before you buy a scanner.
Add these fields to every issue in your tracker, whether it runs in Jira or a shared sheet:
- owning department,
- named owner, and
- due date.
IT owns templates and code. Communications owns page content and PDFs. Each owner field needs to have a specific person’s name.
The accessibility lead then has one job: checking each closed ticket against its WCAG criterion and marking it verified only when the retest passes.
Turn the milestone into a program
A completed ADA Title II checklist records what someone checked on one date, while a program keeps each finding open until it closes. Convert every checklist line into a backlog ticket with a WCAG criterion, a severity, and a status, and the list keeps working after the date passes.
Georgia’s checklist shows the difference. The state’s digital services office published “Meeting Accessibility Compliance for State Agencies” as a 201.26 KB PDF built around one fixed date. As of October 2026, the page still lists that original date. A PDF records each box as it stood on the day someone ticked it.
Each time DOJ shifts the date, a checklist pinned to one deadline needs rewriting, and a backlog needs new due dates.
Give every ticket these fields, in addition to the dates:
- WCAG criterion: the success criterion it fails, such as 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum).
- Severity: whether the failure blocks a task, slows it, or only degrades it.
- Status: open, in progress, or verified.
Rank open tickets by user impact first and traffic second. A failure that blocks a permit application outranks a contrast issue on an archived news page.
Monthly scans keep the backlog current
Compliance after the audit runs as a cycle: detect, assign, verify, then detect again. Each pass catches newly published pages and PDFs, routes them to owners, and reopens any verified ticket that has slipped. The monthly trend line shows which way your site is moving.
The web’s most influential home pages lost ground in 2026. WebAIM’s analysis of one million home pages found an average of 56.1 errors per page. Low-contrast text appeared on 83.9% of those pages, up from 79.1% in 2025. WebAIM reports that the increases reversed a trend of gradual improvement in recent years.
Federal rules treat the deadline as a start date. The Federal Register notice says covered entities must begin complying with the rule on the compliance date. If you haven’t started already, you need to start now.
Run checks on this schedule:
| Cadence | Check | Scope |
| Monthly | axe or WAVE checks in CI, plus a full site crawl | Every domain on the inventory |
| Quarterly | Manual screen-reader review | Top tasks: paying a bill, applying for a permit, finding a meeting agenda |
| Every scan | Automatic reopen rule in your tracker | Verified tickets that fail the same criterion on the same asset |
Report open tickets, reopened regressions, and verified fixes to leadership each month. Compare your findings with our report on the most common ways government websites fail WCAG to see which failure types keep coming back, and fix the template behind them.
Unlike Georgia’s checklist, which recorded a single date, a monthly scan keeps tracking where the site stands no matter which date DOJ sets next. We recommend it for every local government.
Frequently asked questions
What is the current deadline for Title II web accessibility compliance?
DOJ’s interim final rule set April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people, and April 26, 2028 for smaller governments and special districts. Georgia separately gave state agencies an April 24, 2026 deadline.
How should agencies track WCAG fixes after an accessibility audit?
Run a live backlog instead of a one-time checklist. Log every failing page, PDF, and portal screen as a ticket with its WCAG criterion, owning department, status, and verification date.
What should be included in a government website accessibility inventory?
Export a full crawl into one sheet covering every public page, document, and authenticated screen your accessibility statement promises. Tag each asset as public, document, or authenticated, and note any claimed exception with a reason. Public pages, PDFs in the CMS media library, and login-protected portals all belong on this list.
Who should fix and verify website accessibility issues internally?
IT typically owns templates and code, while communications owns page content and PDFs. Each ticket needs a named owner and due date, and the accessibility lead verifies closed tickets by retesting against the WCAG criterion.
Why do accessibility checklists become outdated so quickly?
A completed checklist only records what was checked on one date. Converting checklist lines into backlog tickets with WCAG criteria, severity, and status keeps the work current, since each regulatory date change otherwise forces the checklist to be rewritten from scratch.
References
- Accessibility – LA County Planning. (2026, February 26). LA County Planning. https://planning.lacounty.gov/accessibility/
- Digital Services & Solutions. (2025, May 19). Meet title II ada accessibility compliance. Digital Services & Solutions. https://digital.georgia.gov/resources/digital-accessibility-compliance/how-do-i-compliance-checklist
- Extension of compliance dates for nondiscrimination on the basis of disability; accessibility of web information and services of state and local government entities. (2026, April 20). Federal Register. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/20/2026-07663/extension-of-compliance-dates-for-nondiscrimination-on-the-basis-of-disability-accessibility-of-web
- State and local governments: First steps toward complying with the americans with disabilities act title II web and mobile application accessibility rule. (2025, January 8). ADA.Gov. https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-rule-first-steps/
- Warren, C. D. (2024). Digital accessibility planning. https://it.nc.gov/documents/digital-accessibility-planning/open
- WebAIM. (2024). WebAIM: The WebAIM million – an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages. Webaim.Org. https://webaim.org/projects/million/
