The 5 Accessibility Mistakes We Find on Almost Every Government Website

We run WCAG 2.1 AA scans on government and business websites every day, and the same handful of issues show up almost every time — regardless of the platform, the budget, or how recently the site was redesigned. Here are the five we see most, and how to fix each one.

1. Images with no text alternative

By far the most common finding. Icons, photos, and decorative images with no alt text (WCAG 1.1.1) are invisible or meaningless to screen reader users. It's usually not neglect — most page builders and CMSs simply don't require an alt text field to be filled in, so it quietly gets skipped.

Fix: add a short, descriptive alt attribute to every meaningful image. Purely decorative images should have an empty alt attribute (alt="") so screen readers skip them entirely instead of announcing a meaningless filename.

2. Low color contrast

Light gray text on a white background, white text over a busy photo, pastel-on-pastel navigation links — all common design choices that fail WCAG 1.4.3. It's the single most common issue we catch in automated contrast checks, and it's frequently invisible to sighted staff who happen to have great eyesight and a bright monitor.

Fix: body text needs at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background; large text needs 3:1. A contrast checker tool takes the guesswork out of it.

3. Unlabeled form fields

Contact forms, permit applications, and FOIA request forms frequently rely on placeholder text instead of a real, programmatically associated <label> (WCAG 4.1.2). Placeholder text disappears the moment someone starts typing, and screen readers may not announce it consistently at all.

Fix: every input needs a real <label> element, even if it's visually hidden for design reasons.

4. Broken or illogical heading structure

Screen reader users often navigate a page by jumping heading to heading, similar to skimming a table of contents. A page with no H1, multiple H1s, or headings chosen for font size rather than structure (WCAG 2.4.4, 3.1.1) makes that kind of navigation useless.

Fix: one clear H1 per page describing its main content, with H2s and H3s used in order to reflect the actual outline — not picked for how big the text looks.

5. Inaccessible PDFs

Meeting agendas, minutes, and forms posted as scanned images inside a PDF are effectively blank pages to a screen reader — there's no actual text underneath, just a picture of text. This is especially common with older archived documents.

Fix: use "print to PDF" or an OCR pass instead of scanning, prioritizing the documents residents actually download most rather than trying to fix the entire archive at once.

None of these require a redesign

Every one of these is fixable without rebuilding your site. Start with a free scan to see which of these five actually apply to you, then work through our full compliance checklist.