ADA Website Compliance Checklist for Local Governments

The Department of Justice's Title II rule sets a hard deadline: state and local government websites must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Small entities serving fewer than 50,000 people have until April 26, 2027. That sounds far off until you realize how much work is usually involved — most towns haven't touched their site's accessibility since it was built.

Here's the order we'd tackle it in, based on what we actually find when we scan government websites every day.

1. Run a baseline scan

You can't fix what you haven't measured. Start with a free automated check to catch the high-volume, easy-to-miss issues: missing alt text, low-contrast text, unlabeled form fields, and broken heading structure. Automated tools won't catch everything — nothing does — but they'll surface 30-40% of real issues in minutes instead of days.

2. Fix images without text alternatives

This is almost always the single biggest finding. Every meaningful image, icon, and button needs a text alternative under WCAG 1.1.1. If your site is built in a page builder like Elementor or WordPress, this is usually a per-image "Alt Text" field — tedious, but not technical.

3. Fix color contrast

Low-contrast text — light gray on white, white on a busy photo background — fails WCAG 1.4.3 and is one of the most common issues we see on government sites, usually in navigation, footers, and text overlaid on hero images.

4. Label every form field

Contact forms, FOIA request forms, permit applications — if a form field doesn't have a programmatically associated label, a screen reader user has no idea what to type into it. See WCAG 4.1.2.

5. Fix heading structure and page titles

Screen reader users navigate by jumping between headings, not by reading top to bottom. Pages need one clear H1, headings in logical order, and a unique, descriptive page title (WCAG 2.4.2, 2.4.4).

6. Address your PDFs

Meeting minutes, agendas, and forms posted as scanned PDFs are usually invisible to screen readers. Prioritize the documents people actually download most — agendas, tax forms, permit applications — over the entire archive.

7. Set up ongoing monitoring

Compliance isn't a one-time project. Every new page, plugin update, or content change can introduce a new issue. Scheduled monitoring catches regressions before a resident — or a DOJ complaint — does.

If you're not sure where your own compliance risk actually stands, read what happens if your government website isn't ADA compliant next.