The ADA Title II web deadline hit on April 24, 2026. Cities serving 50,000+ residents were legally required to meet WCAG 2.1 AA.
I scanned 221 of the largest US city government websites after the deadline - homepage + a resident service page each. Here's what I found.
The headline numbers
- 42% still have at least one critical barrier (a control a screen reader can't operate, a menu a keyboard can't reach)
- 45% fail WCAG 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value) — the single most-cited criterion in ADA lawsuits
- 23% blocked the scan entirely with aggressive bot walls
- Average score was 93/100 — which sounds great until you realize a 93 can still lock someone out of paying their water bill
The most surprising finding: your CMS vendor predicts your risk
This blew my mind. Cities on CivicPlus had critical barriers 72% of the time. Cities on Granicus/OpenCities? Just 24%. Same budgets, same legal obligation — 3× the failure rate based on platform choice alone.
| CMS Vendor | Cities | Avg Score | % with Critical Barrier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Granicus / OpenCities | 37 | 96 | 24% |
| WordPress | 8 | 94 | 38% |
| Drupal | 20 | 94 | 45% |
| Municode | 17 | 93 | 47% |
| CivicPlus | 32 | 90 | 72% |
If you build or maintain government sites — this is the table that should keep you up at night. The accessibility floor is set before a single content editor touches the page.
What's actually broken
The top failures read like a greatest-hits of "things we should've fixed years ago":
28% — Color contrast failures
17% — Invalid ARIA attributes
13% — Links with no discernible text
13% — Missing image alt text
9% — Interactive elements unreachable by keyboard
Homepages are worse than service pages
This surprised me. 34% of homepages had a critical issue vs. 25% of service/payment pages. The front door is less accessible than the rooms inside.
The uncomfortable truth
A city website isn't like a store. You can't go to a competitor. If the permit form is broken for a screen reader user, that resident is just... stuck. And now, post-deadline, that's not just a bad UX — it's a compliance gap with legal teeth.
58% of cities had zero critical barriers. 11 scored a perfect 100. Conformance is achievable. It's just not evenly distributed.
How I did this
I built a scanning engine that runs WCAG 2.2 AA checks + scripted keyboard testing (focus traps, focus visibility, skip links, reachability) against real headless browsers. Same config for every city, strict robots.txt compliance.
If you want to run the same scan on your own site — government or otherwise — you can do it free at https://accesslumens.com. No signup required.
Full methodology and data: https://accesslumens.com/research/state-of-us-local-government-accessibility-2026
Top comments (0)