ADA Title II Website Requirements: WCAG Rules for Counties and Small Towns

That is the short answer. This page covers what the rule includes, the checks to run first on a county or town site, what to do about the PDFs that make up most of a clerk’s uploads, and what drives the cost of a fix.

What the ADA Title II web rule requires and when

The Department of Justice published the rule in April 2024. It covers the websites and mobile apps of state and local governments, including content a vendor provides for you under a contract, such as an online payment portal or a permit system. The standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, at Level AA.

The original deadlines were April 24, 2026 and April 26, 2027. In April 2026 the department moved both back a year with an interim final rule:

• Governments with a population of 50,000 or more: April 26, 2027.
• Governments under 50,000, and special district governments such as water, fire or library districts: April 26, 2028.

Population refers to the total population of an area of governance, as defined by the Census Bureau. Look up your own number before you plan around the later date.

Two things could still move. The extension came as an interim rule, with public comments closed in June 2026, and the National Federation of the Blind has sued to restore the original dates. Check ada.gov before you commit to a schedule. The standard itself, WCAG 2.1 AA, did not change.

The rule has five exceptions. Each one is narrower than it sounds:

• Archived content, kept only for reference, not changed since it was archived, and held in an area clearly marked as the archive.
• Preexisting documents: PDFs, Word files and spreadsheets posted before your deadline, unless people still use them to apply for or take part in a service.
• Content the public posts, such as comments, as long as nobody posted it on your behalf.
• Individual documents behind a login, such as one resident’s tax bill or water statement.
• Social media posts made before your deadline.

The extra year is time to fix the site in stages. It is not a reason to wait.

The WCAG 2.1 AA checks most county sites fail

WCAG 2.1 AA has 50 success criteria. You don’t need an expert to find a county site’s biggest problems. These are the checks to run first, and most of them take nothing more than a keyboard and a phone:

1. Images without text alternatives. Every photo, map and graphic needs alt text that says what it shows. A scanned flyer posted as an image fails, whatever it says.
2. Low contrast. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Pale gray text on white is the usual failure.
3. Keyboard traps and missing focus. Tab through the page. You should reach every menu, link and button, see where you are, and never get stuck inside a pop-up.
4. Forms without labels. Every field in a permit, records or contact form needs a label a screen reader announces, and an error message has to say what went wrong.
5. Missing or out-of-order headings. Department pages built from bold text instead of real headings leave screen reader users with no way to skim.
6. Links that say “click here.” Link text should name where the link goes.
7. Pages that break on a phone. At 320 pixels wide a page has to work without sideways scrolling, and text has to hold up when it is enlarged to 200%.
8. Video without captions. Recorded meetings need captions. Automatic captions are a start and usually need correcting, especially for names and street names.

Automated scanners catch some of these, not all. A scanner can tell that an image has no alt text. It can’t tell whether the alt text is right.

PDFs, meeting agendas and posted notices

For most counties and towns, the pages are not the hard part. The documents are. Agendas, minutes, budgets, ordinances and application forms pile up as PDFs, and every new one posted after your deadline has to meet WCAG 2.1 AA too.

An accessible PDF is a tagged PDF: real text rather than a scanned image, headings marked as headings, a reading order that makes sense, alt text on images and labeled form fields. A scanned page of signed minutes is a picture of text, and a screen reader gets nothing from it.

Three habits keep the pile from growing:

1. Post agendas and notices as web pages first, and attach the PDF only if you need it. A page is easier to make accessible than a PDF, and residents on phones read it more easily.
2. Export from Word with tags turned on, using real headings in the source document. Fixing a PDF after the fact takes far longer than building it right.
3. Sort the backlog. Old files nobody uses can move to a marked archive. Forms people still fill in, such as permit and records requests, have to be fixed or rebuilt as web forms, whatever their age.

Posted notices, like road closures or boil advisories, belong in page text, not in a photo of a printed flyer. The same goes for social media: a notice posted as an image needs alt text that carries the whole message.

What an accessibility fix costs

We can’t give you a fair number without seeing the site, and you should be wary of anyone who can. The cost depends on a few things you can count before you call anyone:

• Templates, not pages. Most accessibility problems live in the theme. Fix the header, menu and page template once, and every page built on them improves.
• The platform. Some older content systems can’t produce accessible markup at all. When that is the case, a rebuild costs less than patching.
• Documents still in use. Count the PDFs people still need, not every file on the server.
• Video. Count the hours of recorded meetings that need corrected captions.
• Vendor tools. Payment, agenda and permit portals belong to their vendors, but the rule still applies to them. Ask each vendor for an accessibility conformance report.

Our process is the same as for any project: a free audit, then a fixed quote in writing, which suits a budget that has to be approved before the money is spent. When a deadline is close, we stage the work so the pages residents use most get fixed first.

Keeping a site accessible is the other half of the job, because new pages and uploads can undo it every week. Webfresh Autopilot watches a public site for images missing alt text and broken links to forms and agendas, and any change to official wording waits for staff approval.

Our website design for county offices and municipalities covers the rebuild, and IT support for local government covers the servers, patching and backups behind it.

Case study: Jefferson County, PA

Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, had three legacy websites: the main county site, the District Attorney’s portal and the Maintenance Department system. We rebuilt all three and moved more than 200 pages of legacy content onto a platform that meets the Section 508 standards, organized by department, with permissions so each department manages its own pages.

We also moved the county from its old .com domains to official .gov addresses with no break in service. Section 508 is built on WCAG 2.0 AA, so a site like this is most of the way to WCAG 2.1 AA already. What remains are the newer criteria for phones and low vision, such as reflow and the contrast of buttons and form borders.

Read the Jefferson County case study