GoKawiilAccessLumens Research · July 2026 The State of US Local Government Accessibility 2026 The ADA Title II deadline passed on April 24, 2026 . 42 % of city sites still have a critical accessibility barrier. Under the Department of Justice’s 2024 ADA Title II rule, state and local governments serving 50,000 or more residents had until April 24, 2026 to make their web content conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We scanned 221 of the largest US city governments after that deadline — homepage and a resident service page each — to ask a simple question: did they make it?
42% Still have a critical barrier of 158 scored cities 45% Fail WCAG 4.1.2 most-litigated criterion 23% Blocked automated audit aggressive bot-walls 93 Average score out of 100
The nuance that matters: city sites are not catastrophically broken. The average score across the 158 scored cities was 93 out of 100. But 42 % still carried at least one critical barrier after the compliance deadline — a control a resident cannot operate: a button a screen reader announces as nothing, a menu a keyboard user can never reach, a link with no discernible purpose. A good score and a locked-out resident are not mutually exclusive. And unlike a retailer, a city is not optional. If its permit form, tax portal, or council page is unusable with assistive technology, there is no competitor to switch to — and, post-deadline, there is a legal obligation it is now missing.
“A city site can score 93 /100 and still lock a resident out of paying a water bill.”
Key findings 1. Your city’s CMS vendor predicts its accessibility risk — by a factor of 3 . In our sample, cities running CivicPlus (n= 32 ) had a critical barrier 72 % of the time — 3 × the rate of cities on Granicus / Vision / OpenCities (n= 37 , 24 %). Same public officials, same budgets, same legal obligation — yet the platform underneath is one of the strongest signals of whether residents get an accessible experience. This is an observed association across the cities we scanned, not a controlled comparison; a vendor’s customers may differ in other ways. 2. Nearly half of city sites fail the criterion most cited in ADA lawsuits. 45 % of cities had failures under WCAG 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value) — the requirement that interactive elements announce what they are and what they do to assistive technology. It is the single most common thread in US digital-accessibility complaints. 3. Almost a quarter of city sites could not be audited at all. 23 % of the sites we attempted ( 51 of 221 ) sat behind bot protection aggressive enough to block an automated accessibility scan running a real browser. That is a finding in itself: the same walls that stop a scanner can interfere with monitoring tools, and over-aggressive challenges can themselves create barriers for users of assistive technology. 4. The biggest cities do best — but no size tier is clean. Cities over one million residents had the lowest critical-barrier rate ( 13 %), while mid-size cities of 100,000–250,000 fared worst ( 44 %) — often the tier with the least in-house accessibility staffing. Every tier still left residents facing critical barriers. 5. Compliance is achievable — 11 cities proved it. 11 of the scored cities posted a perfect 100 across every page we tested, and 58 % had no critical barrier at all. A conformant city site is a normal, reachable outcome — not a moonshot.
The platform gap: accessibility by CMS vendor A handful of vendors power most US municipal websites. We fingerprinted each city’s platform and compared them. The spread is stark — and it is the clearest lever a city has: the platform you buy sets your accessibility floor. Critical-barrier rate by CMS vendor Share of cities on each platform with at least one critical barrier. Lower is better. Granicus / Vision / OpenCities 24 % WordPress 38 % Drupal 45 % Municode 47 % CivicPlus 72 % Accessibility by CMS vendor: cities sampled, average score, critical-barrier prevalence, and average number of distinct issue types per city CMS vendor Cities Avg score % with critical Issue types/city Granicus / Vision / OpenCities 37 96 24 % 1.1 WordPress 8 94 38 % 1.8 Drupal 20 94 45 % 1.6 Municode 17 93 47 % 2.3 CivicPlus 32 90 72 % 3.2 If you procure or manage a government site, this is the most actionable row in the study: platform choice and template configuration move the floor for every page you publish. Vendors with small samples (fewer than eight cities) are omitted from this table to keep the comparison fair.
The lawsuit-relevant picture We mapped every finding to the five WCAG success criteria most frequently cited in US digital accessibility litigation: Failures by lawsuit-relevant success criterion Share of cities with at least one failure under each criterion. 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value 45 % 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) 28 % 1.1.1 Non-text Content (alt text) 22 % 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) 13 % 2.1.1 Keyboard 11 % Failures by lawsuit-relevant WCAG success criterion, share of cities affected Success criterion Cities affected 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value 45 % 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) 28 % 1.1.1 Non-text Content (alt text) 22 % 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) 13 % 2.1.1 Keyboard 11 % ADA Title II mandates WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Because our engine tests against WCAG 2.2 AA — a superset — every city that fails here also fails the 2.1 AA bar the deadline set. Each row is unfinished compliance work.
Where barriers concentrate: by page type Homepages carried more critical barriers than the resident service pages behind them — the opposite of what many teams assume. Share of pages with a critical issue Homepage 34 % Service / payments page 25 % Accessibility by page type: sample size, average score, and critical-issue prevalence Page type Pages Avg score % with critical Homepage 157 93 34 % Service / payments page 119 94 25 %
By population tier Larger cities fared slightly better — but every tier left residents facing critical barriers. Accessibility by population tier: cities sampled, average score, critical prevalence, and most common failure Population Cities Avg score % critical Most common failure 100,000 – 250,000 98 93 44 % Color contrast 250,000 – 500,000 30 93 43 % Color contrast 500,000 – 1M 22 94 41 % Missing image alt text 1M+ 8 95 13 % ARIA hidden focusable elements
The most common failures Share of cities where each issue appeared at least once. The most common accessibility failures by share of cities affected Issue Severity Cities Elements must meet minimum color contrast ratio thresholds Color & Visual Accessibility Serious 28 % Elements must only use permitted ARIA attributes Structure & Semantics Serious 17 % Links must have discernible text Navigation Critical 13 % Certain ARIA roles must contain particular children Structure & Semantics Critical 13 % Images must have alternative text Images & Media Moderate 13 % <li> elements must be contained in a <ul> or <ol> Structure & Semantics Serious 10 % Certain ARIA roles must be contained by particular parents Structure & Semantics Critical 9 % Interactive element not reachable by keyboard Interactive Controls Serious 9 %
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