Article URL: https://accesslumens.com/research/state-of-us-local-government-accessibility-2026 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844956 Points: 15 # Comments: 2

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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.