Is Your City Website ADA-Ready? Here's How to Check in 2 Minutes
Every government IT director in the country is asking the same question right now: is our website ready for the DOJ's new Title II web accessibility rule? With the April 26, 2027 deadline approaching for entities serving 50,000+ residents, and April 2028 for everyone else, the cost of not knowing is no longer theoretical. Here is how to get a practical first answer in a few minutes, and why the assumptions you have been making about your site are probably wrong.
Why "We Think It's Fine" Is Not Good Enough
Most government IT teams have never conducted a formal accessibility assessment of their website. When asked about compliance, the most common response is some version of: "We use a modern CMS, so it should be fine," or "Our web vendor said they built it to standards," or "We haven't received any complaints."
The data tells a very different story. After scanning government websites across the country, we have found that the average municipality scores 62 out of 100 on automated WCAG 2.1 AA testing, a D grade. Many WCAG issues are invisible to anyone who is not specifically testing for them. A sighted developer browsing your site will never notice that your images lack alt text, that your forms have no labels for screen readers, or that your color contrast ratios fall below the required 4.5:1 minimum. These issues are invisible until a resident using assistive technology encounters them, or until the DOJ does.
The absence of complaints does not mean the absence of barriers. Studies consistently show that the vast majority of residents with disabilities who encounter inaccessible government websites simply give up and find another way to get the service: a phone call, an in-person visit, asking someone else to navigate the site for them. They are being excluded silently.
Three Things You Can Check Manually Right Now
Before you run a scan, you can get a rough sense of your site's accessibility in about five minutes with three manual checks. These will not give you a readiness score, but they will reveal whether your site has fundamental accessibility issues.
Check 1: Tab Through Your Homepage
Open your website in a browser and put your mouse aside. Press the Tab key repeatedly and try to navigate your entire homepage using only the keyboard. Watch for a visible focus indicator, a highlight or outline, that shows you which element is currently selected. Try to reach every link, every button, every form field, and every interactive element.
If the focus indicator disappears, if you get trapped in a section and cannot tab out, if you cannot reach a critical element like your search bar or navigation menu, or if the tab order jumps around unpredictably, your site has keyboard accessibility issues. Every resident who cannot use a mouse (due to motor disabilities, vision impairments, or temporary injuries) is affected by these issues.
Check 2: Zoom to 200%
Press Ctrl and + (Cmd and + on Mac) until your browser zoom reaches 200%. WCAG requires that your site remain functional and readable at this zoom level without requiring horizontal scrolling. This is not an edge case. Millions of residents with low vision browse the web at increased zoom levels as a daily necessity.
Look for: text that gets cut off or hidden behind other elements, navigation menus that break or become unusable, content that requires horizontal scrolling to read, buttons or links that overlap and become unclickable, and form fields that no longer display properly. If your site breaks at 200% zoom, residents with low vision cannot use it.
Check 3: Right-Click Your Images
Right-click on any image on your homepage and select "Inspect" (or "Inspect Element"). Look at the HTML for the image tag. Does it have an alt attribute? If so, does the alt text describe what the image communicates? Or does it say something useless like "image1," "photo," or "DSC_0472.jpg"?
Check three to five images across different sections of your homepage. If most of them lack meaningful alt text, your entire site likely has the same issue. Missing alt text is the single most common WCAG violation on government websites. We find it on 89% of the sites we scan.
Why Automated Scanning Catches What Manual Checks Miss
The three checks above test a tiny fraction of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. They will tell you if you have obvious issues, but they will miss the vast majority of violations. Automated scanning tools evaluate your site against dozens of specific criteria simultaneously, checking every element on every page in seconds.
An automated scan catches things a manual check simply cannot: color contrast ratios that are 4.4:1 instead of the required 4.5:1 (close enough to look fine to the naked eye, but technically non-conformant), form fields that have visual labels but no programmatic association to the label element, heading structures that skip from h1 to h3, ARIA attributes with invalid values, and dozens of other code-level issues that only show up in the source code.
Automated scanning is not the complete picture. AuditAble evaluates 28 of the 50 WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria today (33 when AI-assisted evaluation is enabled) and reports every criterion it did not test as Not Evaluated. The remaining criteria require human judgment. But automated scanning is the most efficient way to identify and fix the most common violations, and it provides the objective, documented baseline that the DOJ expects to see.
How AuditAble's Free Scan Works
We built AuditAble's free scanner specifically for government IT teams who need a fast, honest answer about their compliance posture. Here is how it works:
Paste your URL
Enter your city's homepage URL. No account creation, no credit card, no sales call required.
We scan up to 15 pages
Our scanner evaluates your homepage and up to 14 additional pages against WCAG 2.1 Level AA criteria using axe-core, the industry-standard testing engine.
Get your report card in a few minutes
Your readiness report card includes an overall score (0-100), a letter grade, a count of violations by severity, and a summary of the most critical issues found.
The free scan gives you a representative sample of your compliance posture. It is not a comprehensive audit of every page on your site (that is what our paid plans provide), but it tells you quickly whether you are in the green, the yellow, or the red. For most government IT directors, the free scan answers the immediate question: do we have a problem, and how big is it?
What Communities Are Discovering
Since launching AuditAble, government entities across the country have started scanning their websites. Here is what the data shows:
62
Average score (out of 100)
89%
Have missing alt text on images
84%
Have color contrast violations
76%
Have form fields without labels
The common thread across these findings: most government websites were built by competent developers who were never given accessibility requirements. The sites work well for sighted residents using a mouse. They fail for residents who rely on keyboards, screen readers, voice control, or other assistive technologies. The issues are not the result of negligence. They are the result of not knowing what to test for.
The good news is that awareness is the first step. Once you know what is wrong, the path to fixing it is straightforward. The most common violations (missing alt text, low contrast, missing form labels) are among the easiest to fix. Many government teams have improved their scores by 20+ points within a single sprint by addressing the highest-severity issues first.
The Clock Is Ticking
The DOJ Title II deadline is not an abstract future event. For entities serving 50,000+ residents, April 26, 2027 is the date. For everyone else, April 26, 2028. The entities that will be best positioned are the ones that know their compliance posture today and have a documented plan for improving it. The entities at greatest risk are the ones that assume they are fine without ever testing.
A free scan takes a few minutes. You will either confirm that your site is in good shape, or you will discover that you have work to do, and you will know exactly what that work is. Either outcome is better than not knowing.
Check your site now. It takes a few minutes
Government teams across the country have already discovered where they stand. No account needed, no credit card, no sales pitch. Just an honest readiness report card for your website.
Get the Two-Minute Site Check Guide as a PDF
How to assess your city website's accessibility in a few minutes, what the results mean, and how to document your findings for a council briefing or budget request. No account required.