AccessLumens Research · July 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?
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.
Check your city or agency site against the Title II bar
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Scan your site freeMethodology
We selected the largest US city governments by population and attempted 221 of them; our sample covers cities of roughly 100,000+ residents, the upper portion of the 50,000+ cohort covered by the April 24, 2026 ADA Title II web deadline. Each city was scanned on up to two pages — its homepage and one resident service-flow page (online payments, permits, or contact) — using the AccessLumens scanning engine (SWBS-1.3 scoring) with identical configuration for every page of every city, including scripted keyboard testing (focus traps, focus visibility, reachability, skip links). 51 cities (23%) could not be scanned because bot-protection challenges blocked a real headless browser; those are reported as a finding but excluded from the scored statistics, leaving 158 scored cities. We enforced strict robots.txt compliance — pages a site disallows were not scanned. CMS vendors were fingerprinted from page markup and response headers; vendors with fewer than eight cities are excluded from the vendor comparison. ADA Title II requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA; our engine tests WCAG 2.2 AA, a superset, so a city failing here also fails 2.1 AA. Headline failure statistics count automatically detectable WCAG violations; best-practice advisories and manual-review items are excluded. A city’s score is the mean of its scanned page scores. Individual cities are not named — the purpose of this study is to describe the state of the sector, not to single out governments. Scores use our SWBS model; this is a diagnostic snapshot, not a legal conformance determination (see our disclaimer).