For towns, counties and libraries
Town website accessibility
Plain-English help for anyone who keeps a town, county, library or school website: the ADA Title II rule and what to fix first.
Check the official rules. Rules and dates change, so check them with the official sources before you rely on them: ADA.gov (the US Department of Justice), the W3C's WCAG pages and Section508.gov. PageKiwi helps you find problems and get closer to meeting the rules. It can't promise a website meets them, it isn't legal advice, and we can't take responsibility for decisions made from it.
Three things to do this month
- Know your date
April 26, 2027 for places of 50,000 people or more; April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. The rule in plain words.
- Check your most-used pages
Home, agendas, payments, contact. Run Accessibility Check and Picture Check on each.
- Fix new content as you post it
Describe photos, use real link words, post agendas as pages or tagged PDFs. It's easier than fixing a backlog later.
Start with the rule
- ADA Title II website rule for towns, cities and counties
Deadline extended: WCAG 2.1 AA by April 2027 or April 2028, special districts, the exceptions, and where to start.
- Accessibility in the news: recent official actions
Agendas, minutes and meeting videos
- PDFs, agendas and minutes under the ADA Title II rule
Which documents must meet WCAG 2.1 AA, the archive and old-document exceptions, and ADA.gov's examples.
- Make a scanned PDF accessible for screen readers
Tell if it's a scan, run OCR and add tags, or post the agenda as a web page instead.
- Captions for recorded board meetings
What the Title II rule asks of recorded and live meeting videos, and how to correct automatic captions.
Everyday content fixes
- How to add alt text in WordPress (and why it's not showing)
The block editor, the Media Library and the classic editor, and five reasons alt text doesn't appear.
- Write good alt text
Describe your pictures for people who can't see them, with examples.
- "Click here" and other link text that fails
Why "click here" and "read more" fail, examples from a town site, and how to change a link in WordPress.
- Icon links with no text
Social media and email icons a screen reader calls just "link", and what to tell your web person.
- Headings in order: one H1, then H2 and H3
Why a page needs one H1 and no skipped levels, and how to set and check them in WordPress.
Your accessibility page
- Accessibility statement template
What to put on your accessibility page, the words to leave out, and a free generator.
- Accessibility statement generator (free, made in your browser)
Libraries and schools
- Library websites and the ADA Title II rule
Catalogs, e-books and event sign-up, your date, and questions to ask your vendors.
- School district websites and the ADA
ADA Title II and Section 504, your date, and what the Office for Civil Rights has looked at.
When something looks wrong
- Website still shows the old version
You changed it and saved, but it still says 6pm. Your browser, the site's cache, or a change that never published.
- Events calendar shows the wrong time or an old event
Every time off by hours, one meeting wrong, or the home page list out of date: time zone, repeating events, copies.
- Accessibility overlays and widgets
What a widget can and can't fix, what the FTC ordered, and the content only you can fix.
Your site runs on WordPress?
PageKiwi for WordPress (beta) checks pictures with no description, links and headings from inside your admin, with where to click to fix each one. Free.