County Website Accessibility
A county rarely has a website. It has a federation of them — one per department, several per vendor, each with its own budget, its own contract and its own renewal date. The hardest part of county accessibility work is not the code. It is knowing who owns what.
One date, applied to every department
ADA Title II
April 26, 2027
Public entities with a population of 50,000 or more
About 8 months from today.
ADA Title II
April 26, 2028
Public entities with a population under 50,000, and special district governments
About 20 months from today.
Counties fall on both sides of the 50,000 line, and the date follows the county's own population. What surprises people is that it does not follow the org chart: the compliance date belongs to the public entity, so the assessor's separately-hosted parcel search is on the same clock as the main county site, even though a different office pays for it.
That is worth establishing in writing early, because the usual failure mode is not disagreement. It is each department assuming another one had it covered.
All four dates, in full
| Compliance date | Rule | Who it applies to |
|---|---|---|
| April 26, 2027 | ADA Title II | Public entities with a population of 50,000 or more |
| April 26, 2028 | ADA Title II | Public entities with a population under 50,000, and special district governments |
| May 11, 2027 | HHS Section 504 | Recipients of HHS federal financial assistance with 15 or more employees |
| May 10, 2028 | HHS Section 504 | Recipients of HHS federal financial assistance with fewer than 15 employees |
Where these dates come from. Verify current guidance before relying on any date for planning — both rules have already moved once.
- U.S. Department of Justice — ADA Title II web rule: ada.gov/resources/web-rule-first-steps
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — Section 504 deadline extension: hhs.gov press release
MakeWPCompliant provides technical accessibility services, not legal advice. How a rule applies to a specific organization is a question for current federal guidance and, where appropriate, qualified legal counsel.
Where county services actually live
The first deliverable on a county engagement is usually not a fix. It is a map, because no one document currently says which department is served by which platform. Roughly what that map looks like:
| Department | What the public does there | Where it usually lives |
|---|---|---|
| Board of commissioners | Agendas, packets, minutes, meeting video | An agenda management portal, embedded or linked |
| Assessor | Look up a parcel, review a valuation, file an appeal | A hosted assessment package, often on its own subdomain |
| Treasurer | Pay property tax, view a bill | A payment processor, off-site entirely |
| Clerk and recorder | Search deeds, order certificates, file documents | A records search application with its own interface |
| Elections | Check registration, find a polling place, read results | A state or vendor system — plus pages built in election week |
| Courts | Case lookup, jury duty, e-filing | Frequently a state system the county does not control |
| Sheriff | Inmate roster, warrants, filing a report | A separate application, often with its own theme |
| Public health | Clinic hours, inspection results, program enrolment | WordPress pages plus a searchable inspection database |
| Human services | Benefit information and applications | WordPress pages plus long downloadable forms |
| Public works | Road closures, permits, project maps | WordPress pages plus an embedded GIS map |
Only some of that is WordPress, and only some of the WordPress is yours to change. But every row of it is part of the same public entity's obligation, which is why the map has to exist before the work is scoped.
The renewal date is the lever, not the deadline
Counties buy software constantly, and every one of those contracts has a renewal. Between now and the compliance date, most county vendor agreements will come up for renewal at least once — and a renewal is the one moment when accessibility language can be added without a negotiation nobody budgeted for.
So the inventory we hand over carries a column most accessibility reports do not: when this contract is next open. A finding attached to a renewal three months out is a different piece of work from the same finding attached to a renewal in 2029, and treating them identically wastes the earlier one.
What is shared, and what only looks shared
County sites tend to arrive in one of three shapes, and the shape decides how far a single fix travels:
- One install Every department is a section of one WordPress site. A theme fix reaches all of them at once — the best case, and the least common.
- Multisite A shared parent theme with a subsite per department. Theme fixes propagate; plugin and content problems stay local to each subsite.
- Separate installs Departments that bought their own site years apart. The themes look similar because someone copied one. They share nothing.
That third case is worth naming early, because it is the one where a proposal written against "the county website" turns out to have quietly meant one ninth of it.
Election pages are built under time pressure
Results pages, sample ballots and polling place lists are frequently assembled in the days around an election by whoever is available, outside the normal review process. It is also the content with the widest audience the site will ever have, and the least margin for a table that cannot be read or a results graphic with no text alternative.
The durable fix is not to review those pages afterwards. It is to leave behind a template and a short checklist for the person building them at 11pm.
Related
Counties usually overlap several of these. Each has its own page because the systems and the editors genuinely differ:
April 2027 is a deadline, not a starting date
If your public-sector WordPress site needs to meet the Title II technical requirements, start identifying the real remediation work now.