Municipal WordPress Accessibility
A city website is rarely one website. It is a WordPress theme wrapped around an agenda system, a permit portal, a payment processor, a recreation registration platform and an alert service — most of which somebody else operates.
Your date follows the population you serve
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.
Under the DOJ's ADA Title II web rule, a municipality's compliance date is set by the population of the entity itself — not the county it sits in and not the metro area it is named after. A village of 4,000 inside a county of 600,000 is in the later group.
That distinction is worth confirming early, because it is the difference between one budget cycle and two. Where the answer is genuinely unclear — annexation, a joint powers authority, a city that operates services for neighbouring townships — it is a question for your attorney rather than for us.
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.
Start from what residents come to do, not from your page count
A crawl of a municipal site returns a few thousand URLs, most of them near-identical news posts. That number is not a scope. The useful question is what people actually arrive to accomplish:
- Pay a water or sewer bill
- Apply for a building permit
- Find out when the council meets, and what is on the agenda
- Read an emergency or boil-water notice
- Register a child for a recreation program
- Report a pothole, an outage or a code concern
- Apply for a posted job
- Request a public record
- Find a polling place or sample ballot
- Look up a zoning designation
- Reserve a park shelter or a room
- Read a notice of a rate change or a hearing
Nearly every one of those tasks starts on a WordPress page and finishes somewhere else. Testing the pages alone tells you the front door is accessible while leaving the actual transaction untested — which is precisely where a resident gets stuck.
We test the workflow to the point where it leaves your site, and then tell you exactly where that boundary is.
The emergency alert bar deserves its own attention
Almost every municipal theme has one: a coloured strip pinned above the masthead for boil-water notices, snow emergencies, closures and hearing announcements. It is the single piece of content on the site most likely to matter urgently to somebody, and it is frequently the least accessible thing on the page.
It is also easy to miss in testing, for a specific reason:
If dismissal is remembered in a cookie, the second page a scanner loads no longer has an alert bar on it.
We test that component in the state a resident meets it — freshly rendered, before dismissal — and on a phone, which is where a snow emergency is actually read.
Then the systems behind the buttons
Once the alert is handled, the same treatment applies to the rest of the stack. We identify which layer each finding belongs to, because that decides whether the fix is one theme edit or a conversation with a vendor.
- Theme Masthead, department navigation, footer, the alert region, and the quick-links grid every municipal theme has.
- Plugins Meeting calendars, staff directories, document repositories, request forms, notification signups.
- Embeds Agenda and minutes portals, GIS parcel and zoning maps, meeting video, job listings.
- Hand-offs Utility billing, permits and licensing, recreation registration, court payments — usually a different domain entirely.
- Content Ordinances, notices, agenda packets, budgets, meeting minutes, and years of uploaded documents.
Most municipal findings come from a handful of causes
- The department mega-menu only opens on hover Fix the theme's navigation once — every department benefits
- Homepage quick-links are icon tiles with no text label Give each tile a real accessible name in the template
-
Agendas are listed as
2024-03-12-FINAL-v2.pdfFix the link text pattern, and the upload habit that produced it - Meeting video is posted with automatic captions only Identify it, price the correction, and separate it from the code work
- The bill-pay button leaves for a vendor portal Document the dependency in procurement language
-
Council photos carry alt text reading
IMG_4821Correct the current content, then fix the editorial workflow
Documents deserve their own plan rather than a blanket answer — the government overview covers how the rule treats archived and current material differently, and why remediate every PDF ever uploaded is usually the wrong scope.
If your city also operates a separate water, fire or transit district with its own board and its own website, note that special district governments have their own compliance date regardless of the population they serve.
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.