Website Accessibility for Municipalities
Everything you ever wanted to know, but were
afraid to ask

You can read the federal rules for yourself here: https://www.ada.gov/508/

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. § 794d) requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities, including employees and members of the public.

It comes down to one word: accessibility. An accessible municipal website has two parts, the site itself and the content published into it. Town Web builds and maintains the first. Your municipality creates the second, and we help you with it. Our accessibility statement sets out which parts are ours and which are yours, in detail.

The municipal website hosts information, guidelines, meeting minutes and agendas as well as decisions that all influence residents and the bigger community. 

Accessibility is not a box we tick at launch. Every Town Web site is built to meet ADA and Section 508 accessibility standards before it goes live, and the work carries on from there.

• Accessibility scans. The website accessibility tool scans your pages and documents, flags any issues it finds, and keeps a record of what has been found and fixed, so you know where you stand instead of guessing.
• Document scanning. Uploaded PDFs are the most common source of accessibility problems on a municipal site. Minutes, budgets, and ordinances usually start life on a scanner, and a screen reader sees a picture where your resident sees text. We flag those documents, and we can fix them or show you how.
• Dead-link checks. Links rot as pages move and documents get replaced. We check for broken links so residents do not land on a page that is no longer there.
• Themes, menus, and code. Page structure, heading order, color contrast, keyboard and screen-reader navigation, forms, buttons, and link text. When we find an accessibility problem in our own code, we fix it and push the update to every site it affects.
• Pre-publish warnings. When you save a new page, the editor flags likely accessibility problems before a resident ever sees them.

Some documents cannot be rewritten. For an ordinance or a signed record, the practical answer is to keep the original and post a plain-language summary next to it.

No automated tool catches everything, and accessibility work is never finished. What we can tell you is where you stand, what changed, and what to do next. The full picture, including what our scanner does not do, is in our accessibility statement. And if a vendor or an automated checker has told you your site fails, forward it to us: we will run a scan and walk you through what it actually says.