The ADA Title II WCAG 2.1 AA deadlines are April 26, 2027 (agencies with 50,000+ population) and April 26, 2028 (smaller agencies and special districts). If your government website isn't compliant, you're at legal risk. DOJ is actively enforcing, complaint filing is up, and organizations with no documented remediation activity are most exposed. The good news: most government websites fail on the same handful of issues.
1. Color Contrast
WCAG 2.1 AA requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between text and its background (3:1 for large text). This is the single most common failure on government websites. Common violations: light gray text on white, gold text on white, white text on medium-blue backgrounds, faded placeholder text in form fields.
Fix: Use the WebAIM Contrast Checker to test any color pair. Update your CSS. Don't forget form field placeholder text — it's frequently overlooked.
2. Missing or Inadequate Alt Text on Images
Every meaningful image needs descriptive alt text. Purely decorative images should have empty alt (alt="") so screen readers skip them. Common failures: no alt attribute, alt text like "image001.jpg", and charts or infographics where the alt text doesn't convey the data.
Fix: Audit every image. For informational images, write alt text that describes what the image communicates — a pie chart's alt text should describe the data, not say "pie chart."
3. PDF Documents Without Tags
Every PDF linked from your website must be accessible. Most legacy government PDFs are not. An untagged PDF is invisible to screen readers. This matters especially because government agencies typically have hundreds or thousands of PDFs — benefit forms, meeting agendas, policy documents, permit applications.
Fix: Use our Free PDF Accessibility Checker to identify failures. Prioritize PDFs that gate access to services, then remediate with Acrobat Pro or a remediation vendor.
Have hundreds of PDFs and no idea which ones fail? We remediate and tag document libraries at scale for agencies, districts, and health systems — and we document the work so it stands up as evidence of good-faith progress.
4. Forms Without Proper Labels
A form field without a proper <label> element is inaccessible to screen reader users. The common mistake: using placeholder text as a visual label. When a user focuses the field, the placeholder disappears and the screen reader announces nothing.
Fix: Every form input needs an associated <label> element — visually displayed or visually hidden but present in the HTML. Never rely solely on placeholder text. Required fields must indicate requirement in the label, not just by color.
5. Videos Without Captions
Any pre-recorded video on your government website must have accurate captions. Auto-generated captions from YouTube do not meet the standard — they're too inaccurate for government terminology, proper names, and technical language. Captions must be accurate, synchronized, and identify speakers when there are multiple.
Fix: Use YouTube's caption editor to correct auto-generated captions, or upload an SRT file. For new video production, budget transcription and captioning into your production workflow from the start.
Where to Start: The Audit
Automated tools like WAVE and Axe catch roughly 30–40% of WCAG failures. Run them on every page as a first pass. The remaining failures require manual review using screen readers and keyboard-only navigation. Organizations with no documentation of a compliance audit are most vulnerable to enforcement action. Even a documented automated scan with a remediation plan shows good-faith effort.