What this Index measures
Under the Department of Justice’s Title II web accessibility rule, public entities serving 50,000 or more people must conform to WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2027; smaller entities and special districts by April 26, 2028. The Index scans the live homepage of every US local-government .gov website we can enumerate, runs the WCAG 2.0/2.1 A and AA rule set — the standard the DOJ rule references — and grades each site A through F on the count of serious and critical failures found. Every graded site gets its own report page, and the whole dataset is downloadable below under CC BY 4.0.
By deadline tier
| Title II deadline | Sites scanned | With serious or critical failures |
|---|---|---|
| April 26, 2027 | 43 | 28 (65.1%) |
| April 26, 2028 | 342 | 259 (75.7%) |
Grade distribution across all 385 scanned sites: 98 A · 99 B · 109 C · 46 D · 33 F. The grade formula is in the methodology below.
State by state
The most common failures
| What fails | Sites affected | Instances |
|---|---|---|
| Text with too little contrast against its background (color-contrast) | 137 | 1,411 |
| Links with no accessible name — a screen reader announces nothing (link-name) | 117 | 552 |
| Embedded frames without a title (frame-title) | 43 | 55 |
| Page blocks pinch-to-zoom on mobile devices (meta-viewport) | 41 | 42 |
| Images missing alternative text (image-alt) | 37 | 149 |
| Buttons with no accessible name (button-name) | 29 | 63 |
| Page does not declare its language (html-has-lang) | 28 | 28 |
| Page has no title (document-title) | 25 | 25 |
| List markup that is malformed, which confuses screen readers (list) | 21 | 35 |
| Keyboard-focusable content hidden from assistive technology (aria-hidden-focus) | 17 | 506 |
| ARIA roles missing their required parent element (aria-required-parent) | 14 | 64 |
| ARIA attributes used where they are not allowed (aria-prohibited-attr) | 14 | 32 |
Methodology
Each site’s homepage is loaded in a real headless browser and audited with axe-core 4.12.1, restricted to the WCAG 2.0/2.1 Level A and AA rule tags. We count failing elements (axe violation nodes) at each impact level, and grade on serious + critical counts:
- A — no serious or critical failures detected
- B — no critical failures, at most 2 serious
- C — 10 or fewer serious-or-critical failures
- D — 11 to 25 serious-or-critical failures
- F — more than 25 serious-or-critical failures
Only .gov-hosted sites are scanned; a homepage that redirects off .gov is excluded rather than scored. Automated checks find a subset of WCAG 2.1 AA — an A grade means the homepage passed every automated check on the day it was scanned, not that the entity conforms to the standard or to its Title II obligations. Scanning is continuous; this page and the dataset regenerate as new results land. Entity list: US local governments from the public .gov registry with population figures from Census data.
Download the data
The full dataset is free to download and reuse under CC BY 4.0 — cite “CivicBinder Municipal Web Accessibility Index” and link this page:
- dataset.csv — one row per scanned entity
- dataset.json — the same rows as JSON
Cite this dataset: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21739139 — a versioned snapshot of this index archived on Zenodo.
If your entity is on this list
CivicBinder turns a failing scan into a fixed website and a binder of evidence — the scan record, the remediation log, and the posted accessibility statement your entity will want on file before its deadline. Request your free five-page report — your actual defect counts against WCAG 2.1 AA with examples quoted from your own pages, no engagement required. Or write to hello@civicbinder.org. Data updated August 1, 2026.