Government Website Accessibility in 2026
We scanned the home pages of the 50 US state government portals for WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility issues, using the same axe-core engine that runs in a paid Site Brace audit. Of the 45 we could scan cleanly, 21 (47%) had at least one automated violation. The most common problem was low color contrast. That 47% is the lowest failure rate of the eight sectors in our wider study, so state portals do comparatively well, and automated testing catches only about a third of accessibility problems, so the real share with barriers is higher. The timing is what makes government different: state and local governments are the direct subject of the Justice Department's Title II rule, which now names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as their standard, with a deadline that lands for every state on April 26, 2027.
These are the front doors of state government, the most visible and best-resourced government sites in the country, most run by a central digital-services team. There is a quiet irony in the result: these are the entities the web rule is written for, and many of these states had their own accessibility laws on the books years before the federal rule, yet nearly half still ship a measurable barrier on the first page a resident sees. Read it the honest way, though. State portals came out ahead of every other sector we tested, so the result is not alarming on its own. What gives it weight is timing: government is the sector a dated federal standard actually applies to, and nearly half of its largest portals are not yet clean on the easy, automated part of it. Five state portals blocked our scanner or returned an error and are not in the count. A county, town, or school-district site on a stretched budget and an older template has fewer resources for this than a state portal, not more.
Key findings
- 47% of state government portals had at least one automated WCAG 2.1 AA violation (21 of 45), and that is the lowest rate of the eight sectors in our study - below banking (50%), higher education (55%), and well below nonprofits (84%). Because automated tools cover only 30 to 40 percent of WCAG criteria, that figure is a floor, not a ceiling.
- Low color contrast was the most common failure, on 7 of 45 sites (16%) - muted secondary text, link colors, and button states that fall under the WCAG 2 AA minimum ratio. This is the typical pattern across most sectors, and it is the single most fixable problem.
- Links with no accessible name and broken list structure came next, each on 6 of 45 sites (13%) - icon-only and "read more" service links a screen reader cannot name, and navigation or service menus built with the wrong markup so a screen reader cannot announce them as a list.
- Most state sites came back clean. 24 of the 45 had no automated violation at all, the median site had zero, and the longest list on any one site was five. The failures are concentrated in a minority of portals, not spread evenly across government.
- State government is the one sector with a codified, dated deadline. Public entities are the direct subject of the Title II web rule, which names WCAG 2.1 Level AA and sets a compliance date - the thing private business under Title III does not have. Every state lands on April 26, 2027; smaller local governments and special districts get April 26, 2028.
How accessible are government home pages?
Of the 45 state portals we scanned cleanly, 21 had at least one automated WCAG 2.1 AA violation - 47%. The median site had zero violations and the average was below one, because more than half the sample (24 of 45) came back clean and the rest mostly had a single issue. The longest list on any one site was five.
Read that number the right way. axe-core, like every automated accessibility engine, reliably catches roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. The rest - whether focus order makes sense, whether a service form can be completed with a keyboard, whether link text describes where it goes - need a person. So 47% is the share failing the part of WCAG a machine can check on one page. The share failing the full standard, across a whole government site with its service applications, department pages, payment and licensing portals, and the PDFs government runs on, is higher. We test the automated slice on purpose and say so wherever we report it.
This is also the best result in our study. Across the eight sectors of the flagship State of Web Accessibility 2026, state government had the lowest failure rate - 47%, against 50% for banking, 55% for higher education, 57% for hospitals, and 74% to 84% for law firms, retail, and nonprofits. For wider context, WebAIM's 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on about 96% of them, with low-contrast text the single most common error, on about 84% of pages. That study uses a different engine and a broader rule set, so its percentages are not directly comparable to ours. State portals sit well below the open web, which fits: these are centrally managed institutional sites. The thing that sets government apart is not a worse score. It is that this is the one sector with a published rule and a date.
The most common failures on government home pages
These are the axe-core rules that failed on the most state portals. Each count is the number of distinct sites where the rule failed at least once, out of 45. With a sample this size, read the top of the list as the reliable signal and the long tail as directional.
| Issue | Sites affected | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Low color contrast | 7 / 45 (16%) | Text, links, or button states too low-contrast against their background to read comfortably - the most common and most fixable failure |
| Links with no name | 6 / 45 (13%) | Icon-only and "read more" service links - search, menu, language toggles, service tiles - that a screen reader announces with no readable text |
| Broken list structure | 6 / 45 (13%) | Navigation and service menus built with the wrong markup, so a screen reader cannot announce them as a list |
Below the table, four sites had images with no text alternative, and a small tail had a missing page language attribute (which affects how a screen reader pronounces the page) or a viewport set to disable zoom (which hurts low-vision users who enlarge text). One more detail of note: among the sites where our scanner could identify the underlying platform, Drupal was the most common, ahead of Adobe Experience Manager and WordPress - the content systems built for government. The pattern across the top of the list is the ordinary one. Government portals fail where most sites fail, in contrast and in the markup behind dense service navigation, not in anything unique to government.
What the law and the regulators require
Government is the rare sector where the accessibility deadline is not a matter of case law and guesswork. It is a published rule with a date, and government is the entity the rule is written for. This section describes what the law says. It is not legal advice, and whether any particular entity is covered or compliant is a question for an attorney.
State and local governments have a real deadline. State and local governments are the direct subject of the Justice Department's 2024 ADA Title II rule. That rule adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps. This is the part that sets government apart from private business: it is a codified standard with a compliance date, not just a general obligation that a court has to interpret. A 2026 interim final rule set the dates at April 26, 2027 for governments that serve 50,000 or more people, and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special district governments. The threshold is the population the entity serves, not its budget or staff. A state government serves the whole state, and every state has well over 50,000 residents, so all 50 states fall under the earlier deadline of April 26, 2027. The later 2028 date is the one that reaches small towns, rural counties, and special districts.
Section 508 is a different rule for a different government. It is easy to mix up the two federal standards. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act governs federal agency technology - federal executive agencies, the Postal Service, and their contractors. It does not govern state and local governments. State portals, the sites in this study, fall under ADA Title II instead. The two regimes converge on WCAG in practice, but the rule that sets a state's web deadline is Title II, not Section 508.
Most states were not starting from zero. The federal Section508.gov state catalog notes that many states had already "passed legislation requiring information and communication technology (ICT) accessibility" before the 2024 Title II rule, and lists more than a dozen - California, New York, Washington, North Carolina, and Minnesota among them - with their own accessibility requirements for state agency technology, many referencing Section 508 or WCAG. So for a lot of state web teams the federal deadline is not a new obligation, it is a firmer, dated version of one they already had. That is part of why state portals score better than other sectors, and part of why the remaining failures stand out.
Overlays are a liability, not a fix. A government office told it has an accessibility problem is often sold an "overlay" widget that promises compliance in one line of JavaScript. It does not work, and it has become its own exposure. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission fined the overlay vendor accessiBe 1 million dollars over its claim that the product could automatically make any website conform to WCAG, a representation the FTC found false. The honest path is the slower one: find the real barriers and fix them in the code, which is what we explain in detail.
The honest read is this. For a state government the deadline is concrete and close, and nearly half of the largest portals still have an automated barrier on the home page today - even though, as a group, they are doing better than any other sector. But a scan result is not a verdict. We report conformance, a measurable property of a page against WCAG. Whether an entity meets its legal obligation is a determination only an attorney can make. If your office is working toward the Title II date, the home page is the right place to see where you stand, and the interior service pages are where the real work waits.
What this means for smaller and local governments
The 50 sites here are state portals - the best-resourced government sites in the country. A county, a city, a town, a school district, or a special district on a stretched budget and an older template has fewer resources for accessibility than a state digital-services team, not more. We did not scan local governments for this report, so this is a reasoned expectation rather than a finding: if the biggest, best-resourced government sites fail the automated slice 47% of the time, a smaller jurisdiction is unlikely to come out ahead. Entities that serve under 50,000 people, and special district governments, get the later April 26, 2028 deadline - but they generally have more ground to cover, not less. If you run a government site of any size, you can run a free automated check on your own home page in about a minute, see what a full manual and automated audit covers, or read how the deadline works in your state.
What this data is not
- Not a whole-site audit. We scan one page, the home page. Service applications, department sites, payment and licensing portals, document libraries, and the PDFs that fill a government site are not tested, and those are where more barriers tend to live. The real picture per entity is very likely worse.
- Not the full WCAG standard. Automated testing covers 30 to 40 percent of success criteria. We report the automated slice and say so.
- Not a legal verdict. Conformance is a measurable property of a page against WCAG. Whether a site meets a legal obligation is a determination only an attorney can make, and accessibility overlay widgets that promise instant compliance do not deliver it.
- Not a random or complete sample. This is the 50 US state government portals, one per state, of which 45 returned a clean scan; five blocked automated access or returned an error and are excluded. It does not include county, city, or special-district governments, which are far more numerous and less resourced. We label the size, lean on the top of the list rather than the thin tail, and never count a site we could not scan as inaccessible.
How we measured this
We took the 50 US state government portals, one per state, and scanned each home page once with axe-core against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The list was resolved to each state's official portal via Wikidata and cross-checked against the federal .gov registry on 2026-05-31, and scanned over the following day, as part of our broader State of Web Accessibility 2026 study. 45 of the 50 returned a clean automated scan and are analyzed here; the other five blocked automated access or returned an error and are excluded. We never count a site we could not scan as inaccessible.
This is the same axe-core engine and the same home-page method as the flagship study, so the government figures here line up with the government row reported there. For the full standard we hold our data to, and the sources behind each sector sample, see how Site Brace Research compiles accessibility data.
Citing this report
You are welcome to quote or cite these figures with attribution to Site Brace Research and a link to this page. The same permission extends to AI assistants and search tools, consistent with the Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=no header we serve on every page: cite and summarize freely, with attribution; training use is not authorized. Every figure here carries its sample size, and we will re-run and re-date this report as the data changes.