What actually goes wrong
We looked at the homepages of 324 towns. We were expecting a hundred different problems. We found about ten, over and over.
Text nobody can read against the background it sits on. Links that are just an icon, so a screen reader announces "link" and stops. Buttons with no name. Photos with no description. Pages that never say what language they are in. Lists that are not really lists. Somebody else's widget dropped into the page, dragging its own problems in with it.
Every one of those came from a person doing something completely ordinary. Picking a color they liked. Adding an icon. Uploading a photo on a Friday afternoon. Pasting in the code a vendor sent them.
Nobody was careless
That is the part worth sitting with. None of these are hard mistakes to avoid if you know to avoid them. They happen because the software allowed them and nobody was watching.
The usual answer is training. Send the Clerk on a course, give them a checklist, ask them to remember. We think that answer is close to useless, and the towns we looked at are the evidence. The person keeping your website alive already has a full-time job doing something else. Asking them to also hold a specification in their head, forever, while an election is happening, is not a plan.
So we took away the permission instead.
How that works in practice
- You cannot pick a bad color
- Nobody writes the underlying code
- Nothing goes out unnamed
- No third-party widgets
The point is not that we are more careful than anyone else. It is that we removed the choices that go wrong.
Where we will not oversell you
We aim high on the published standards, and we will happily go through the detail with your counsel. What we will not do is hand you a certificate and call it settled.
A lot of what actually matters cannot be checked by a machine. No tool can tell you whether your plain-language summary is genuinely plainer, or whether your headings describe what is under them. Anyone selling you a green score as proof of compliance is selling you a green score.
So every Baseline site can publish a report that says plainly which parts are checked automatically on every change, which parts cannot go wrong by design, and which parts a person reviewed and when. If that last date is getting old, the report says so. We would rather you knew.
About that little accessibility button
You know the one. It floats in the corner and opens a panel offering bigger text and higher contrast. If your site has one, somebody sold it to you as compliance.
It does not change your website. It loads afterwards and tries to patch things from the outside, and the code underneath stays exactly as it was. The people it claims to help have said for years that it gets in the way of the tools they already use. The lawsuits have not stopped either.
We understand why towns buy them. The alternative on offer was a rebuild, and the widget was something you could approve this month. We would rather fix the choice than lecture anyone about it. If you are paying for one every year, that money is roughly what a platform costs that does not need it.
And the deadline, honestly
There is a federal rule with two dates. Towns of 50,000 or more have until April 2027. Everyone else has until April 2028.
If you are a small town, you are not standing at a cliff, whatever anyone is telling you. What you are up against is that procurement takes months and your board does not meet that often. There is about one budget cycle between now and then, which is a different kind of pressure and a more real one.
Ask us the awkward version
Bring your auditor. We would rather have that conversation now than after you have signed something.