Accessibility of Web Information & Services for State and Local Government Entities

State and local government websites are often the front door to essential services—benefits, permits, public safety updates, court information, and more. When those digital services aren’t accessible, residents can be excluded from information and services they’re entitled to use.

Accessibility isn’t just a compliance checkbox. It’s a resilience issue: accessible digital services reduce friction during high-demand events (storms, outages, emergencies), improve trust, and help agencies serve the public consistently.

What ‘accessible’ means in practice

Web accessibility means people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with online content and services. That includes residents who use screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, captions, high-contrast settings, voice control, or alternative input devices.

A practical way to think about accessibility is whether a resident can complete critical tasks end-to-end—find information, fill out forms, upload documents, pay fees, and receive confirmations—without barriers.

Common accessibility barriers on government sites

• Images, charts, and icons without meaningful alternative text

• PDFs and scanned documents that aren’t readable by assistive technology

• Forms with missing labels, unclear errors, or timeouts that can’t be extended

• Navigation that requires a mouse (no keyboard support)

• Low color contrast or text that can’t be resized without breaking layout

• Videos without captions or transcripts

• Inconsistent headings and page structure that make content hard to scan

Accessibility and cybersecurity: why they belong together

Accessibility and security are often treated as separate workstreams, but they intersect in important ways:

• Identity and access: authentication flows must be usable with assistive tech (including MFA prompts).

• Incident communications: emergency banners, alerts, and status pages must be readable and navigable for everyone.

• Third-party risk: embedded tools (payments, scheduling, document portals) can introduce accessibility gaps and legal exposure.

• Operational resilience: accessible self-service reduces call-center load during disruptions.

A practical accessibility checklist for public-facing services

If you’re responsible for a government website or digital service, start with these high-impact checks:

• Keyboard-only test: can you reach every link, button, menu, and form field using Tab/Shift+Tab and Enter?

• Headings: do pages use a logical heading structure (H1, then H2/H3) without skipping levels?

• Forms: are fields labeled, errors clear, and required fields announced to screen readers?

• Documents: are PDFs tagged and readable (not just scanned images)?

• Media: do videos have captions and (when needed) transcripts?

• Color contrast: does text meet contrast requirements and remain readable in high-contrast modes?

• Links: do link labels make sense out of context (avoid “click here”)?

How to approach remediation

Accessibility improvements are most sustainable when treated like a program, not a one-time project:

• Inventory critical user journeys (pay a bill, apply for a permit, request records, report an issue).

• Test with automated scans plus manual checks (automation alone misses many issues).

• Prioritize fixes by impact and frequency—start with high-traffic pages and core transactions.

• Build accessibility into procurement and vendor management for third-party tools.

• Train content authors so new pages and documents don’t reintroduce barriers.

• Re-test regularly and after major releases.

Accessible digital services help agencies serve the public more reliably—especially when demand spikes and clarity matters most.

Next steps

If you’d like help assessing accessibility risk across your public-facing services—especially where accessibility, third-party tools, and operational resilience intersect—we can help you scope an assessment and prioritize remediation.

Start by identifying your top 3 resident-facing tasks and the systems that support them. From there, you can build a focused plan that improves usability, reduces risk, and strengthens continuity.