Five things to check on your district's website

You don’t need special software to get a first read on how accessible your district’s website is. These five checks take about fifteen minutes and use only your keyboard, your browser and your own eyes. They won’t find everything, but they’ll tell you a lot.

A quick reminder of why this matters: under the ADA Title II web rule, the part of the Americans with Disabilities Act that covers state and local governments, utility districts must make their websites and online documents meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2028. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the technical standard the rule uses.

1. Put the mouse away

Many residents can’t use a mouse. Some are blind and use a screen reader. Others have tremors, arthritis or an injury.

Go to your homepage and press the Tab key again and again. Each press should move you to the next link, button or form field.

Can you always see where you are? There should be a clear outline around the item you’ve landed on.
Can you open every menu and reach every link?
Can you get to the bill-pay link and press Enter to follow it?

If you get lost or stuck, so do the residents who rely on a keyboard.

2. Zoom in

Residents with low vision often enlarge the page. Hold Ctrl (or Command on a Mac) and press the plus key until your browser shows 200%.

Does the text get bigger without running off the side of the screen?
Do you have to scroll sideways to read a sentence?
Does anything overlap or disappear?

3. Look for words inside pictures

A screen reader can’t read text that’s part of an image. Look for notices posted as pictures: a boil-water advisory saved as a photo, a holiday-hours flyer, a rate table pasted in as an image.

A quick test: try to select the words with your mouse, the way you would to copy them. If you can’t highlight the text, a screen reader can’t read it either. The fix is to put the same information on the page as real text.

4. Open your most recent agenda or minutes

Board agendas and minutes are usually PDFs, and many are scans of paper pages. Open the newest one and try to select a sentence.

If you can’t highlight the words, the document is a picture of text. A screen reader will find nothing in it.
If you can, that’s a good start, though the document may still need headings, a reading order and descriptions for any images.

Under the rule, documents on your website count as web content. Some older documents may qualify for an exception, but anything residents use today generally needs to be accessible. Our deadlines and requirements page explains the exceptions.

5. Try to pay a bill with the keyboard

If residents pay online, follow that link and repeat the first check on the payment portal. You don’t need to finish a payment. Just see whether you can reach the sign-in fields and buttons with the Tab key and see where you are.

Payment portals are usually run by an outside vendor, but the rule covers services your district provides through contracts. If the portal fails this check, ask the vendor for an accessibility conformance report, sometimes called a VPAT or ACR.

What to do with what you find

Write down what you noticed. It doesn’t have to be technical: “Couldn’t see where I was on the homepage menu” is a useful note.

These checks find the obvious problems. A full review also tests with a screen reader, measures color contrast and looks at every page, form and document. If you’d like a second set of eyes, our free accessibility snapshot covers your homepage and two other key pages.