AccessHawkby Nighthawk
ADA Title II · WCAG 2.1 AA · Federal Rule 28 CFR Part 35

Your agendas, minutes and forms are the biggest part of the job.

Title II covers the documents you publish, not just the pages around them — and for most municipalities the PDF library is where the real work is. AccessHawk audits every PDF on your site alongside every page, and tracks what you decide to do about each one. Free scan, about a minute, no signup.

—until April 26, 2027 deadline · population 50,000+
—until April 26, 2028 deadline · under 50,000 & special districts
Which deadline applies to you?

Deep scan: up to 30 public pages and up to 10 of your PDFs opened and inspected, checked against WCAG 2.1 AA. No signup required. How scoring works · Which ACT rules we implement · Privacy

How it works

Built for city administrators, clerks, and communications directors — not just web developers.

We inventory and open your documents

We find the PDFs linked from your site and actually inspect them — is there a tag structure, is it real text or a scan of a page, is there a document title and a language set. A council packet that's a photocopy in a PDF wrapper is invisible to a screen reader, and that is the single most common Title II failure in local government.

We scan the pages around them

Your homepage, your sitemap, and the pages residents actually use — agendas, services, forms, payments — checked live against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard named in the DOJ rule. 43 automated checks, each published with the W3C ACT rule it implements — or with an explicit note where no ACT rule covers it.

You get a record, not just a score

A graded score your council understands, plus somewhere to record what you decided about each finding — fixed, deferred, false positive, or not fixing and why. When someone asks what you have done about accessibility, that record is the answer.

What the free scan checks

43 automated checks mapped to WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the exact standard 28 CFR Part 35 requires — starting with the one most tools charge extra for or skip entirely: your documents. Each check is published with the W3C ACT rule identifier it implements, or an explicit statement that no ACT rule covers it — so you can verify our coverage claims rather than trust them.

An honest note: no automated tool can certify compliance — anyone who says otherwise is selling you a lawsuit. Automated checks reliably find about a third of WCAG issues. Keyboard traps, caption accuracy, and cognitive-load problems need human review. That's exactly what the full AccessHawk platform and our remediation team are for.

And a verifiable one: we publish every check we run against the W3C ACT rule it implements, including an honest note where our implementation is partial and where no ACT rule exists at all. We claim zero complete ACT implementations, because claiming otherwise would require a rendered browser DOM. You can read the whole mapping — as a page or as raw JSON — and check it against the W3C index yourself. Read our full methodology.