Digital Accessibility Services for Municipalities
The updated ADA Title II rule requires your town’s websites, documents, and digital services to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. We answer the three questions every municipal team is asking: where to start, what to prioritize, and how to do it with limited staff and budget.
Schedule a 15-minute conversation
What our clients say
Dirigo Interactive has been a practical, hands-on partner in helping Portland build a real digital accessibility program. From our initial needs assessment through procurement governance, staff training, and vendor evaluation tooling, they’ve helped us move from awareness to action with tools and processes our teams can actually use.
ADA Title II
The deadline
DOJ extended these dates in April 2026. Only the dates moved. The requirement to be accessible did not. For most towns, April 2028 is two budget cycles away, which makes now the right time to scope the work and put a real number in next year’s budget request.
Getting started
Where most towns start
The Digital Accessibility Needs Assessment.
A three-to-four week engagement that reviews your full public-facing digital ecosystem: website, payment portals and permitting systems, PDFs and documents, email, social media, and public kiosks.
We spot-check each channel, rate findings by severity, and apply a risk lens that accounts for public visibility, user impact, and enforcement patterns. You get a prioritized, plain-language report: what’s exposed, what matters most, and what to do about it in what order.
Two things make this different from the free website scan a platform vendor will offer you. It covers your whole digital presence, not just the website. And it’s practitioner-led: the severity ratings and recommendations come from the people who will stand behind them, not from an automated report built to sell you a subscription.
The assessment also scopes everything that follows. Instead of guessing which assets need auditing, which staff need training, or which vendors need attention, you decide with evidence.
The full service set
Training
Live sessions for the staff who publish your content, because new barriers get introduced as fast as old ones are removed if the people creating content don’t know how to do it accessibly. Topics include WCAG 2.1 AA fundamentals, accessible PDF creation, CMS publishing, accessible social media, and testing with assistive technologies. Available as private sessions built around your tools, or collective sessions shared with neighboring towns to keep per-seat costs low.
Procurement & Governance
In the municipalities we’ve assessed, vendor-provided technology is consistently one of the largest sources of accessibility risk. Payment portals, permitting systems, records platforms: you buy them, you don’t build them, and under Title II you’re responsible for them. We give you the procurement playbook, contract and RFP language, and vendor evaluation tools to stop inaccessible technology before the contract is signed, then train your staff to run the system.
Accessibility Audits & Evaluations
Deep, targeted evaluation of specific assets: your website, a set of PDFs, a digital application. The output is a severity-ordered remediation backlog with actionable guidance written for whoever will do the fixing. Audits are sold in modular blocks calibrated by complexity, so limited budgets go to the issues that matter most.
PDF and Document Remediation
Meeting agendas, budgets, public notices, permit applications. PDFs are the single largest source of inaccessible municipal content and a frequent target of complaints. We remediate them to WCAG 2.1 AA so your staff doesn’t have to learn a specialist’s job.
Consulting & Program Management
Flexible blocks of senior-level support: vendor proposal reviews, second opinions, staff coaching, or full program management. Purchase as needed, no long-term commitment.
Working through a regional organization?
We partner with the Greater Portland Council of Governments to deliver accessibility services to their member municipalities. Collective engagements are often the most cost-effective way for smaller towns to get this work done. If you’re part of a COG or municipal league, or you run one, see how regional partnerships work.
What working with us is like
You deal directly with the two principals of the firm. We write in plain language, we prioritize ruthlessly, and we won’t recommend work you don’t need. Accessibility isn’t a project you finish. It’s a practice you maintain. Our job is to find your risk, fix what matters, and leave your team more capable than we found it.
FAQ
Questions we hear from towns
Our IT vendor handles our website. Isn’t accessibility their job?
Your vendor is responsible for the website they build. Under Title II, your town is responsible for everything: the vendor’s output, your PDFs, your payment portal, your online forms, and the documents staff post every week. The vendor does not carry your ADA obligation. We help you see the whole picture and hold every channel to the same standard.
We ran an accessibility scanner and it came back clean. Are we covered?
Automated scanners catch a portion of WCAG issues, not all of them. The problems that draw complaints are often the ones a scanner cannot see: keyboard traps, unclear link text, PDFs that read as images, forms a screen reader cannot complete. Our needs assessment is practitioner-led, so the findings come from people who test the way real users do.
We’re a small town. Are we really a target?
Enforcement follows complaints, not population size. Small towns receive complaints. What matters when one arrives is whether you can show a good-faith effort already underway. Starting now is what protects you, regardless of size.
We don’t have budget for this in the current cycle.
That is exactly what the needs assessment is for. April 2028 sounds far off, but it is two budget cycles away, and FY2028 money gets decided in 2026 and 2027. The assessment gives you a clear scope and a real number to put in the budget request. You cannot request funds for work you have not scoped yet. A remediation project is a starting point, and the assessment tells you what that starting point should cost.
Get started
Is this on your town’s radar?
The City of Portland and towns across New England are already moving on this. Fifteen minutes is enough to tell whether yours should be, and what a sensible first step would look like for a town your size.