State and local governments must automate digital accessibility processes

In 2024, the United States Department of Justice finalized updates to its regulations requiring that web content and mobile applications be accessible to people with disabilities. Under the new rules, state and local government agencies serving populations of more than 50,000 must comply with the WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards by April 2026.

Ensuring access to public services for citizens with disabilities is essential, and current data underscores the need for clear regulations that establish both a roadmap for accessibility, and accountability for government entities.

The updated regulations couldn’t have come at a better time. Numerous organizations have shown that state and local governments are falling behind.

The National Civic League revealed that 57% of Americans with disabilities reported barriers to civic engagement. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ 2025 survey results found disparate efforts across the states. While two-thirds of states have hired a technology accessibility coordinator, only 46% have funding for accessibility improvements. Even more concerning is that only one state reported that it had fully implemented its accessibility plan.

Adobe’s Digital Government Index showed that 26 out of 50 states had more than 10 website accessibility issues.

So, this move by the DOJ is a noble one, done for the right reasons. But it will also be a huge undertaking, even for the biggest state and local governments, especially if they want to move quickly and efficiently to meet the deadline.

Estimating the Cost of Manual Processes

As part of the DOJ’s updated rules, states will need to tag documents that appear on their public-facing websites. Tagging a document creates an underlying structure that makes it accessible for people with disabilities.

These tags tell assistive technologies — such as screen readers — the purpose and reading order of the content. They identify elements like headings, images, and tables to ensure everything is presented in the correct sequence. Without proper tagging, users who rely on assistive technology may be unable to navigate or fully understand the document.

As part of this process, many larger states are finding that they’ll need to tag more than 75,000 documents. Manual tagging takes about 2-3 hours per document, so for some jurisdictions it will take at least 150,000 hours of manual labor to complete the DOJ’s mandate. According to Adobe research, the final price for an in-house project will likely surpass $2 million.

Even for smaller jurisdictions, the cost will be high. A small city or county of around 500,000 residents will need to tag about 12,000 documents, which could take 24,000 hours of labor costing about $400,000.

In a time when so many governments are facing constrained budgets, it will be a challenge to absorb the cost to comply with the WCAG guidelines using a manual process.

Thankfully, these entities don’t have to choose between accessibility and other important budget priorities. By automating accessibility tagging, they can drastically cut costs associated with manual labor while increasing accuracy and efficiency.

Automating the Challenge

Automating the accessibility process, including archiving, tagging and maintaining website compliance, including following WCAG guidelines, is more cost- and time-efficient. But even more importantly, it ensures disabled residents have access to government services by being significantly more accurate than manual processes. In fact, with the right automation tools, state and local jurisdictions can track around 80% WGAC compliance on the first pass.

When finding a partner or solution to help with automating accessibility, there are four essential steps that state and local governments should address:

• Remediating documents: A great automation tool will be able to provide automatic identification and tagging, remediation at scale and the creation of LLMs from PDFs using an API interface. This will help improve productivity and reduce time and operational costs, as well as make document workstreams more consistent and flexible.
• Monitoring and assessing website accessibility issues: Continuous accessibility checks provide recommendations and execution mechanisms for quick fixes that can be taken to address any flagged issues. Agencies can get notified immediately if their site isn’t conformant to WCAG and understand what steps they must take to become compliant.
• Maintaining accessibility compliance with digital assets: Any great automation platform will empower government entities to check the accessibility of new web pages and images created to route the asset to the appropriate people for approval. Agencies should look for tools that automatically generate descriptive titles and ALT text leveraging AI and automatically generate closed captioning transcripts from videos.
• Creating accessible sites: For agencies that are looking to re-platform or modernize their tech stack, accessibility should be at the forefront of their priorities. The right platform will ensure agencies publish websites where the site elements have proper role markers and semantic structure, and enforce required author input like ALT text. This makes for more streamlined, disciplined processes for creating and publishing accessible content.

Accessibility is vital for state and local government websites and mobile apps because it ensures equal access to information and services for all residents, including those with disabilities. Now, with DOJ compliance deadlines coming next year, meeting WCAG guidelines isn’t just a nice-to-have for residents; it’s central to legal compliance, equitable access, public trust and digital efficiency. And while it might seem like a daunting task to take on, automating the process can turn it from a monumental challenge to a golden opportunity.

Brian Chidester is head of industry strategy for the public sector at Adobe.