In April 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice published a final rule under Title II of the ADA setting a single technical standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps: WCAG 2.1 Level AA. A DOJ Interim Final Rule on 20 April 2026 pushed both compliance dates out by a year — governments serving 50,000 or more residents now have until 26 April 2027, and smaller jurisdictions until 26 April 2028.
If your agency or development shop ships sites for those governments, your client carries the legal obligation under Title II — they can't delegate it. But the procurement questions, the conformance warranties, and the remediation work all flow down to your team. The fastest way to keep your renewals safe is to make WCAG 2.1 AA conformance routine across every project you ship.
Why teams switch to A11y Pulse
Public-sector work now ships under a WCAG 2.1 AA bar, and the procurement, remediation, and conformance flow-downs land in your repos. A11y Pulse keeps your team ahead of that without staffing accessibility in-house.
Pre-launch
Run a full WCAG 2.1 AA scan against the staging URL and surface every blocker before procurement asks. Findings come with element selectors and remediation guidance your developers can ship from.
Staging-friendly scans
Per-project reports
Exportable PDF reports per project. The artefact your client passes to their accessibility coordinator or compliance officer comes straight out of A11y Pulse — no spreadsheet rebuild.
Exportable PDF reports
After launch
Daily scans across every project on your books once the site is live, with Slack and Microsoft Teams alerts when something regresses in production.
Daily scans across every site
Side by side
Two ways an agency can cover WCAG 2.1 AA on a public-sector project. A11y Pulse is built for the continuous one.
Title II liability sits with the public entity, not the contractor. The pressure on your team comes from the procurement and contractual side. RFPs increasingly require a stated conformance level, contracts include WCAG 2.1 AA warranties, and renewals are easier when you can point at the evidence trail. A client whose site fails a complaint or DOJ review will look at the vendor who shipped it, even if the legal letter is addressed to them.
Most coordinators want three things: a stated conformance level (WCAG 2.1 AA), a remediation log showing what's been fixed since launch, and a regression policy that catches new issues before users complain. The exportable PDF report A11y Pulse generates covers the first two on demand, and the daily scan history backs the third.
The DOJ rule applies to the web content the government makes available as of the compliance date, not to the contract under which it was built. Sites you shipped two years ago need to meet WCAG 2.1 AA by the same April 2027 or 2028 date as anything new, so legacy projects still under maintenance carry the same exposure as new ones.
Government contracts increasingly include flow-down clauses requiring the same WCAG 2.1 AA conformance from subcontractors touching the site. If you outsource front-end work or use a third-party CMS implementer, the practical answer is to put the same monitoring across whatever they ship and treat the scan dashboard as the shared source of truth on conformance.
No. Automated scanners catch roughly 30 to 50 percent of WCAG issues, including the most common ones (colour contrast, missing labels, alt text, keyboard focus). The rest need human judgement. Most accessibility coordinators are fine with automated daily coverage as the backbone and periodic manual review for the remainder. A11y Pulse pairs cleanly with whichever audit partner your client already has, and the PDF reports work as the input they audit against.
Non-conformance after the deadline doesn't trigger automatic fines. It opens the door to DOJ enforcement and to ADA complaints from members of the public, which is what most government clients are trying to avoid. The realistic risk for an agency is a renewal or recompete that asks for evidence you don't have, or a complaint the client traces back to the site you delivered.
Where we fit
A11y Pulse runs axe-core daily across the sitemap, including JavaScript-rendered pages and authenticated flows. Add a project in about five minutes and the dashboard is running. Per-project reports are exportable as PDFs your client can hand to their accessibility coordinator without a separate retainer.
