From our scan data
What We Actually Find on School Websites
Aggregated results from scans of hundreds of school and local-government websites, through July 2026.
Where these numbers come from
ADA Genie scans real school and municipal websites: every page we can reach, rendered in a real browser, checked against WCAG. The figures on this page are aggregates across every site we had scanned as of July 2026, hundreds in all, most of them public school districts, plus municipalities and public libraries. Findings our human review marked as false positives are excluded. We report two levels honestly:
- Confirmed means the check is mechanical and the failure is definite, like a contrast ratio measured below the WCAG threshold.
- Flagged means an automated or AI-assisted check raised the item for human review, like alt text that exists but does not appear to describe the image.
Percentages are shares of sites with at least one such finding, not counts of pages or images.
The seven patterns we see most
85%
Alt text that fails review
Share of sites with images whose alt text was flagged: missing, or present but not describing what the image actually shows. Event flyers are the classic case, where the image contains a date, time, and location but the alt text says two words.
94%
Low-contrast text flagged
Share of sites with text flagged for insufficient contrast against its background. On about a third of sites we confirmed failures by measuring the actual rendered pixels, which catches cases source-code checkers miss.
70%
Links that say nothing
Share of sites with links like "click here" or "read more," or links with no text at all. A screen reader user navigating by link list hears a page full of "read more" with no way to tell them apart.
64%
Heading structure problems
Share of sites with skipped heading levels, empty headings, or multiple top-level headings. Headings are how screen reader users skim a page; a broken outline makes a page slow to navigate without eyes.
49%
Keyboard barriers
Share of sites with content flagged as unreachable or problematic for keyboard-only users, who include many people with motor disabilities and most screen reader users.
28%
Videos without captions
Share of sites with embedded video flagged for missing captions. Board meetings and announcement videos are the usual finds.
18%
Inaccessible PDFs, and this one is undercounted
Share of sites with PDFs flagged as untagged, unreadable to assistive technology, or image-only scans with no text layer. We only deep-check documents on a subset of scans, so the true share is higher. School sites lean heavily on PDFs: board packets, menus, forms, newsletters. The DOJ rule covers them.
Two patterns that surprised us
Beyond the big categories, two recurring finds are worth naming because almost nobody checks for them:
- Alt text that a screen reader reads as code. We keep finding alt text like "IMG_9829" (a camera filename) or text with leftover web encoding in it, which a screen reader pronounces character by character as gibberish. We have listened to these with the NVDA screen reader, and the experience is exactly as bad as it sounds.
- Carousel slides that are invisible but not silent. Rotating homepage banners often keep their hidden slides exposed to assistive technology, so a screen reader user gets every slide read to them at once, including ones a sighted visitor cannot see. Sometimes those hidden slides contain outdated announcements the district thought were gone.
Why this matters now
Under the DOJ's Title II rule, school and local-government web content has to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2027 (population 50,000 or more) or April 26, 2028 (smaller entities and special districts). Every category above maps to WCAG criteria. If your site looks like the averages on this page, the fix list is real but it is also finite, and most items are ordinary content fixes your own staff can make. We wrote a plain-English guide to the deadline if you want the full picture.
Get your own numbers
Averages are interesting; your site is what matters. We offer a free accessibility audit that shows what we actually find on your pages, each finding with a screenshot and a plain-English explanation, sorted by who can fix it. No installation, nothing added to your site.