Accessibility

Town Communicator exists so that anyone can read what their town decides. That has to include people who use a screen reader, navigate by keyboard, need larger text, or can't rely on colour. Here's exactly where we are.

The standard we're working to

WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That's the standard the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (28 CFR 35.200) requires of state and local government web content. Our pilot towns are all under 50,000 people, which puts their deadline at 26 April 2027.

Where we actually are

Partially conformant. We are not claiming full conformance, because we haven't finished testing against the parts of the standard that a machine can't check.

What is done and holds automatically, on every change we ship:

• An automated WCAG 2.1 A/AA scan (axe-core) runs over the public pages in our build pipeline, and a new failure stops the build. There are currently none recorded.
• Colour contrast across the interface meets AA, checked against every surface a colour is actually used on — including the four accent themes and dark mode.
• Every page can be operated by keyboard, with a visible focus indicator on every control, a working "skip to content" link, and no hijacked tab order.
• Answers from the assistant arrive as real headings, lists and links rather than one block of text, and the conversation announces new answers to a screen reader.
• Documents are readable as HTML — headings, paragraphs and reflowing text — rather than only as a PDF.
• The interface respects prefers-reduced-motion and your system light/dark setting.

What we know is not finished:

• The parcel map. A map is visual by nature. Every parcel is also browsable as text under Topics, but that isn't yet a complete equivalent of what the map shows.
• Scanned documents. Much of the source material is PDFs published by towns and counties. Every document whose text we could extract now has a readable HTML version, offered ahead of the original — but documents published as scans with no text layer have nothing to extract, and for those we can only ask you to tell us so we can get you the contents another way.
• Screen-reader testing. Automated checks find roughly a third of real accessibility problems. A full manual pass with NVDA and VoiceOver is planned and has not yet been done, so there will be problems we don't know about.
• Signed-in pages. Our automated scan covers the public pages. Projects, alerts and the town-office workspaces are not yet in it.

Tell us about a barrier

If something here is unusable for you, we want to know — a specific page and what happened is more useful than anything else you could send us, and it goes to the top of the list.

Report an accessibility problem

We aim to reply within five working days. If a document you need is unreadable, say so and we will get you its contents in a form you can use.

For towns evaluating this product

We'll provide a current Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT 2.5) on request, and we'd rather it be accurate than flattering. Our accessibility work is tracked in the open, and the automated scan runs on every change rather than at audit time.

Last reviewed 26 July 2026. This statement describes the state of the product on that date, and is updated when that changes rather than on a schedule.