What the rule actually says.

We build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, which contains every 2.1 criterion and adds more. Exceeding the standard is the default, not an upgrade.

The fix has to live inside publishing, or it will not hold.

Almost every city we have spoken to assumes accessibility came with the website. It is a fair assumption and it is half right. A platform can be built perfectly well. It still cannot make your agenda accessible, because your agenda is a file somebody uploaded on a Tuesday afternoon. The regulation is unambiguous about whose problem that is: the duty belongs to the public entity, covering content it makes available "directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements."

28 C.F.R. § 35.200(a)

So the exposure is the agenda posted every other Tuesday. The minutes. The budget. The hearing notice, the permit application, the scanned resolution from 2013 that is an image of text and cannot be read aloud by anything. Years of them, already public. And here is why remediation projects tend not to stick: they put the fixing AFTER the publishing — one more step somebody has to remember, every time, forever. That lasts exactly as long as the person who was trained on it. A new clerk starts, somebody covers a vacation, a deadline gets tight, and the file goes up the old way. The obligation does not pause for any of that, and enforcement lands on the agency rather than the software: DOJ's agreements to remediate public websites have been signed by the entities themselves — Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, the City of Hartford, McLennan County — and in Payan v. Los Angeles Community College District the Ninth Circuit upheld liability against the entity, inaccessible web content included.

Which is why we do not sell you a second process to run beside the one you have. We build and run the site, and the fixing happens inside the publishing. Your staff upload and post exactly the way they do today — nothing new to learn, nothing to remember — and the document is conformant before it is ever public, because it passes through us on the way out. And there is a category of problem a widget cannot reach at all. An overlay is JavaScript that runs on a web page. A scanned agenda is a picture of text inside a PDF — the script never touches it, and no length of subscription changes that. We re-authored a scanned 2013 council agenda into real, readable text and veraPDF passes it. The work itself is a project with an end: your site rebuilt to the standard, and the documents you actually have in circulation converted. From there, keeping us on covers the site and converts whatever you publish next — minutes, agendas, notices — so the standard holds without anyone on your staff maintaining it. If you want the historical backlog worked through as well, we do that alongside, at whatever pace your budget sets. What none of it is, is a switch. Everything we fix is yours permanently — the code, every remediated file. Stop working with us and nothing turns off, because there is nothing to turn off. That is the difference between paying for work and renting an appearance. We will not tell you we can make you 100% compliant. Nobody honest will, on content that changes every week. We will get you materially closer, hand you the evidence of exactly what was tested and when, and leave you owning the result. If your website is genuinely in good order and only the documents are failing, we will take just the documents — with one honest caveat: without the site, everything you publish has to route through us before it goes live, and your people have to be trained to do that. It works. It is more for your staff to carry. Better said before you sign than after.