Town of Glocester — website accessibility report

Town of Glocester (Chepachet, RI) is a city entity serving a population of about 10,512. This report covers its public website, glocesterri.gov, as part of the CivicBinder Municipal Web Accessibility Index.

What the scan found

The homepage failed automated WCAG 2.1 AA checks in 131 places, of which 129 were serious and 2 critical. The most frequent failures:

• Text with too little contrast against its background — 119 elements (serious)
• Links with no accessible name — a screen reader announces nothing — 8 elements (serious)
• Failing axe rule "area-alt" — 1 element (critical)
• Embedded frames without a title — 1 element (serious)
• Page does not declare its language — 1 element (serious)

The deadline that applies

Under the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II web accessibility rule, public entities serving 50,000 or more people must conform to WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2027; smaller entities and special districts by April 26, 2028. Based on the population this entity serves, its deadline is April 26, 2028. Both dates were pushed back a year by an interim final rule the Federal Register published on April 20, 2026, so a page quoting 2026 or 2027 for a small entity is quoting the superseded schedule — which date applies to which entity sets out the split and its source.

Is this the website vendor’s problem?

No — the rule obligates the public entity, whoever built or hosts the site. ADA.gov puts it in an example rather than leaving it to inference: “If a county web page lists the addresses and hours of operation for all county parks, that web page must meet WCAG 2.1, Level AA even if a local web design company made the web page and updates it for the county.” The rule’s third-party content exception does not close the gap either: it covers content a resident posts, not content posted by a government’s contractor or vendor, and not the platform that enables the posting. A contract can require a vendor to deliver accessible software, and a good one does. It does not move the obligation. Who is responsible when a govtech platform runs the site works through the exception’s own wording, and checks two of the larger platforms for a published conformance report.

Methodology

The homepage at https://glocesterri.gov/ was loaded in a real headless browser on August 1, 2026 and audited with axe-core 4.12.1, restricted to the WCAG 2.0/2.1 Level A and AA rule tags — the standard the DOJ rule references. Counts are failing elements at each impact level, on the homepage only. Automated checks find a subset of WCAG 2.1 AA; a full assessment also requires manual review. The grade formula and the full open dataset are on the Index page.

Fixing this before April 26, 2028

Quotes for this work vary by an order of magnitude, mostly because vendors price on different units — per page, per hour, per year, or a flat fee — and a per-page rate is the one that turns a small entity’s document library into the whole budget. What Title II website compliance actually costs explains which part of the rule decides your scope, and which vendors publish a price at all records what five of them were charging when each was last read from source. One publishes a rate card; the other four quote after a call.

CivicBinder turns a report like this into a fixed website and a binder of evidence — the scan record, the remediation log, and the posted accessibility statement your entity will want on file. Request your free five-page report: your actual defect counts against WCAG 2.1 AA, examples quoted from your own pages, and a summary of your posted documents. No engagement required — it’s yours to keep either way. Or write to hello@civicbinder.org.

Request Town of Glocester’s free report