Accessibility
Measured, not promised
More than a quarter of Cheboygan County residents are 65 or older, and many reach the County on a phone. Accessibility is a legal requirement and the right thing to do, so we measured it: a real automated audit of the current County site, side by side with this prototype.
On June 3, 2026 we scanned 12 of the most-used pages on cheboygancounty.net with axe-core, the industry-standard automated accessibility scanner, against WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA. We ran the same scan on this prototype. Automated testing catches a large share of issues; the rest we confirm by hand and with assistive technology.
These are not estimates. The scan is a committed script (scripts/cheboygan-audit.ts, axe-core 4.11.3 via Playwright) that anyone can rerun against both sites. The two failures residents feel first are images with no description a screen reader can announce and links that read as nothing at all; on the homepage alone, the photo carousel and column links account for most of them. The full method and page-by-page results are in the Accessibility Pre‑Audit appendix that accompanies our proposal.
Explore the findings
Filter by severity or success criterion. Everything runs in your browser; 6 finding groups are shown.
Loading findings…
Beyond the scanner
Two things a scanner cannot count
Reference data frozen in 2012
The County is managing real flooding right now, yet the Property Info & Maps page still points residents to FEMA floodplain maps “official as of August 16, 2012.” A scanner cannot flag stale content; a good site keeps time-sensitive information current and pulls flood resources to the surface.
Documents locked inside PDFs
Board packets, permit applications, and floodplain maps are posted as standalone PDFs. They cannot be searched, are hard to read on a phone, and are often unreadable to a screen reader. The rebuild indexes every document and keeps an accessible web version alongside the official file.
How we get to AA
Built in, not bolted on
- Audit & baselineAutomated and manual testing of every template, with assistive-technology passes and a cited findings report the County can act on
- Remediate & rebuildSemantic HTML, full keyboard support, labeled forms, contrast-checked color, one clear page title, and a plan for the documents residents actually download
- Monitor & sustainOngoing monitoring, a yearly conformance statement, staff training, and periodic re-audits so the site stays compliant as content changes
Many public entities are required to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA under the U.S. Department of Justice's Title II rule, which is being phased in over the coming years. A measured plan now is the difference between meeting it comfortably and scrambling later.