2026-05-17 · 9 min read

Caddo Parish Government Website Accessibility: Shreveport, SporTran, and the April 2027 DOJ Title II Deadline

# Caddo Parish Government Website Accessibility: What the DOJ Title II Rule Requires

Caddo Parish is the anchor of northwest Louisiana. At approximately 240,000 residents, it is home to Shreveport — the region's largest city — and functions as the economic, medical, and governmental hub for a broad swath of the state's northwestern parishes. The City of Shreveport, at approximately 179,000 residents, is separately incorporated and independently governed from Caddo Parish. That distinction matters significantly for DOJ Title II compliance: both are separately covered entities, each with its own compliance obligation and its own April 26, 2027 deadline.

The Caddo Parish compliance picture also includes SporTran, Shreveport's public transit authority, and LSU Health Shreveport, a public academic medical center. Caddo Parish Schools, serving approximately 37,000 students, is an independently covered entity that falls under the later April 26, 2028 deadline as a smaller covered entity.

Louisiana uses parishes, not counties. That naming distinction is legally immaterial for DOJ compliance purposes — what matters is the population size and the nature of the digital services provided.

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Louisiana Uses Parishes, Not Counties

Louisiana is organized into parishes rather than counties. Parishes are the primary unit of local government — functionally equivalent to counties in every other state. Caddo Parish government operates under an elected Parish Commission and provides county-equivalent services: property records, court administration, public health, juvenile services, and infrastructure.

The City of Shreveport operates its own elected mayor and city council government, entirely distinct from the Parish Commission. Both the parish and the city are separately covered entities under the DOJ Title II Final Rule. A compliance effort by Caddo Parish government does not satisfy Shreveport's obligation. An audit of city digital properties does not cover parish government websites. These are independent programs.

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The DOJ Title II Final Rule

In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice finalized a rule amending 28 CFR Part 35 under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The rule requires state and local governments to bring their websites and mobile applications into conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

Two compliance deadlines exist:

• April 26, 2027 — for covered entities serving populations of 50,000 or more.
• April 26, 2028 — for covered entities serving populations under 50,000.

WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the technical standard published by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. It consists of 50 success criteria organized under four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. These criteria address how content is presented to users relying on assistive technology, how content can be navigated without a mouse, how content is structured for comprehension, and how content is built to be reliably interpreted by assistive technologies.

The rule covers websites, mobile apps, and any web-based digital service offered by or on behalf of a covered public entity. PDF documents, scanned records, third-party payment portals, and online forms are all within scope. A government entity cannot satisfy the rule by making its home page accessible while leaving its permit portal or property tax system inaccessible.

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Covered Entities in the Caddo Parish Area

The Caddo Parish compliance picture involves multiple independently covered public entities.

Caddo Parish government. The Caddo Parish Commission's digital properties include the parish website, online public records, permit portals, budget and financial documents, commission meeting archives, public health resources, and constituent services. All are within scope of the April 26, 2027 deadline.

City of Shreveport. Shreveport's city government operates its own website, city services portal, permitting system, utility payment platform, council meeting records, and citizen-facing digital tools. At approximately 179,000 residents, Shreveport is well above the 50,000 threshold. All city digital properties must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027. The city and the parish each carry this obligation independently.

SporTran (Shreveport Area Transit). SporTran is Shreveport's public transit authority. As a transit authority, it is an independently covered entity under Title II of the ADA. SporTran's websites, route and schedule information, trip planning tools, real-time rider alerts, fare payment systems, and any mobile applications must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027. Transit digital accessibility is among the highest-consequence compliance areas — riders with disabilities depend on accessible scheduling and routing information for independent mobility.

LSU Health Shreveport. LSU Health Sciences Center Shreveport is a public academic medical center operated under the authority of Louisiana State University. It includes a hospital, medical school, and outpatient clinical network. As a public institution, it is a covered entity under Title II. Patient-facing web properties — scheduling systems, patient portals, clinical intake forms, PDF discharge documents, and billing portals — must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Clinical digital properties are among the most complex to remediate because they involve multi-step interactive workflows and real-time data.

Caddo Parish Schools. Caddo Parish Schools serves approximately 37,000 students. Because the district's student population falls under 50,000, it qualifies for the April 26, 2028 deadline — the later deadline for smaller covered entities under the DOJ rule. The district's websites, parent portal, individual school pages, enrollment forms, IEP documents, and board meeting materials are all within scope. A 2028 deadline does not mean planning can begin in 2028 — it means the audit should start in 2026 to allow adequate remediation time.

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Where Caddo Parish and Shreveport Sites Most Commonly Fail

The WebAIM Million 2024 report found that 95.9% of one million home pages had detectable WCAG failures, with an average of 56.8 distinct errors per page. Government sites operating legacy CMS platforms — which describes most mid-size parish and city governments — typically run above that average.

Common failure categories for the Caddo Parish area:

Scanned PDF documents. Commission meeting agendas, ordinances, zoning documents, budget records, and court dockets are frequently posted as scanned image-based PDFs. A scanned PDF is a bitmap — a screen reader reads nothing from it. WCAG 1.1.1 requires text alternatives for non-text content. Every image-only scan on a covered entity's website is a compliance failure.

Third-party payment portals. Property tax payments, utility bill payments, permit fees, and court payments frequently route through third-party vendor systems. The DOJ rule holds the covered entity responsible for services offered on its behalf. Neither Caddo Parish nor the City of Shreveport can satisfy the rule by pointing to a vendor contract. If the third-party portal is not accessible, the government entity remains in violation.

Form label and input failures. Online applications for permits, business licenses, utility accounts, and social services frequently have form fields that lack programmatic label associations. These fields are unusable with a screen reader. WCAG 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships) and WCAG 3.3.2 (Labels or Instructions) require that all form inputs have correctly associated labels.

Transit digital properties. SporTran's rider-facing digital tools — route maps, schedule PDFs, trip planners, real-time departure information — require systematic accessibility review. Trip planning tools with interactive map components are among the most challenging categories of transit digital content to make WCAG-conformant.

Healthcare digital complexity. LSU Health Shreveport's patient-facing systems involve clinical scheduling platforms, patient portals, and medical record access tools. These systems are typically implemented by enterprise healthcare vendors. Vendor accessibility claims vary widely; many healthcare platform vendors self-certify conformance without independent testing. An audit of LSU Health Shreveport's digital properties should include independent testing of vendor-supplied platforms, not reliance on vendor VPATs alone.

Video and multimedia content. Commission meetings, city council sessions, public hearings, and institutional videos posted without compliant captions fail WCAG 1.2.2. Auto-generated captions — common on YouTube-hosted government video — do not satisfy WCAG 1.2.2's requirement for synchronized, accurate captions.

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The Two-Government Coordination Challenge

A distinctive feature of the Caddo Parish compliance picture is that two separately governed entities — the parish and the city — serve substantially the same geographic population. Residents may interact with both Caddo Parish government and City of Shreveport digital services for different needs: county property records from the parish, utility payments from the city, transit from SporTran.

This creates an opportunity for coordinated compliance planning — a shared audit scope, shared vendor negotiations, shared accessibility policy templates — while each entity must independently satisfy the rule. The entities cannot file a single accessibility statement. They cannot satisfy each other's compliance obligations. But they can share audit findings frameworks, remediation vendor relationships, and compliance program timelines to reduce duplicated effort and cost.

The same logic applies to LSU Health Shreveport and the State of Louisiana's broader accessibility compliance program. State-level coordination — including model accessibility statements, shared remediation tooling, and vendor qualification lists — can reduce per-entity costs while each entity remains independently accountable.

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School District Compliance: Caddo Parish Schools

Caddo Parish Schools is an independently covered entity with the April 26, 2028 deadline. At approximately 37,000 students, it is among Louisiana's larger school districts.

The district operates a main website, individual school websites, a parent and student portal, an enrollment system, and special education documentation processes. IEP documents, evaluation reports, and procedural safeguard notices are frequently distributed as PDFs and must meet WCAG accessibility requirements.

Parent portals — used for grade access, attendance, communications, and lunch account management — are typically implemented by third-party vendors. These systems are within scope because they are offered on behalf of the school district. Vendor accessibility conformance claims should be verified through independent testing, not assumed from vendor documentation.

With the April 2028 deadline, the district has more runway than the parish and city governments. That runway does not, however, make planning optional. Vendor renegotiations, PDF remediation programs, and CMS accessibility updates all require lead time. Beginning the audit in 2026 is the only way to ensure the district has adequate remediation time before April 2028.

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Compliance Timeline

The deadline for Caddo Parish government, the City of Shreveport, SporTran, and LSU Health Shreveport is April 26, 2027. From May 2026, that is approximately eleven months. For Caddo Parish Schools, the deadline is April 26, 2028.

A realistic compliance program for the 2027-deadline entities:

| Date | Milestone | |---|---| | Now (May 2026) | Baseline audit; inventory digital properties across all covered entities | | July 2026 | Complete audit; prioritize findings by service impact | | September 2026 | Begin remediation; initiate PDF remediation and vendor review | | November 2026 | Third-party vendor accessibility confirmation | | January 2027 | Mid-point verification testing | | March 2027 | Final conformance testing | | April 1, 2027 | Publish DOJ-compliant accessibility statements | | April 26, 2027 | Deadline for parish government, city, transit, and public hospital | | April 26, 2028 | Deadline for Caddo Parish Schools |

The audit phase is the critical bottleneck for all entities. Remediation cannot be prioritized or scoped until findings are documented. The audit should begin immediately — not after planning is complete.

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The Parallax WCAG Audit

Morton Technology Consulting offers the Parallax WCAG audit at a fixed fee of $9,500.

The audit covers 200 representative pages across an agency's digital footprint. Testing combines automated scanning using axe-core against the full WCAG 2.1 Level AA ruleset with manual testing using NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS. Keyboard-only navigation testing is conducted separately from screen reader testing to surface failures that automation cannot detect.

Deliverables include a full findings report with severity ratings (critical, serious, moderate, minor), a remediation roadmap prioritized by impact on service access, and a DOJ-compliant accessibility statement draft ready for legal review and publication.

At $9,500, the Parallax audit fits within most Louisiana government entity written-quote thresholds without requiring a full competitive bid process. For the Caddo Parish area's multi-entity picture, the audit can be structured to cover each covered entity's distinct digital footprint, or to coordinate shared findings where digital properties overlap.

For the full Louisiana compliance picture, see the Louisiana government website accessibility guide. See also St. Tammany Parish government website accessibility, Jefferson Parish government website accessibility, Orleans Parish government website accessibility, and East Baton Rouge Parish government website accessibility. The broader national hub is at government website accessibility WCAG compliance.

A sample audit report is available at morton-digital.com/parallax-sample-audit. Full service details at morton-digital.com/products/parallax.

To discuss your agency's timeline and scope, contact [email protected].

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*Morton Technology Consulting LLC, Tallahassee, FL. Southeast government website WCAG 2.1 compliance audits for the April 2027 deadline. [email protected]*

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