2026-05-17 · 6 min read

DeKalb County Government Website Accessibility: What the DOJ Title II Rule Requires

# DeKalb County Government Website Accessibility: What the DOJ Title II Rule Means for Georgia's Fourth-Largest County

DeKalb County, Georgia — home to roughly 770,000 residents and one of the most economically diverse jurisdictions in the Southeast — faces a hard federal compliance deadline that many county departments are not yet prepared to meet. Under the Department of Justice's final rule implementing Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, dekalbcountyga.gov and every digital service the county operates must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 24, 2027.

That deadline is less than a year away. For a county this size, the remediation window is already tighter than most officials realize.

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Who Must Comply and When

The DOJ rule tiers compliance deadlines by population. Jurisdictions with 50,000 or more residents face the earlier April 24, 2027 deadline. Smaller entities get until April 26, 2028.

Here is how DeKalb's landscape breaks down:

DeKalb County government (dekalbcountyga.gov) — population ~770,000 — is firmly in the 2027 cohort. Every web property the county operates, including the county commission site, permitting portals, courts, tax assessor, public health, and the county's transit circulator program, falls under this obligation.

City of Dunwoody sits right at the 50,000 threshold. At approximately 50,000 residents, Dunwoody is a borderline case: if its population meets or exceeds 50,000 in the relevant census data the DOJ uses, it falls in the April 2027 group. Dunwoody's web team should treat 2027 as the operative deadline and not count on the later date.

City of Decatur (~23,000) and City of Tucker (~37,000) fall below 50,000 and have until April 2028 — but starting remediation in 2026 or early 2027 is still the prudent path given how long substantive fixes take.

What is not covered under DeKalb County's obligation: MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) is a separately governed regional transit authority — it has its own Title II obligations as an independent covered entity, not an extension of DeKalb County. Similarly, the CDC headquarters in DeKalb is a federal facility (Title II does not apply to the federal government), and Emory University is a private institution outside Title II's scope. The DeKalb County School District is an independent governmental entity with its own compliance obligation.

What is covered under DeKalb County: The county's own bus circulator service, Ride DeKalb, operates as a county program. Its schedules, booking interfaces, and any rider-facing digital content on dekalbcountyga.gov must meet WCAG 2.1 AA.

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What the Rule Actually Requires

WCAG 2.1 Level AA is a 50-criterion technical standard organized around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. For a government website, the practical implications include:

• Every image conveying information must have descriptive alternative text
• All video content — public meetings, commission proceedings, emergency announcements — must have captions and, for pre-recorded video, audio descriptions
• Forms (permit applications, tax appeals, voter registration assistance) must be navigable by keyboard alone and must not rely on color as the only way to convey meaning
• All interactive elements must be reachable and operable by screen reader users
• PDFs published as official documents must be tagged and structured so assistive technology can parse them

The rule covers the county's websites, mobile apps, and any third-party web content the county contracts for or controls — including vendor-built permitting systems and payment portals.

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Five Accessibility Failures Common on Georgia County Government Sites

Government websites of DeKalb's vintage and complexity tend to accumulate the same categories of failure. Based on automated scanning patterns across similar jurisdictions, these are the issues most likely to surface on dekalbcountyga.gov:

1. Untagged PDFs in public-record libraries. County governments publish thousands of PDFs — ordinances, meeting minutes, budget documents, zoning maps. When these files are generated from scanned paper or exported without accessibility settings, they are images of text to a screen reader: completely inaccessible. A remediation backlog of several years of agenda packets alone can represent hundreds of documents.

2. Inaccessible commission and board meeting video. DeKalb County streams and archives public meetings. Auto-generated captions on platforms like YouTube are not WCAG-compliant without human review. Accuracy rates below roughly 98 percent — the working standard for meaningful access — mean a resident who is deaf or hard of hearing cannot reliably follow public proceedings.

3. Color contrast failures in maps and data visualizations. GIS-based parcel maps, zoning maps, and public health dashboards frequently use color combinations that fail the 4.5:1 contrast ratio required for normal text and 3:1 for large text. When color is the only encoding for a data category, colorblind users and low-vision users receive no information at all.

4. Form fields without programmatically associated labels. Online forms for business licenses, court payments, and public records requests are high-traffic, high-stakes pages. When a form field's visible label is positioned visually but not linked to the input element in the HTML, screen readers announce the field with no context. Users tab into an input and hear only "edit text" — with no way to know what the field expects.

5. Skip navigation and focus-order problems. County sites often carry dense navigation menus with dozens of links before the main content. Without a functional "skip to main content" link, keyboard-only users — including many people with motor disabilities who cannot use a mouse — must tab through every navigation item on every page load. This is one of the most common, most easily fixable, and most consistently unfixed failures across local government sites.

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The Compliance Timeline Is Already Tight

Achieving genuine WCAG 2.1 AA conformance for a county the size of DeKalb is not a task measured in weeks. A realistic remediation arc for a 770,000-resident county government looks like this:

• Audit phase (4–8 weeks): Comprehensive automated scan plus manual expert testing across representative pages and user flows. Automated tools catch roughly 30–40 percent of failures; the rest require human judgment.
• Remediation planning (2–4 weeks): Prioritized issue backlog, developer assignment, vendor engagement for third-party tools.
• Remediation execution (3–6 months): Code fixes, PDF remediation, video captioning, content updates — often touching every department that publishes to the web.
• Validation and conformance statement (2–4 weeks): Re-testing to confirm fixes hold, publishing an accessibility statement.

Starting that process in Q3 or Q4 2026 leaves almost no margin for the procurement cycles, department approvals, and vendor delays that are standard in county government. The time to act is now.

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How Morton Technology Consulting Can Help

Morton Technology Consulting offers the Parallax WCAG Audit — a fixed-fee, $9,500 engagement designed specifically for government agencies navigating Title II compliance.

The Parallax audit delivers:

• A comprehensive WCAG 2.1 AA audit combining automated scanning and manual expert review across your live web properties
• An itemized, prioritized issue report your development team or vendor can execute against directly
• A remediation roadmap with realistic timelines tied to your April 2027 deadline
• A sample accessibility conformance statement for your public-facing pages

There are no hourly rates, no surprise overages, and no vague deliverables. The $9,500 fixed fee covers the full engagement.

DeKalb County has the largest population in Georgia outside of Fulton, a diverse and technology-engaged resident base, and a federal deadline that is counting down. The question is not whether dekalbcountyga.gov will need to change — it is whether those changes happen on a planned schedule or under legal pressure.

To schedule a scoping call or request a sample audit report, contact Morton Technology Consulting at morton-digital.com.

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