2026-05-17 · 5 min read

Orleans Parish Government Website Accessibility: New Orleans, RTA, and the April 2027 DOJ Title II Deadline

# Orleans Parish Government Website Accessibility: New Orleans, RTA, and the April 2027 DOJ Title II Deadline

Orleans Parish and the City of New Orleans are the same government. Louisiana's consolidated city-parish structure means there is no separate parish government operating alongside a city government — the City of New Orleans IS the Parish of Orleans, with a unified administration, a single web presence, and one compliance obligation under the DOJ Title II Final Rule.

That compliance obligation is real, it is federal, and the deadline is April 26, 2027.

The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) carries a separate, parallel obligation. As a transit authority independently covered under Title II, the RTA must bring its websites, trip planning tools, mobile applications, and real-time arrival systems into WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance by the same deadline.

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The Consolidated City-Parish Structure

Most Louisiana parishes have a separate parish government alongside their incorporated municipalities. Orleans Parish is the exception. When Hurricane Katrina accelerated population loss and administrative restructuring, New Orleans already had a consolidated government that served as both the city and parish authority. Today, the City of New Orleans government website, city council, mayor's office, and all city departments operate under a single digital umbrella that also represents Orleans Parish.

This structure simplifies the compliance question in one sense: there is one primary government entity to audit, not two. It does not reduce the scope of what needs to be audited. A city of 370,000 residents — with departments covering property records, permits, courts, public works, parks, health, emergency management, and dozens of other services — has a substantial digital footprint. Each department may maintain its own web presence. Each third-party vendor portal used to collect fees or deliver services carries its own compliance obligation that falls back to the consolidated government.

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Post-Katrina Digital Infrastructure

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 destroyed or disrupted virtually every government system in New Orleans. The digital rebuild that followed was compressed, emergency-driven, and largely disconnected from accessibility standards. Systems built in the 2006-2012 period — which now handle property records, permits, court filings, and municipal payments — were not designed with WCAG compliance in mind. Many were built to minimum functional specifications under FEMA reimbursement timelines.

The result is a layer of digital infrastructure that is old enough to have significant accessibility debt but new enough to be the current system of record. Unlike legacy mainframe-era systems that are obvious candidates for replacement, these post-Katrina web systems are often treated as "recent" by IT staff who lived through the rebuild — even though they predate WCAG 2.1 by a decade or more.

Agencies planning their compliance timeline should not assume that post-Katrina systems are WCAG-compliant simply because they are newer than the systems they replaced. A compliance audit is the only way to know.

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New Orleans RTA: Transit Accessibility for a Low-Car City

New Orleans has one of the lowest rates of private vehicle ownership among US cities of its size. A significant portion of residents — including those in lower-income neighborhoods, those with disabilities, and those without driver's licenses — depend on the RTA as their primary transportation option.

This creates a distinct accessibility risk profile for RTA's digital tools. When a transit trip planner fails keyboard navigation, when a route schedule PDF is an untagged image scan, or when a real-time arrival alert fails to render text that screen readers can read — these failures affect riders who have no alternative way to get the information. The inaccessibility of transit digital tools is not an inconvenience for this population; it is a barrier to mobility.

The RTA's independently covered status under Title II means it cannot rely on the consolidated city government's compliance program. The RTA must conduct its own audit, produce its own findings, and remediate its own digital properties on the same April 26, 2027 timeline.

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Tourism and Visitor Digital Access

New Orleans receives millions of visitors annually. Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, the French Quarter, and the convention center draw tourists from across the United States and internationally. A meaningful portion of those visitors have disabilities — mobility impairments, visual impairments, hearing impairments — and many interact with city digital channels before and during their visit.

City event portals, parking systems, street closure maps, and public safety information reach an audience far larger than the resident population. These visitor-facing digital channels are subject to the same Title II compliance standard as resident-facing services. The fact that content serves tourists does not exempt it from WCAG 2.1 AA.

Inaccessible tourism-related government digital content also creates potential liability outside of the DOJ enforcement framework, as visitors are protected under Title III of the ADA for private businesses and under Title II for government-run venues and portals.

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Enforcement Context

Disability Rights Louisiana (DRLA), the state's federally designated Protection and Advocacy organization, has standing to file formal complaints with the Department of Justice on behalf of affected individuals anywhere in Louisiana — including New Orleans.

New Orleans also has national-level visibility in disability rights advocacy. Post-Katrina recovery included documented instances of inaccessible emergency services affecting residents with disabilities. That history is known to national disability rights organizations, several of which maintain active relationships with Louisiana advocates. A New Orleans government agency that misses the April 2027 deadline is not filing in an enforcement vacuum.

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Compliance Timeline

| Date | Milestone | |---|---| | Now (May 2026) | Baseline audit of city and RTA digital properties | | July 2026 | Complete audit; prioritize by impact on service access | | September 2026 | Begin remediation; initiate PDF remediation workflow | | November 2026 | Vendor review; confirm third-party portals meet WCAG 2.1 AA | | January 2027 | Mid-point verification testing | | March 2027 | Final conformance testing | | April 1, 2027 | Publish DOJ-compliant accessibility statements | | April 26, 2027 | Deadline |

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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 the agency's digital footprint. Testing combines automated scanning with axe-core against the full WCAG 2.1 Level AA ruleset and manual testing with 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, 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 government agency written-quote thresholds without a full competitive bid process.

For full details on Louisiana compliance obligations, see the Louisiana government website accessibility guide. A sample audit report is available at morton-digital.com/parallax-sample-audit. Full service details at morton-digital.com/products/parallax.

To start a conversation about 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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