2026-05-17 · 10 min read

St. Tammany Parish Government Website Accessibility: What the DOJ Title II Rule Requires

# St. Tammany Parish Government Website Accessibility: What the DOJ Title II Rule Requires

St. Tammany Parish is Louisiana's third most populous parish and its fastest-growing. At approximately 270,000 residents, it sits on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, directly across from New Orleans. It is a bedroom community for the New Orleans metro — connected by the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and Interstate 12 — but it is also one of the most economically vibrant and rapidly expanding jurisdictions in Louisiana.

That growth creates a compliance picture that is bigger than many St. Tammany officials may expect. More residents means more digital government services. More services means more covered web content. And more covered web content means a larger audit and remediation scope than a parish of this size might have faced even a decade ago.

The DOJ Title II Final Rule applies to St. Tammany Parish government, to St. Tammany Health System, and to the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission, which operates the Causeway. St. Tammany Parish Public Schools — serving approximately 38,000 students — is an independently covered entity that falls under the April 2028 deadline as a smaller entity. Each covered entity has its own compliance obligation. None can satisfy it by pointing to another entity's audit.

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Louisiana Uses Parishes, Not Counties

Louisiana is organized into parishes, not counties. Parishes are the primary unit of local government — functionally equivalent to counties in every other state — and St. Tammany Parish government operates under an elected Parish President and Parish Council. It provides the full range of county-equivalent services: property records, permitting, planning and zoning, public works, health services, and emergency management.

For DOJ Title II purposes, parishes and counties are treated identically. What matters is the population size and the nature of the services provided, not the name given to the unit of government. St. Tammany Parish government — at approximately 270,000 residents — is well above the 50,000-person threshold that triggers the April 26, 2027 compliance deadline.

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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 to support comprehension, and how content is built to be reliably interpreted by assistive technologies and browsers.

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.

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Covered Entities in St. Tammany Parish

St. Tammany Parish's compliance picture involves several large public entities with distinct digital footprints.

St. Tammany Parish government. The parish government's digital properties include the main parish website, online permit and licensing applications, zoning and property records portals, council meeting archives, public health resources, flood and emergency management pages, and constituent service tools. All are within scope of the April 26, 2027 deadline. The pace of growth in St. Tammany — new subdivisions, commercial development, infrastructure expansion — generates a large volume of active digital transactions that must all conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

St. Tammany Health System. St. Tammany Health System is a public hospital and health system operated by St. Tammany Parish government. As a public health system, it is a covered entity under Title II of the ADA. Patient-facing web properties — including appointment scheduling systems, the patient portal, clinical intake forms, billing portals, and PDF discharge and care instructions — must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027. Healthcare digital properties often include complex interactive systems that are among the hardest categories to remediate.

Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission (Lake Pontchartrain Causeway). The Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission is a public authority jointly established by St. Tammany and Jefferson Parishes to operate the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. The Causeway is a critical transportation corridor — approximately 23 miles long, one of the world's longest bridges — connecting St. Tammany Parish to the New Orleans metro. As a public authority, the Commission is a covered entity under Title II. Its websites, toll account management systems, traffic and incident communications, and any digital rider information must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

St. Tammany Parish Public Schools. St. Tammany Parish Public Schools serves approximately 38,000 students. Because the district's student population falls under 50,000, it qualifies for the April 26, 2028 deadline — the later deadline established by the DOJ rule for smaller covered entities. This does not mean the district can defer planning. With a deadline of April 2028, a district that starts its audit in late 2027 will have inadequate remediation time. The district's websites, parent portal, school-level pages, enrollment forms, IEP and special education documents, and board meeting materials are all within scope.

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The North Shore Growth Effect

St. Tammany Parish's status as Louisiana's fastest-growing parish shapes its compliance risk in two directions simultaneously.

First, more residents means a larger population interacting with government digital services. A permitting portal used by a hundred residents per week is a different risk exposure than one used by a thousand. St. Tammany's growth trajectory places it firmly in the higher-volume category.

Second, rapid growth often outpaces digital infrastructure investment. A parish that has added tens of thousands of residents in a decade may be running government websites and systems designed for a smaller jurisdiction. Incremental content additions — new permit types, new development zones, new public health resources — accumulate accessibility debt over time without a systematic accessibility review. The practical result is that a baseline audit in a rapidly growing jurisdiction tends to surface more aggregate failures than a static one.

This is not a criticism of how St. Tammany has managed its digital infrastructure. It is the predictable consequence of building digital services at scale without an accessibility-first mandate — a situation shared by virtually every government entity in the country, as the WebAIM Million 2024 report confirmed when it found that 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG failures.

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Where St. Tammany Parish Sites Most Commonly Fail

Common failure categories for parishes of St. Tammany's profile:

Scanned PDF documents. Parish council agendas, planning commission minutes, zoning ordinances, budget documents, and permit checklists are frequently posted as scanned image PDFs. A scanned PDF is effectively a bitmap — a screen reader reads nothing from it. WCAG 1.1.1 requires a text alternative for all non-text content. Every image-based scan on the parish website is a compliance failure.

Growth-driven new content. Rapidly growing jurisdictions add new web pages — subdivision information, new permit categories, development zones, utility extensions — at higher rates than static ones. Each piece of new content added without an accessibility review adds to the remediation backlog. St. Tammany's growth rate makes this risk more acute than for slower-growing parishes.

Third-party payment and permitting portals. Property tax payments, permit fee collections, and utility payments frequently route through third-party vendor systems. The DOJ rule holds the government entity responsible for services offered on its behalf. St. Tammany Parish cannot satisfy the rule by pointing to a vendor contract. Each third-party system used in service delivery must be assessed and, if non-conforming, remediated or replaced.

Healthcare digital systems. St. Tammany Health System's patient-facing digital infrastructure — scheduling platforms, patient portals, clinical intake systems — is among the most complex category of digital properties any government entity operates. These systems involve interactive forms, multi-step workflows, and real-time data. WCAG compliance for clinical portals requires specialized testing beyond what automated scanners can provide.

GIS and property record tools. Permit tracking, flood zone lookups, property records searches, and development monitoring interfaces are built on GIS platforms. These platforms require significant customization to achieve WCAG 2.1 conformance. Flood zone maps and property records are high-use tools in a parish as active as St. Tammany.

Emergency and flood content. St. Tammany Parish's location on the Gulf Coast and Lake Pontchartrain north shore means flood and emergency management web content is among its most critical. This content must be accessible to all residents — including residents with visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor disabilities — precisely when it matters most. Inaccessible emergency alert systems are among the highest-priority compliance failures for any Gulf Coast jurisdiction.

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School District Compliance: STPPS

St. Tammany Parish Public Schools is an independently covered entity with its own compliance program. At approximately 38,000 students, the district qualifies for the April 26, 2028 deadline — the rule's accommodation for smaller covered entities.

The district operates a main website, individual school websites, a parent portal, an enrollment system, and communications infrastructure. Special education documentation — IEP records, evaluation reports, procedural safeguard notices — is frequently distributed in PDF format and must meet WCAG accessibility requirements.

Parent portals are a particular compliance risk area for school districts. These systems — used by families for grade access, attendance monitoring, lunch account management, and communication — are often implemented by third-party vendors whose accessibility conformance is neither monitored nor contractually required. The DOJ rule applies to these portals because they are offered on behalf of the school district. Third-party status does not limit the district's obligation.

STPPS should initiate its accessibility audit in 2026, even with the 2028 deadline, to allow adequate time for vendor remediation and contract renegotiation if needed.

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Compliance Timeline

The deadline for St. Tammany Parish government, St. Tammany Health System, and the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission is April 26, 2027. From May 2026, that is approximately eleven months. For St. Tammany Parish Public Schools, the deadline is April 26, 2028.

A realistic compliance program for parish government should work backwards from the April 2027 deadline:

| 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, health system, and Causeway authority | | April 26, 2028 | Deadline for St. Tammany Parish Public Schools |

The audit phase is the critical bottleneck. Remediation cannot be prioritized or scoped until findings are documented. An audit that begins in the fall of 2026 leaves insufficient time for meaningful remediation before the April 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 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 St. Tammany's multi-entity compliance picture, the audit can be structured to cover shared and distinct digital properties across parish government, the health system, and the Causeway authority.

For the full Louisiana compliance picture, see the Louisiana government website accessibility guide. See also 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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