Springfield Unified School District

1. Executive summary

Your site now scores 82 out of 100, a B. Screen reader and keyboard users can complete the main tasks: finding a school, enrolling and reading board agendas. Three critical issues remain, all on the athletics schedule page, where images of the schedule have no text alternative. Fixing those and the 41 major issues (mostly link names and heading order) would move you into the A range. Keep weekly scans running so new content stays accessible.

Compared with the previous scan on Aug 31, 2026: score 61 → 82 (+21), issues 280 → 140.

2. Regulatory framework

Under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Department of Justice's 2024 rule (28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H, as amended by the April 2026 interim final rule), state and local government web content must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people, and by April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments. This report tests against WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA success criteria, which include every WCAG 2.1 AA criterion.

3. Issues by severity

4. Recommendations (priority order)

1. Images are missing alternative text — Screen readers can't describe these images, so blind and low-vision visitors miss the information they contain (flyers, event posters, charts). First step: Open the image in your CMS editor and fill in the 'Alt text' / 'Alternative text' field.
2. Buttons have no accessible name — Icon-only buttons (search, menu, close) are announced as 'button' with no purpose. First step: Add an aria-label to icon buttons (for example aria-label="Open menu").
3. Text doesn't have enough contrast against its background — Light grey text on white, or text over photos, is hard or impossible to read for people with low vision or color blindness, and for anyone outdoors on a phone. First step: Use a darker text color or lighter background so the contrast ratio is at least 4.5:1 (3:1 for large text).
4. Form fields are missing labels — Assistive technology can't tell users what to type into these fields (search boxes, newsletter signups, contact forms). First step: Add a visible <label> connected to each input with the for/id attributes.
5. Links have no readable text — Screen readers announce these links as just 'link', so people can't tell where they go. Common with icon-only links and 'read more' buttons. First step: Give every link visible text, or add an aria-label describing the destination.
6. Adopt a monitoring cadence. Re-scan weekly and treat new critical issues as a content defect to be fixed within one sprint.
7. Publish an accessibility statement with a contact method for barriers and your conformance target.
8. Train content authors on alt text, headings and accessible documents; most new issues come from new content, not the template.

5. Pages needing attention first

6. Score history

Appendix A. Methodology

Pages were discovered from the sitemap and internal links, loaded in a headless Chromium browser at 1280×800, and evaluated with axe-core (WCAG 2.x A/AA tagged rules, violations only). Severity maps axe impact levels: critical → Critical, serious → Major, moderate/minor → Minor. Page scores apply weighted penalties per failing rule (10/4/1 × √elements, capped) and the site score is a depth-weighted average that counts the homepage three times and top-level pages twice.

Limitations. Automated testing reliably detects roughly 30–57% of WCAG success-criteria failures and produces no false positives for the rules used. It cannot judge the quality of alt text, caption accuracy, logical reading order, or keyboard usability of custom widgets. A high score indicates the absence of common barriers, not legal conformance. Pages behind logins, PDFs and third-party portals are out of scope.