A Mid-Size County Government: ADA Compliance Across a Multi-Department Website

Eight Departments, One Website, One IT Team

County government is its own beast. A city site has one publishing voice. A special district has one function. A county has eight functions under one URL, and each one has its own staff, its own document pile, and its own ideas about how the web works. This mid-size county government serves about 570,000 residents and reflects a pattern common across multi-department local government agencies. Eight departments share the site, from the Sheriff's Office to the Registry of Deeds to the Agricultural School. Each one publishes on its own schedule.

Two people ran IT. Everyone else published. When the county IT director ran an automated WCAG 2.1 AA scan across the full site, the tool spat back 2,847 individual violations. Not evenly spread. The breakdown told the real story:

The Real Problem: No Gate at the Point of Publish

This wasn't one broken page or one bad PDF. It was the whole publishing model. Department staff uploaded PDFs, added images, and created pages on their own. No review. No accessibility gate. Nothing catching problems before they went live. The IT director's two-person team fielded roughly 47 accessibility tickets a month. “My PDF won't open in a screen reader.” “The contact form skips fields when I tab through it.” They'd fix each one. Then three more would show up.

The county needed a platform that enforced accessibility at the moment of publish, not after. And they needed to kill an entire category of ticket: content published with unknown accessibility status. If it went live on the county site, it had to pass first.

The Build: Central Governance, Department Autonomy

WPPersona's multi-department architecture did most of the heavy lifting here. The IT director set one accessibility-compliant template library and one set of publishing rules at the county level. Each department got its own workspace inside those rules. Department editors kept their autonomy. The county kept the guardrails. The governance choices:

• Department editors can create and edit inside approved templates. They cannot modify template structure or override accessibility settings.
• Every PDF upload triggers automatic accessibility scanning. No department editor can bypass the scan. Not even the IT director without an explicit override.
• A county-level compliance dashboard shows content health across all 8 departments in real time.
• High-risk PDF uploads fire an email to the department editor and the county IT director simultaneously.
• A shared media library holds approved images with accessibility metadata (alt text, decorative status) that any department can reuse.

Before and After: Accessibility Score

The 74% Ticket Drop

Six months after launch, the IT director pulled the ticket data. Before WPPersona, 47 accessibility tickets a month. After, 12. That's a 74% drop. What's more interesting is what the remaining 12 tickets were about. None of them came from the WPPersona platform itself. Every single one traced back to embedded third-party tools the county hadn't replaced yet, a payment processor and an old form builder one department still ran on the side.

That's the shift. The IT team stopped firefighting. They started planning the next phase, which was retiring the last of the third-party embeds. Compliance work moved from reactive to proactive. Same two people. Very different week.