bloomz 
Part of our guide to choosing a district website platform.
A district website that a blind parent cannot read, or that a keyboard-only user cannot navigate, is not a minor technical gap. It locks families out of enrollment forms, bell schedules, board agendas, and the announcements that keep a household connected to school. For public agencies, it is also a legal exposure that has grown sharper every year. Accessibility is the floor your website has to clear before anything else about it matters.
This is general information for district teams weighing how to handle accessibility, not legal advice. For your specific obligations, talk to your district counsel.
What the rules actually require
Three things tend to get named in the same breath, and they do different work.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the civil rights statute. It requires public entities, including public schools and districts, to make their programs and services accessible to people with disabilities. Courts and the Department of Justice have repeatedly read that to cover websites and digital content, and in 2024 the DOJ issued a rule under Title II that ties public-entity web content to a specific technical standard.
That standard is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, currently version 2.1, at conformance level AA. WCAG is the detailed checklist: text alternatives for images, sufficient color contrast, content that works with a keyboard alone, captions for video, and so on. When people say a site needs to be “accessible,” WCAG 2.1 AA is usually the bar they mean.
Section 508 is the federal procurement rule. It applies directly to federal agencies, but many states have adopted parallel requirements, and 508 itself now points back to WCAG. The practical upshot for a district is simple. Build to WCAG 2.1 AA, document that you did, and you have met the spirit of all three.
The failures that show up again and again
Most accessibility problems on school sites are not exotic. They come from a handful of recurring habits.
Images without alt text
A photo of the science fair, a banner announcing registration, a flyer saved as a JPEG. If there is no alt text, a screen reader announces nothing useful, and a parent who is blind loses whatever that image was carrying. Decorative images can be marked as such. Informational ones need a short, accurate description.
Poor color contrast
Light gray text on a white background looks clean to a designer and disappears for a reader with low vision. WCAG sets specific contrast ratios for a reason. School-spirit color palettes, used carelessly, are one of the most common ways a site falls out of conformance.
Keyboard traps and unreachable controls
Plenty of people never touch a mouse. They tab through a page. If a menu opens but cannot be closed with a keyboard, or a form field cannot be reached at all, the page is broken for them even if it looks fine on screen. Keyboard navigability has to be tested, not assumed.
Inaccessible PDFs
This is the quiet giant. Districts publish enormous volumes of PDFs: board packets, lunch menus, special-education notices, athletic forms. A scanned document with no text layer is, to a screen reader, a blank rectangle. PDFs need to be tagged and structured, or replaced with real web pages, which is usually the better answer.
The harder problem: staying compliant after launch
A district can pay for an audit, fix every flag, and pass. Then a front-office staffer uploads an untagged flyer the following Tuesday, and the site is out of conformance again. Accessibility is not a one-time project. It degrades with every new piece of content, and most content on a school site is added by people who are not accessibility specialists and should not have to be.
That is why the platform matters more than the audit. When the publishing tools enforce good practice by default, accessibility holds. The system should prompt for alt text when an image goes up, prevent low-contrast combinations within the theme, produce headings and landmarks that screen readers can navigate, and steer staff toward web pages instead of loose PDFs. The work of staying compliant moves from heroic vigilance to ordinary routine.
This is the model behind Bloomz Slick Sites. The pages are WCAG-ready and keyboard-navigable by default, so the baseline a district has to defend is already in place, and it does not crumble the first time someone posts an event. Public pages also translate into more than 250 languages, which extends access in a different but related direction: a parent who reads Spanish or Vietnamese or Arabic is not locked out either.
Accessibility is not a premium tier
One thing worth saying plainly. On some legacy platforms, accessibility tooling and remediation services are sold as an add-on, an extra line item on the renewal. For a public school district, that framing is backward. The legal obligation does not become optional because a vendor charges separately for it. Accessibility should be part of the product you already bought, built in rather than bolted on, because the district is on the hook for the outcome either way.
When you evaluate a platform, ask where accessibility lives. If the answer is “an additional package,” you are being asked to pay twice for something the law already requires you to deliver.
If you are weighing a platform change, accessibility belongs at the top of the requirements list, and it pairs closely with the mechanics of the move itself. Our guide to migrating a district website without the six-month project covers how to carry accessibility verification through a migration without stalling it.
Get the foundation right and accessibility stops being a recurring fire drill. It becomes the default state of a site that keeps every family connected. To see how Bloomz keeps districts compliant by design, Schedule a demo.