How accessible are Colorado's government websites?

Key findings

PDFs are the dominant compliance liability in Colorado. Across the 63 government websites scanned so far, we found 3,916 PDF documents, and 3,086 of them — 79% — fail basic accessibility checks. Moffat alone hosts 678 failing PDFs. Agendas, forms, budgets, and notices published as inaccessible PDFs are covered by the same WCAG 2.1 AA requirement as web pages — and they're routinely the largest and least-tracked share of a government's compliance debt.

Page scores so far range from 71 (Westminster) to 100 (Castle Pines), averaging 87 out of 100. A high page score doesn't clear an entity on its own — that's why each row also carries a document score and an overall risk rating: an otherwise strong site can still hold substantial PDF debt or a blocked citizen service.

Reading level

63 of the 63 scanned Colorado entities publish content above the grade-8 reading level that federal plain-language guidance targets for government content (scanned average: grade 10.9). Dense text isn't a WCAG failure by itself, but it compounds every other barrier — and it's usually the cheapest thing on this page to fix.

How these scores work

• Automated WCAG 2.1 Level AA testing with axe-core, the same open-source engine used across the accessibility industry, run on every page we crawl (sitemap-first, robots.txt-aware, typically up to 120 pages per scan).
• Plain-language scoring via the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, measured on real page prose — not menus or boilerplate.
• PDF inventory: every linked PDF is counted and run through basic accessibility checks (the DOJ rule covers documents, not just pages).
• Critical Service Risk detection: pages where residents pay bills, apply for permits, or request services are flagged when failures are severe enough to block task completion.
• The 0–100 score weights each failure by severity and by how many pages it affects, translated into plain English — "4.1.2" becomes "a screen reader user can't tell what this button does."

Automated scans catch most, but not all, WCAG failures — they're a compliance monitor, not a certification or legal advice. Results are a point-in-time snapshot; leaderboard last updated July 16, 2026.