July 9, 2026
Government sites: now with extra boss fights
Show HN: 92% of US city websites fail Ada accessibility
Turns out your city website may look fine but still slam the door on disabled residents
TLDR: The study says most U.S. city websites still have barriers that can lock disabled residents out of basic public services, even when the sites score well overall. Commenters were split between anger, cynicism, grammar-policing the title, and dunking on both bad design and possible AI-written presentation.
A spicy new Hacker News post claims 92% of U.S. city websites fail disability access rules, and the comments instantly turned into a mix of outrage, nitpicking, and exhausted "yeah, obviously" energy. The study’s big twist is that these sites are not total dumpster fires on the surface—the average score was a shiny 93 out of 100. But commenters zeroed in on the brutal catch: a site can still seem polished while blocking someone from paying a water bill, submitting forms, or even using a menu if they rely on assistive tools. That detail hit hard.
The strongest reactions were furious and personal. One commenter said government sites were already a nightmare before you add a disability, while another dropped the bleakest take of the thread: ableism is everywhere, and society barely even notices. Others argued this should be a baseline requirement for any .gov site, even calling for a standard design system so cities stop reinventing inaccessible wheels. Then came the side drama: one user got hung up on the title using "Ada" instead of ADA—yes, the acronym police arrived on schedule—while another accused the write-up of having that dreaded LLM vibe, basically saying, "cool research, but did a robot write the post?" Even the anti-bot tools got dragged, with commenters warning that CAPTCHAs and scraper blockers may be making things worse for disabled users. In other words: the websites are on trial, but the comments section put the whole system in the dock.
Key Points
- •Among 158 scored US cities, the average accessibility score was 93 out of 100, but 42% still had at least one critical barrier.
- •CMS vendor choice showed a strong association with accessibility outcomes: CivicPlus cities had a 72% critical-barrier rate versus 24% for Granicus, Vision, and OpenCities in the sample.
- •45% of cities had failures under WCAG 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value, identified as the criterion most frequently cited in US digital accessibility lawsuits.
- •23% of attempted sites, or 51 of 221, could not be audited because bot protection blocked automated scanning in a real browser.
- •Larger cities performed better overall, but no population tier was free of issues; 11 cities achieved perfect scores across all tested pages.