03 · Research / Reports / 001
The homepages of Maine's 25 largest municipalities
Batch 001 · scanned 2026-07-25 · published 2026-07-25
We ran automated WCAG checks against the official website homepage of each of Maine's 25 most populous municipalities, the front doors of local government for more than a third of the state's population. We name every site scanned and publish each one's violation counts; element-level detail stays private, shared free with any municipality that asks. Every number below traces to raw scan output we retain.
Findings
- homepages scanned
- 25 / 25homepages scanned
- fail at least one WCAG A or AA check a machine can run
- 20 / 25fail at least one WCAG A or AA check a machine can run
- individual WCAG A/AA failure instances across the 25 homepages
- 128individual WCAG A/AA failure instances across the 25 homepages
- pass every automated check including best practices
- 0 / 25pass every automated check including best practices
Five of the 25 came back with no WCAG failures at all, only best-practice findings. Credit where it's due. At the other end, the median homepage produced 13 violation instances and the worst produced 64.
What's failing
These are true WCAG A/AA failures, the floor the ADA's Title II web rule will hold these exact websites to, sorted by how many of the 25 homepages each appears on.
| Failure | Impact | Sites | Instances | What it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Insufficient color contrast | serious | 10 / 25 | 26 | Text that low-vision readers may simply not be able to read. |
| Links without discernible text | serious | 9 / 25 | 60 | A screen reader announces these as just “link,” with no way to tell where they go. |
| Buttons without discernible text | critical | 3 / 25 | 4 | Controls that assistive technology can only call “button.” |
| List markup errors | serious | 4 / 25 | 10 | Broken list structure scrambles how content is announced and navigated. |
| Focusable content inside aria-hidden | serious | 2 / 25 | 6 | Keyboard focus lands on elements screen readers are told don't exist. |
| ARIA widgets missing names or structure | critical / serious | 4 / 25 | 11 | Progress bars, menus, and composite widgets announced without meaning. |
| Images without alt text | critical | 1 / 25 | 2 | The oldest rule in the book, still failing in 2026. |
| Other A/AA failures | serious / moderate | 3 / 25 | 9 | Untitled frames, nested interactive controls, zoom-blocking viewport, unfocusable scroll regions. |
Beyond the WCAG failures, 23 of 25 homepages also miss on landmark structure (content not contained in navigable regions, 224 instances), and roughly a third have heading-structure problems. These are "best practice" findings rather than WCAG violations, but they're a decent proxy for whether accessibility was considered when the site was built.
Every site we scanned
Counts include both WCAG failures and best-practice findings from axe's default ruleset, as of the scan date. A higher count isn't a usability ranking (the limitations below apply to every row here), but nothing came back clean, and the gap between the best and worst is wide.
| Municipality | Population | Violation types | Instances |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portland | 68,408 | 6 | 64 |
| Lewiston | 37,121 | 3 | 24 |
| Bangor | 31,753 | 6 | 37 |
| South Portland | 26,498 | 4 | 11 |
| Auburn | 24,061 | 4 | 8 |
| Biddeford | 22,552 | 4 | 14 |
| Scarborough | 22,135 | 3 | 9 |
| Sanford | 21,982 | 2 | 2 |
| Brunswick | 21,756 | 4 | 21 |
| Westbrook | 20,400 | 3 | 18 |
| Saco | 20,381 | 4 | 11 |
| Augusta | 18,899 | 13 | 48 |
| Windham | 18,434 | 3 | 7 |
| Gorham | 18,336 | 8 | 12 |
| Waterville | 15,828 | 5 | 13 |
| York | 13,723 | 5 | 9 |
| Falmouth | 12,444 | 4 | 17 |
| Kennebunk | 11,536 | 4 | 15 |
| Wells | 11,314 | 3 | 5 |
| Orono | 11,183 | 9 | 57 |
| Standish | 10,244 | 3 | 10 |
| Kittery | 10,070 | 2 | 13 |
| Lisbon | 9,711 | 3 | 26 |
| Brewer | 9,672 | 3 | 11 |
| Topsham | 9,560 | 5 | 13 |
Homepage only, one load per site, 2026-07-25. Numbers change as sites change; these are a snapshot.
The federal clock is running
The Department of Justice's ADA Title II web rule requires state and local governments to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. After the April 2026 extension, entities of 50,000 people or more must comply by April 26, 2027 (in Maine that means Portland, alone) and everyone else by April 26, 2028. Every homepage in this scan is covered by the rule, and the failures above are the automated-detectable slice of what those deadlines require fixing.
Methodology
- Frame
- The 25 most populous Maine municipalities (2020 U.S. Census); each official website's homepage, verified by title before scanning.
- Tooling
- axe-core 4.12.1 (default ruleset) driven by Playwright 1.62.0 / Chromium, desktop viewport 1280×900.
- Procedure
- One page load per site (the same footprint as any visitor) with a settle delay for late-loading widgets. One site's bot protection required an alternate browser configuration; tooling and ruleset were identical.
- Scope
- Homepages only. Deeper pages, the ones where people actually pay taxes and request services, are future work.
- Counting
- “WCAG failures” are axe rules tagged to WCAG 2.0/2.1 A or AA criteria. “Best practice” findings are reported separately and never counted as WCAG failures.
- Publication
- Sites are named with per-site violation counts; element-level findings stay private. Raw output is retained so every published number is traceable. Any municipality can request its full results, free.
Limitations
What this scan cannot tell you
Automated tools catch somewhere between a third and half of WCAG issues, and nothing here involved a keyboard-only pass, a screen reader, or a disabled person attempting a real task. A homepage with zero automated findings can still be unusable. Treat every number in this report as a floor.
This is also one page per site, on one day. Municipal sites change; some of these numbers are already different.
If you run one of these websites
Your municipality's full findings are free. Email hello@organizerstudio.me and we'll send them, no strings. We don't charge for findings; the same data is one free browser extension away from anyone who wants it.
Fixing them is a different job, and mostly not a hard one. Alt text, link labels, and contrast values are cheap, and your staff or current vendor could probably work straight from the findings without hiring anybody. If you'd rather have hands-on help, municipalities can hire Pinebit at commercial rates. See the note below on how that's kept separate from this research.
Who paid for this, and who benefits
Stated plainly, so nobody has to dig for it
Maine Organizer Studio is volunteer-run and nobody paid for this scan. Commercial work goes through Pinebit, a separate for-profit software firm run by the same person, which means there is a business somewhere in the picture that could theoretically benefit from municipalities discovering they have accessibility problems.
So, the rules we hold ourselves to: findings are free to any organization that asks, we never charge for them, and we do not solicit the organizations we scan. If your town wants its full results and never wants to hear from us again, that's a perfectly good outcome and costs you nothing.