Accessibility Statement

What we checked

Automated and keyboard testing have been performed. Manual assistive-technology testing is still pending. These checks do not establish WCAG conformance.

On 10 October 2026, an automated audit of civicupdate.com used Chromium and axe 4.14.0, with additional keyboard, focus, contrast and layout probes. The axe runs took place between 15:14 and 15:50 UTC. We also reviewed the corresponding source code. This was a bounded, signed-out review, not a complete manual or complete-process audit.

The audit covered 200 combinations of page, state, screen size and theme across 35 URLs. Of these, 34 URLs returned HTML in 196 cases; the retired search route returned plain text with HTTP 410 in four cases. Both light and dark themes were checked at 320 by 568, 390 by 844, 768 by 1024 and 1280 by 800 CSS pixels.

All four sizes covered home without an area, home with Wilmington and New Hanover selected, the open home location picker, sign-in, the Wilmington town page and a meeting detail page. Other states used 390 and 1280 pixel widths. These included other town pages, selected meeting archives, Meetings, Local Buzz, Civic Calendar, Coverage, Officials and contacts, About, Privacy, Preferences, unsubscribe presentations, Policy Pulse and a missing-page response. Menu, theme-toggle, disclosure, upcoming-meeting and denied-location states were also exercised. This Accessibility Statement was added after that audit and was not in its scope.

The results included 1,182 failure observations and 63,624 observations requiring manual review. Repeated observations are not separate defects or a measure of conformance. Seven source-supported findings were identified; some other flags require retesting because of animation timing, closed disclosures or modal menus.

Changes made and verification status

Source review on 10 October 2026 confirms the following changes. Targeted post-change Chromium tests provide evidence for menu focus, picker dismissal and calendar names and relationships. An earlier full audit was incomplete: it covered 190 cases with no recorded failures but 29 errors, including pages that could not be checked. Full-route browser and assistive-technology verification remains open; these results do not establish full conformance.

• Visible and spoken control names (A11Y-01): the header, area picker, calendar days and coverage request controls now derive their names from their visible words.
• Location overlays covering keyboard focus (A11Y-02): suggestions now close when focus leaves, and the desktop picker closes when focus moves outside it.
• Sticky header covering keyboard focus (A11Y-03): scroll clearance now follows the rendered header height, with a correction when a focused control is covered.
• Dark picker link contrast (A11Y-04): picker footer actions now use the existing theme-aware link colors. Solid-color calculations give 8.8420:1 in light mode and 10.2824:1 in dark mode; rendered states still need retesting.
• Calendar detail relationships (A11Y-05): disclosure buttons now reference stable, mounted panels and expose whether their details are expanded.
• Repeated source landmarks (A11Y-06): per-record source information now uses ordinary content instead of repeating the same complementary landmark.
• News heading hierarchy (A11Y-07): Local Buzz article titles now use level-two headings below the page heading. This and the landmark change are navigation improvements, not separately established WCAG failures.

Remaining checks and limitations

• Complete keyboard tasks, speech control, NVDA and VoiceOver use, reading order, useful image descriptions, link context, form recovery and announcements still need human testing. The automated run did not test Firefox or Safari.
• Menu isolation, closed-popup relationships and skip-link visibility after animation still need retesting. Automated flags alone do not establish how these controls behave with assistive technology.
• Contrast over photos, gradients and transparent surfaces, visible focus, non-text contrast, target sizes and spacing exceptions remain under review in both themes and actual Windows high-contrast settings.
• Actual 200% and 400% browser zoom, enlarged text and text spacing need manual testing. Font-size doubling was only a proxy for zoom; the audit included just 12 core-state reflow checks at 320 CSS pixels, not every route.

Processes and content outside the audit

The audit blocked submissions, authentication endpoints and external active scripts. It did not complete sign-in, provider CAPTCHA or recovery, account preference writes, account deletion, coverage requests or valid-token unsubscribe. Sign-in error and unsubscribe confirmation URLs tested presentation only. Cloudflare challenges and analytics were blocked.

Signed-in and admin features, offline and installed-app experiences, external government documents and PDFs, news sites and other linked services were not audited. Paginated archives, government-body pages and town-officials pages were not covered, and the application error boundary was not deliberately triggered. External content may have its own accessibility limitations.

Reporting an accessibility barrier

Publisher accessibility contact: contact route pending. We have not yet provided a verified route to contact the CivicUpdate owner. We will update this statement when one is available. Government contacts and the town-coverage request form are not routes for reporting CivicUpdate accessibility barriers.

Useful details to keep for a future report include the page address, the task you were trying to complete, what prevented it, and the browser or assistive technology used. Do not include passwords or account secrets.