Los Angeles County RR/CC serves roughly ten million residents in ten languages, under Section 508, the ADA and California Government Code 7405 — which adopts WCAG 2.0 AA as the state standard. This review reads the current public site against WCAG 2.2 AA and lists what I would fix, in the order I would fix it.
Every item below carries the success criterion it maps to, what a resident actually experiences, and how to confirm it. Nothing here is a conformance claim: this is a designer's heuristic review of public pages and published brand values, not an automated scan or an assistive-technology test session.
I reviewed the public homepage and the section landings as a sighted designer with a color meter, plus the department's own published brand values. Contrast figures are computed from those values against the surface each one sits on. Items I could not confirm without a keyboard pass, a screen reader or an automated crawl are marked Verify rather than asserted.
Confirming the full picture takes three passes I would run before any remediation ticket is written: an automated crawl for machine-detectable failures, a keyboard-only pass through the top ten resident tasks, and a screen-reader pass on the same ten with NVDA and VoiceOver.
#FCC227 measures 1.7:1 on white and roughly 1.9:1 over the lighter areas of the hero photographs. Anywhere it carries a word — hero subheadings, section links, tab labels — that text is below the 4.5:1 floor by a wide margin, and no text size exempts it.
Fix: yellow becomes fills, rules and shapes only. Text roles move to navy #213F80 (10:1 on white) and a deep blue #0D577B (7.8:1). Navy on a yellow fill is 6.1:1, so the primary button keeps the brand.
The homepage hero carries four slide indicators and no pause affordance is visible. Check: whether it advances on a timer. If it does, content that moves for more than five seconds needs a mechanism to pause, stop or hide it — and a rotating hero also moves the target out from under anyone reading slowly, magnifying, or mid-click.
Fix: a visible pause control at minimum; better, retire the rotation. One message plus one action outperforms four rotating ones and removes the criterion entirely.
The department publishes in ten languages, so every translated page must declare its own lang, and in-page passages in another language must declare theirs. Check: the lang attribute on each translated page and on the language names in the switcher. Where a translation layer swaps text without changing lang, a screen reader keeps reading Spanish or Korean with an English voice — unintelligible in practice.
Fix: set lang per translated page, mark language names in the switcher with their own lang, and confirm the switcher itself is a labelled control rather than an icon.
Search and the language control are glyphs. Each needs a programmatic name, and the expandable ones need aria-expanded that actually changes. Fix: visible labels where space allows, aria-label where it does not.
Check: tab through the masthead and a landing page. Where a theme removes the browser's default ring without replacing it, keyboard users lose their place. Fix: a 3px ring at 2–3px offset on every interactive element, in navy on light surfaces and yellow on navy — and confirm the sticky masthead never covers the focused element.
Carousel dots, the pale icon-chip circles, hairline card borders and input outlines all have to clear 3:1 against what surrounds them. Several of these are brand tints chosen for softness. Fix: keep the tint as the fill, add a 3:1 boundary or a darker glyph inside it.
The active tab, the current sub-nav item and the selected carousel dot are distinguished by hue. Fix: pair every current state with a second signal — a 4px rule, a weight change, and aria-current so it reaches assistive technology too.
Three identical links sit side by side on the homepage. Pulled into a screen reader's link list they read as three identical destinations. Fix: name the destination — "Learn about voting and elections" — or append a visually hidden continuation of the card heading.
Check: crawl the linked PDFs for tags, a text layer and table headers. On county sites the PDF layer is usually the largest real barrier: untagged documents, scanned forms with no text layer, tables with no header structure. Every linked PDF is in scope. Fix: put fees, requirements and key dates in HTML tables with proper headers, and keep the PDF as the printable copy rather than the source of truth.
Wide fee and date tables are the usual failure point — they force two-dimensional scrolling at 320 CSS pixels. Check: every landing at 320px wide and at 400% zoom; convert wide tables to stacked rows below the breakpoint.
Hover-opened menus commonly trap or skip keyboard users and become unreachable on touch. Check: open, traverse and dismiss every section menu with Tab, arrow keys and Escape, and confirm the tab order follows the visual order.
A masthead with a mega-menu puts dozens of links ahead of the content on every page. Check: a skip link that is visible on focus, one h1 per page, no skipped heading levels, and real header/nav/main/footer landmarks.
Carousel dots, social icons and inline utility links are the likely sub-24px targets. The address lookup and registration forms need persistent visible labels, not placeholders, and error text that names the field and the fix. Check: measure targets; submit each form empty and with bad input.
Contrast comes first because it is measurable today and systemic — one change in the token layer reaches every page. Language is second for the same reason, once confirmed. The hero is third because removing the rotation deletes a criterion rather than satisfying it. Everything after that is page-level work.
lang on every translated page and in the switcher, then correct it.aria-current to the shared chrome.Prepared by Sam Deo as part of a redesign proposal for the LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. Findings come from a visual and structural review of public pages and the department's published brand values, dated August 2026. Only the contrast findings are measured; everything marked Verify is a hypothesis raised by what is visible, and needs tooling or an assistive-technology session to confirm or dismiss. This document is not a legal conformance statement and does not constitute an ACR or VPAT.