Digital public infrastructure.

Deep dive on Access & Equity Group F · 2026-08-30 · Categories not yet enabled in the app UI

A broken pothole is visible. A broken pothole is reported. A broken city website form, a PDF that won’t open in a screen reader, an English-only benefit application in a neighborhood where 40% of residents speak Spanish at home — those are just as consequential to the residents affected, and virtually invisible to everyone else. Nobody in civic tech is systematically tracking them. That’s the opportunity.

1. Compliance deadlines under the 2024 DOJ rule

The April 2026 deadline has already passed. Cities of 50,000+ residents that have not remediated their web accessibility are, as of this document’s writing, in ongoing violation. The April 2027 deadline is now the more common status — smaller municipalities have a shrinking window.

2. Why this category is a moat

Municipal digital-infrastructure failures are systematically underreported for three structural reasons:

• The people affected can’t easily complain through the broken channel. A blind resident locked out of a screen-reader-hostile city site cannot use that site’s contact form to report the problem. A Spanish-speaker locked out of an English-only benefit application cannot navigate the same application to report the language gap. The failure mode is self-silencing.
• The failures are invisible to sighted / literate / English-fluent city staff. A DPW director does not notice a screen-reader trap the way they notice a pothole because they never encounter it. Which means the failure is not on any internal dashboard until someone external audits it — typically DOJ or a plaintiff’s attorney.
• No civic-tech reporting tool has systematically routed these categories. 311 systems assume physical infrastructure. Web-accessibility audit tools exist (aXe, WAVE) but they’re operated by developers, not residents. There is no existing consumer path from “this city thing is broken for me” to the responsible authority.

Fault Line’s reporting model — ten-second submission, community verification, statutory-cited escalation — maps onto digital-infrastructure failures cleanly. And since almost no competitor is touching this category, being the tool that does is a defensive position that’s hard to attack.

3. Reportable categories

Categories in this document extend the initial five from Access & Equity Group F to twelve. Each maps to a named responsible authority and a cited legal framework.

4. How a resident reports one of these

Digital-infrastructure failures need a different report flow than a pothole. A pothole photographs well; a screen-reader trap doesn’t. The reporting UI (scoped in DEFERRED.md #25 and #26) will support:

• URL + short description as primary evidence. The URL of the broken page or PDF, plus a text description of what fails and how.
• Screenshot optional but not required. Where a screenshot captures the failure (visible layout break, missing alt text visible via inspector), include it. Where it doesn’t (screen-reader failure), the description carries the report.
• Screen-reader / assistive-tech context. Which assistive technology was in use (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack), what platform, what browser. Not required for submission but strengthens evidence when included.
• Automated snapshot on submission. When Fault Line accepts a URL, the system captures a snapshot of the page state at submission time. Cities can’t later remediate the URL and claim the report was inaccurate; the snapshot is the evidence.

5. How this reaches the responsible authority

The routing dataset (per DEFERRED.md #25) maps each digital-infrastructure category to:

1. Primary authority: Municipal IT / web team + the department that owns the specific page or form.
2. Escalation authority: Municipal ADA coordinator. Every public entity with 50+ employees is required by 28 CFR § 35.107 to designate one.
3. Federal fallback: The DOJ Civil Rights Division for ADA Title II violations. This is a real complaint pathway that has resulted in consent decrees against municipalities, some involving large monetary settlements.

6. Guardrails

1. No offensive auditing. Fault Line does not automatically scan city websites for accessibility failures at scale. Reports are resident-initiated, on the specific pages residents actually try to use. Wide-net auditing without a specific resident-affected use case shifts this from accountability tooling into vulnerability discovery, which has different ethical and legal considerations.
2. No zero-day disclosure. Reports of accessibility failures give the responsible authority a reasonable window to remediate before public disclosure. Same statutory-notice model as the physical-infrastructure demand letter flow.
3. No malicious use. The DOJ complaint pathway is a real remedy. It is not a lever for filing spam complaints against a city as a form of harassment. Automated bulk-submission is a violation of terms of service.
4. Verification standard. Digital-infrastructure reports require the same community-verification threshold as physical reports before escalation. Two independent reporters must reproduce the failure at the same URL before a demand-letter template is generated.

7. For cities: get ahead of this

Public works directors and IT leadership should look at Fault Line reports the way you look at Snyk security scans: a signal that something specific is broken and can be fixed. See /cities for the pilot dashboard.

8. What still needs to happen before this ships

1. Category constants + routing dataset (in scope with DEFERRED.md #25).
2. URL-first + automated-snapshot reporting flow (new in DEFERRED.md #26).
3. ADA Title II demand-letter template with WCAG citation (in scope with DEFERRED.md #25).
4. First municipal ADA coordinator to accept pilot reports through the workflow — this is the pilot-city conversation.

9. Grant relevance

Digital public infrastructure is directly fundable by:

• Ford Foundation Public Interest Technology — the flagship funder for civic-tech-adjacent digital access work.
• Mozilla Foundation — open-web accessibility is a stated priority; Fault Line’s OSS webapp meets their portfolio criteria.
• Ash Center Government Innovators Network — recognition + distribution channel to municipal IT and ADA leadership.
• State-level Assistive Technology programs — every state has an AT Act-funded program; several have small-grant lines for civic-tech that expands access.

See GRANTS.md §4 Tier A/B for the current funder-tier map. Digital public infrastructure is the strongest single-category grant hook Fault Line has — nothing else in the taxonomy is this cleanly aligned with public-interest-technology funders.

Not legal advice. Municipal digital-accessibility obligations under the 2024 DOJ rule are complex and jurisdiction-specific. For live compliance questions, consult a licensed attorney with ADA Title II experience. For a live claim against a public entity, consult a plaintiff’s attorney — there is a private right of action under 42 USC § 12132.