Report Card Mesa County, CO
Public website mesacounty.us, population 161,260. Measured on October 23, 2026.
| Documents found on the public site | 773 |
|---|---|
| Missing screen-reader structure | 291 |
| Scanned images with no text | 73 |
| Fail full PDF/UA validation (veraPDF) | 93% |
| Forms and notices residents use today | 53 |
Estimate from a crawl of 1,500 pages and a random sample of 120 documents. How we measure
We fetched 1,500 pages of the public site and found 773 links to documents on them. The crawl stopped at our page limit, so documents linked deeper in the site are not counted.
We downloaded a random sample of 120 of them. 118 opened as PDF files, and of the 115 we could read, 44 (38.3%) had no tag tree, which is the structure a screen reader needs to read a document in order. 11 were pictures of pages with no text layer at all.
As an independent check, 115 documents from the sample were also validated with veraPDF against the full PDF/UA-1 standard; 93% failed at least one rule. That number is always higher than ours: a document can have a tag tree and still fail on reading order, table structure or missing text alternatives. The grade uses the stricter, simpler fact, no tag tree at all.
Of the documents missing structure, about 18.2% look, from their names and location on the site, like forms, notices and guides that residents use today. Those are the ones the Title II rule reaches first. The rest are largely archives, which the rule exempts unless they are still used to obtain a service.
Colorado's accessibility law, HB21-1110, applies to public entities in the state, towns and counties among them, whatever their size. It asks that their information technology, websites included, meet the standards of the state's Office of Information Technology, which are based on WCAG 2.1 AA. Compliance was due on July 1, 2024.
HB24-1454 added one year of protection from liability for governments that could show good-faith efforts. That year ended on July 1, 2025. The federal Title II dates of 2027 and 2028 are separate from the state rule.
We opened 60 documents from Mesa County, CO and tested each one. Every one of them needs work before a screen reader can read them properly. Three are below, with the reason for each.
6 pages · Tables or form fields
2 pages · Tables or form fields
5 pages · Tables or form fields
These are examples, not the whole list. The full inventory for Mesa County, CO comes with an order and names every file. A person confirms every finding before anything is quoted or changed.
Repair is priced per page, and our rates are public. For a written estimate for this site, write to us or use the form; we look at the actual files before we quote.
| Documents residents use today, missing structure | 53 |
|---|---|
| Median length of a document in the sample | 3 pages |
| Estimated pages in that set | 159 |
Most governments start with a much smaller set, the twenty or thirty forms that get the most use, and add the rest month by month. Rates per page.