How the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs Cut Critical Accessibility Findings by 97%

• The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) gives the public access to the state’s museums, historic sites, cultural centers, and libraries. Today, much of that access happens online, so providing barrier-free digital experiences is mission-critical.
• A 2024 rule from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) added urgency to the DCA’s accessibility efforts. This rule, reinforced by a governor’s mandate, required that the department bring its entire digital portfolio—one of the largest of any New Mexico state agency—into conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA.
• Meeting the ADA Title II requirements was no small feat given the complexity of the DCA’s digital footprint. Its 15 highest-traffic websites ran on three content management systems and carried nearly 20,000 open findings.
• Working with Level Access, the department used the Level Access Platform to scan, score, and prioritize those sites every week. Level Access experts also conducted manual evaluations, including an audit of the New Mexico State Library website.
• To sustain the work, the department loaded Level Access Academy courses into New Mexico’s own learning management system and made 10 of them a requirement for every content manager.
• Within six months, critical findings fell by 97% and the portfolio’s average score rose from 78% to 87%. The effort also supported a broader modernization push that now extends to digital exhibits and 3D tours.

The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) preserves and shares the cultural life of New Mexico and the Southwest—giving the public access to museums, historic sites, cultural centers, and the New Mexico State Library. Much of that access now takes place through digital channels, so ensuring these channels are barrier-free is integral to the DCA’s mission.

In 2024, that purpose met a firm date. The DOJ issued a new rule under Title II of the ADA, requiring state and local government entities to bring web and mobile content into conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 2026. Federal enforcement of that date was later extended, but New Mexico held its agencies to the original deadline under a governor’s mandate.

This was no small task given the size and complexity of DCA’s digital portfolio. “Our initial audit found more than one hundred websites owned by DCA,” says Ian T. Cook, Chief Information Officer at the DCA. The 15 highest-traffic sites ran on Drupal, ModX, and WordPress across a range of themes, and every museum, historic site, and cultural center operates as its own division.

Additionally, because the department runs lean to stretch taxpayer dollars, managing website content is often an added duty for staff whose primary work sits elsewhere. As a result, many sites still ran on outdated infrastructure, and accessibility-specific tooling was limited.

“Our teams knew about accessibility. They knew images needed alt text and colors needed sufficient contrast,” says Addison Cruver, the DCA’s Web Accessibility Project Manager. “They just didn’t have the right tools.”

What the department needed was a reliable baseline, a way to prioritize accessibility work across independent divisions, and reporting leadership could follow week to week.

As they prepared to meet the April 2026 deadline, the DCA first focused on people. Cook engaged Cruver to keep the work moving and report progress every week. Then he turned to tooling, ruling out the department’s existing project management software and spreadsheets as too manual for the job. After researching the market, he chose Level Access.

The 15 highest-traffic URLs were added to the Level Access Platform, which scanned them every week and returned prioritized findings alongside a conformance score for each site. That report set the rhythm. Cook and Cruver sent content-level fixes to content managers across divisions, code-level fixes to technical teams, and results to the Cabinet Secretary of Cultural Affairs.

Cruver sequenced the remediation deliberately. She started with the oldest and most challenging content management systems, clearing critical findings along with the fixes that covered the most ground for the least effort. “We prioritized low-hanging fruit, like color contrast, where changing one line in a style sheet had a ripple effect across the entire site,” she says.

The Platform became her working hub. Code snippets pointed to the exact location of an issue, including problems that never surfaced on the front end, and the Level Access browser extension let her verify a fix in real time before running a scan to close it out.

Level Access experts also conducted manual evaluations, including a full audit of the New Mexico State Library. Libraries already lead on physical accessibility, so the department wanted its digital presence held to the same standard.

With remediation underway, the department expanded focus to sustaining progress long-term. That meant upskilling teams on how to prevent new issues from emerging. Cook used Level Access Academy SCORM files to embed 10 accessibility training courses into the state’s own learning management system and made completing all 10 a prerequisite for content managers. “Because we were able to load the files into the system that everybody already knows and uses, completing the training was so much easier for our staff,” Cook says.

When the DCA established its accessibility baseline in December 2025, its 15 websites carried nearly 20,000 open findings, with an average conformance score of 78%. Six months later, that average had reached 87%, total findings had been cut by 48%, critical findings had fallen by 97%, and high-severity findings had fallen by 62%.

The department had set an ambitious target for April 2026: zero critical findings across all 15 sites. It came close, and the few remaining findings are being closed alongside the ongoing State Library remediation. The work set the department apart when every New Mexico state agency submitted an accessibility report to the governor’s office in July. “We were in the highest percentile for every single question,” says Cook.

The effort also became the department’s opening for a broader modernization push. The Drupal and ModX sites were already scheduled for redesign, and accessibility is now embedded in that effort. “Accessibility is top of mind for the whole redesign,” says Cruver.

Individual systems improved, too. For example, when the internal Media Center, where content creators enter the events and exhibitions that feed every site, had no field for alternative text, the team built one. “We’re able to direct the inputs to be accessible,” says Cook. “It’s not all on the end user to know exactly what is accessible and what isn’t.”

The work is far from finished. “Accessibility is a moving target,” Cook says. DCA is now moving beyond core websites to improve the accessibility of digital exhibits and 3D tours.

“Everyone is thinking about how to make things better now,” says Cruver. “It’s clear that our accessibility efforts are elevating user experience across the entire department.”