All rise. UI Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Patricia Semantics presiding. Today’s defendant has been growing, undisturbed, for about twenty-five years. It has thirty-two icons on its homepage, and one of them says “I Want To…”
The defendant could not fit through the courtroom door. The bailiffs brought it in one department at a time.
The charges
The clerk read three counts into the record.
- Growing by addition. Parks and Recreation added a page for summer camps. The Clerk’s Office added a page called “Documents and Resources,” and a few years later, a second page called “Forms and Documents.” Nothing has ever been removed. A notice about the 2019 leaf collection schedule is still three clicks deep, and it’s still marked “NEW!”
- Burying forms in PDFs. A permit application, a business license renewal, and a request for a backyard chicken coop all start the same way: download, print, fill out by hand, scan, and email to an address that may or may not still be monitored.
- Sending residents to another website to pay. The water bill and the parking ticket are paid on a vendor’s site, with a different logo, a different color scheme, a different login, and a convenience fee.
The search bar entered a plea on the defendant’s behalf. It returned a 2014 meeting agenda.
Opening statements
Prosecution: Your Honor, nobody visits this website for fun. People come to pay a water bill, renew a dog license, or find out when the leaves get picked up. The defendant turns every one of those into a scavenger hunt.
Defense: My client serves forty departments, and every one of them has a page. Isn’t that what a city website is for?
Judge Semantics: Every department has a page. The court would like to know whether the residents do.
The witnesses
A resident named Marisol testified first. She had been trying to renew her dog’s license since August.
Prosecution: Where did you start?
Marisol: The search bar. I typed “dog license.”
Prosecution: What did it find?
Marisol: A 2014 meeting agenda. Item seven was about a dog park, so I guess it was trying.
Prosecution: How did you find the right page in the end?
Marisol: I searched on Google. It found the page on the city’s website faster than the city’s website could.
The prosecution then called the chicken coop application, a PDF. It was a scan of a photocopy of a form that was typed on a typewriter. The court reporter, a screen reader, asked it to state its name for the record. The court reporter then read the entire answer aloud: “Image.”
Next, the payment portal took the stand, wearing a different logo from everyone else in the room.
Prosecution: Who do you work for?
Payment portal: The city. Technically, the vendor.
Prosecution: And the convenience fee. Who is that convenient for?
Payment portal: I’d prefer not to answer that.
Marisol, still in the gallery, added that paying her parking ticket had given her a new password to forget.
The defense called the city’s web team. The whole team came. It was one person named Gary, who also answers the main phone line.
Gary explained that each department owns its own pages, and nobody owns the whole website. The content management system was chosen through procurement in 2013, and its contract runs through 2027. Every change has to fit a budget that was approved last year.
On cross-examination, the prosecution asked who could delete the 2019 leaf collection notice. “Parks owns it,” Gary said. “Parks says it belongs to Public Works. Public Works says it belongs to me. I’m not allowed to delete anything.”
Mitigating circumstances
Judge Semantics noted for the record that the defendant is not a rare oddity. Counties, school districts, utilities, courts, and hospital billing departments all have their own versions. For many people, these are the websites that matter most, because they’re the only way to get something done.
“The defendant isn’t neglected because nobody cares,” the judge said. “It’s what happens when many people care about their own small piece of it, and nobody is responsible for the whole thing.”
Expert testimony
The court heard from GOV.UK, which showed that a government website can be organized around the tasks people need to finish, instead of the departments that handle them. The U.S. Web Design System testified that it gives agencies a shared set of accessible components, so each one doesn’t have to build its own.
The prosecution also noted that in 2024, the Department of Justice adopted a rule requiring state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, the same accessibility standard many private companies already follow. The chicken coop application shifted in its seat.
The verdict
The jury found the municipal website guilty on all three counts. The defendant asked to receive the verdict as a PDF. The request was denied.
Sentencing
Judge Semantics handed down the following sentences:
- Pages are named after the task, not the department. “Pay a parking ticket,” not “Revenue Services.”
- The most-used PDF forms become web forms, starting with whichever ones generate the most phone calls to Gary.
- The search bar finds the current page first. The 2014 agenda goes to the archive, where it can be found by anyone who’s looking for it on purpose.
- Someone owns the whole website, with the authority to delete things. Their first assignment is the 2019 leaf collection notice.
- The payment portal tells residents where they’re going and what the fee is before they leave the city’s website.
“None of this requires a full redesign,” the judge said. “Each fix saves a resident a phone call.”
Court is adjourned. On its way out, the defendant added a new page about the trial. The old page stayed exactly where it was.
This case is part of the UI Court series.