The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a final rule in April 2024 creating accountability for state and local governments that are not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It requires all digital content to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1 Level AA standards.
The deadline for jurisdictions with more than 50,000 residents was originally April 24, and those with smaller populations had an extra year. But days before the deadline, the DOJ issued an extension, with a new deadline of April 26, 2027 — or 2028, depending on population.
The extension reflects what governments have been communicating consistently, according to National Association of Counties (NACo) CIO and Managing Director John Matelski, which is that the original timelines underestimated the capacity constraints of local governments.
NACo surveyed its Tech Xchange community, which connects county leaders, and responses revealed that not a single one out of more than 100 counties that answered felt they were even at 75 percent compliance.
However, he emphasized, the extension should be treated not as a delay, but as an implementation runway; it does not enable governments to push off the work for another year.
“And the extension does not pause the obligations,” Matelski said, noting that litigation can still happen and at least one county has already faced multiple lawsuits. “Title II still requires equal access to services, even today, regardless of the deadline … there is zero reduction in my mind in terms of liability exposure at this time.”
THE WORK CONTINUES
Although there is an extension, local governments like the city of Tucson, Ariz., are “keeping momentum” for accessibility, Nadia Menchaca, a Tucson IT manager, said.
The city has a governance risk and compliance team acting as project managers and providing guidance for other teams that support digital services, Menchaca said. It’s a multifaceted process, one piece of which is the city’s work to modernize public-facing forms with support from Laserfiche — an area in which she said the city has reached compliance.
Achieving ADA compliance has been a “big overhaul,” she said, and it started with understanding what needed to be done to meet WCAG standards, identifying issues and exploring resources available to remediate them, and making corrections.
“We always want to make sure that we’re innovative, but we also want to make sure that we’re inclusive,” Menchaca said of the city’s efforts to modernize digital services.
Over the course of the next year, Tucson city officials are moving forward as if the deadline were April 2026 as originally planned, focusing on areas in which accessibility issues remain and ensuring fixes that have been made are sustainable, while standardizing best practices.
She emphasized the value of putting trust in city teams to know their systems and what they need to do to reach compliance — and maintaining strong documentation in the process.
The deadline extension “recognizes the tremendous amount of work that needs to go into the process for governments,” Andy MacIsaac, Laserfiche senior strategic solutions manager, said; the challenge they are grappling with is scale. Part of the reason is that content is in varied forms and different locations, but governance can help.
One of the key challenges with meeting this deadline, Matelski said, is the cost of remediation. Estimated compliance costs are exceeding $1 billion nationwide, and many governments had not funded for that, so it created “great fiscal pressures.” Governments were not made aware of the extension until several days before the deadline, further compounding funding challenges as many governments had already completed their budgeting cycles.
Addressing accessibility comes with inherent complexities due to the fragmented nature of governments’ digital ecosystems, said Matelski. This involves coordination across departmental teams and with vendors. Procurement reform is “central to ADA compliance,” he said.
Companies are playing a role in government work to comply with the ADA. Recent government technology acquisitions — like those of CoUrbanize by Gravity and Streamline by CivicPlus — have been touted for their ability to support government work to meet the now-extended deadline. Other companies support compliance efforts directly with their tools.
For example, MediaScribe offers AI-powered captions and translations for video content. As governments work to meet the WCAG standard, MediaScribe Chief Operating Officer Dana Healey said that for many, the video piece is not even “on their radar,” although the ADA rule does apply to video content — from city council meeting recordings to social media videos.
Government officials should not let the extension give them “a false sense of relief,” Healey said; they should assess their video content and create a plan to make it accessible.
There is “not a single silver bullet” for governments to solve challenges related to funding constraints, Matelski said. However, there are practical and scalable pathways governments can pursue.
“You need to start out with the right policies, the right prioritization, and the right partnerships,” Matelski said. He urged governments to start with high-impact systems like online payment services, benefits administration services, elections and voter information, and public safety.
Ultimately, the path forward requires “progress over perfection” to mitigate legal ramifications, Matelski said. But he expects that those government entities that can demonstrate the progress they have made towards compliance and the plans to continue that work will help the DOJ look “more favorably” upon them than on those that are making little or no progress.
After the deadline, the cost shifts from large and expensive remediation efforts to accessibility maintenance, training and monitoring, he said.
The next year is a “critical transition period,” after which governments can expect increased enforcement activity through investigations, compliance reviews and lawsuits. Governments, he said, are not immune from those risks today, but their likelihood is expected to increase post-deadline.
“The extension is not a pause; it’s a grace period, quite frankly, before accountability tightens,” Matelski said.
