But new guidance from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) argues that view is far too narrow and if agencies struggle to define what accessibility actually means, compliance efforts might be flawed from the very beginning.
Max Heintz, supervising attorney for the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, examines the issue and offers legal guidance on meeting federal digital accessibility standards in NASCIO’s Digital Accessibility Compliance: Thoughts from a Public Sector Attorney report released Wednesday.
It arrives as state and local governments continue preparing to meet the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)’s Title II final rule on web and mobile accessibility. Compliance deadlines were extended last month, to April 2027 for governments serving populations of 50,000 or more; and to April 2028 for those serving populations up to 49,999, and special districts.
Now, many governments are shifting their focus beyond the compliance deadline itself to litigation exposure, documentation practices and vendor oversight associated with enforcement.
https://blog.usablenet.com/ada-web-lawsuit-trends-2026 / https://www.nascio.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NASCIO_Digital-Accessibility-Compliance-Interview_2026_a11y.pdf. Visualization created by Ashley Silver.
Heintz separates the cases into two broad categories: residents attempting to access digital services and employees seeking accessibility accommodations in the workplace. Both, he argues, ultimately point governments toward the same answer: building durable accessibility programs rather than reacting issue by issue.
“In both cases … they really get you to the same place. Public entities are best equipped to deal with either type of lawsuit by having a robust accessibility process,” he said in the report, indicating governments should understand that “accessibility isn’t a project; it’s a process.”
A major pressure point is vendor management. Responsibility does not end when governments outsource work as some would assume, the report finds, because the DOJ final rule covers content and services created or managed on behalf of states by third-party contractors. In layman’s terms, governments are required to make sure third-party content and services used are accessible, but vendors themselves are expected to remediate their own noncompliant offerings.
“There are challenges [in vendor relationship management],” Heintz said in the report. “[Entities] can’t control what a vendor does to the same degree they can control what their own workforce does when they build something in-house.”
New York’s approach, according to the report, relies on statewide accessibility policies that existed before the DOJ final rule and have been revised over time. What Heintz described there is a model where vendor-built public content must align with WCAG 2.0, the DOJ standard, and those requirements are operationalized through uniform contract language.
“A vendor is building something on behalf of New York to serve the public, right? So, it has to accomplish the goals of preventing and eliminating barriers to access for citizens with disabilities,” he said. “We refine and operationalize that in our contracts, ensuring those vendor contracts are uniform.”
The legal path ahead of the deadline remains uncertain in other ways. Many agencies understand when enforcement begins and what kinds of complaints may trigger investigations, but Heintz said remediation timelines are still largely undefined — and judges have broad discretion. They may look to earlier consent decrees involving accessibility disputes for direction, even when those agreements are not formal precedent.
Governments may encounter accessibility disputes through state and federal courts rather than exclusively through DOJ investigations, the report points out, and measuring noncompliance could become equally complicated. Beyond standard audits, Heintz described a landscape filled with testing approaches and uncertain benchmarks, noting, “There’s a plethora of testing tools,” and indicated many cases may move through litigation channels instead of direct federal review.
He also spends time unpacking what DOJ language around “good faith compliance” may mean for governments still working through accessibility efforts. Simply reacting when complaints arrive, he argued, does not meet that threshold.
“If you don’t have [a strong accessibility program and processes], that is not good faith compliance,” Heintz said, cautioning agencies against “playing Whac-a-Mole with fixing problems as people report them.” Instead, he pointed toward established processes, active remediation efforts and broader issue reviews when problems surface.
Documentation can be key, Heintz said in a closing recommendation, alongside early legal involvement when complaints, audits or findings appear. Governments should build accessibility and litigation education into regular training, he said, get the organization familiar with lawsuit processes ahead of challenges, and work directly with testers from affected populations to improve in-house validation.
