Website accessibility requirements are essential for ensuring that websites are usable and inclusive for everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in legal consequences, including lawsuits and financial penalties.
- The Department of Justice has released new rules for ADA Title II, which affects state and local government websites and organizations that receive funding from them.
- The rules require websites to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards by either April 2026 or April 2027, depending on the population served.
- A gap assessment should be conducted to determine the current state of the website and what changes need to be made to meet the new standards.
- The assessment should include a platform, theme/template, website add-ons, and content assessment.
- Training and mentorship should be provided for content creators to ensure accessible content is added going forward.
- A spot check plan should be implemented to regularly check content and update procedures as needed.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Easy A11y Guide. I’m Gen Herres, and in this video, I’ll be talking about the recent Department of Justice rules on ADA Title II, which applies to state and local governments, as well as many organizations that are funded by state and local governments.
Who is affected?
Who is affected by this? Websites that belong to state and local government. Some examples of these are public libraries, schools such as K-12, as well as universities and community colleges, police departments and fire departments, parks, transportation services, and many more. Organizations that are for-profit and not-for-profit that run programs on behalf of state and local governments or that receive funding from state or local governments are also are also affected by this, which means it is quite wide-reaching in its effects, such as drug rehabilitation programs, shelters, food pantries, hospitals and clinics, as well as many other organizations.
What if you aren’t sure whether your organization is or is not affected? What you want to do is follow the money. Ask the question, does the organization receive any funding that traces to state and/or local government? Check all of the revenue sources that the organization has. If you do have funds that trace to state and local government, be sure to contact your funding source.
The new requirements
This new set of rules from the Department of Justice, applying to ADA Title II, requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA. WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These are maintained by W3C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. They maintain the standards for HTML, CSS, and several other web standards. The version that you need to meet is version 2.1, Level AA.
There are three levels to WCAG standards. The first is A, and this is considered very basic criteria. The second is AA, and this is the standard that is applied in nearly every lawsuit regarding accessibility. The third is AAA. This is very extensive accessibility and is not reasonable for most organizations to be able to meet. The standard that we are looking at is WCAG 2.1, Level AA.
How long you have to conform
If your organization is affected, then you have until either April 2026 or April 2027 to get everything in line. If you’re a special government district, that’s 2027. Otherwise, you need to look at the population of the geographic area that the organization serves. For example, if you’re talking about a school district, you would look at the population of the geographic area that the school district serves.
So the Baltimore City School district serves all of Baltimore City. That is significantly more than the 50,000 person cutoff. So Baltimore City Schools have two years or until April 2026 to have their website conform. If the population is less than 50,000, then the organization has three years or until April 2027 to conform.
Perform a gap assessment
Now that we know how long the organization has to conform, we want to do a gap assessment. The purpose of this is to determine where the website is currently at and where it needs to be to meet the new set of standards. This is not a comprehensive, detailed audit. We don’t need to get into all the fine details right now. We want to get an overview and determine if what we have can be updated to meet these standards or if we need to revise what we have.
We’ll take a look at the platform that the website is on, the template or theme that the site is using, the website add-ons or plugins that have been added to the website for more functionality, and of course, the content of the site. For the platform assessment, we’ll want to take a look at the Content Management System or CMS that the website is built with. The question we need to ask, can this existing CMS meet the new standards of WCAG 2.1 Level AA or not. If it cannot, then you’ll need to get a new content management system for your website.
At this point, you will also be getting a new theme or template for your site, so you wouldn’t actually need to do a theme or template assessment since we’ll be throwing out the platform along with the template used on that platform. If the platform can be used, then you want to take a look at the theme or template that you’re using. The exact wording or naming of this varies based on the platform.
This is basically a framework that allows you to display your content on the front end of your website. The question you want to ask, can this theme or template meet the new standards of WCAG 2.1 Level AA? If it can, what needs to be done to adjust it? And if it can’t, then you’ll need to look into a replacement that can meet these standards.
The next part of the assessment is website add-ons. These are sometimes called plugins, and they add additional functionality to your website. Some of these affect the front end or what is displayed to website visitors, and some do not. You’ll need to assess the ones that do. You’ll want to assess if the existing website add-ons or plugins can be used as is, if they need changes to their settings, or if they can’t be used and you need to replace them.
Finally, we’ll take a look at content. Many of the issues with content have been caused by people inputting content who just don’t know any better. They don’t know about the guidelines, they don’t know about accessibility principles, and so they just put whatever they want in hoping it looks good. With this new set of rules that you need to conform with, you will want to make sure that you have specific procedures for adding and checking content going forward.
Implement a spot check plan
You’ll want to implement a spot check plan to regularly check the content to see if your new plan and procedure for adding content is going well or poorly. You’ll then want to update your procedures and add training for your people as needed. Once you have a good system in place for adding content, that’s when you’ll want to move on to remediate older content. Finally, you’ll want to make sure that you have training and mentorship available for any new people who are added to the team updating content on the website, as they will all need to be properly trained to add content in an accessible manner.
What your organization needs to do. In 2024, you’ll want to get a process for entering content put into place. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but you do need to have a process and checks in place starting as soon as possible to start getting your organization on the right track. You’ll also want to do a gap assessment to determine the difference between where you are currently at and where you need to be and the general progress you’ll need to make along the way.
In 2025, you’ll want to check on your content process and revise it as needed so that you can confidently enter accessible content on your website. You’ll also want to start implementing the accessibility updates. Since you did the gap assessment in 2024, you’ll be able to have some budget set up for 2025 and 2026 to actually do the remediation.
In 2026 and beyond, you’ll want to monitor the accessibility of the website, and you’ll want to remediate it as needed. You will need to have in place a plan to do monitoring of the website and find out if suddenly issues are appearing and what the causes of those issues are. Most organizations will not have a trained and experienced accessibility professional on staff. That’s okay.
Bring in an accessibility specialist
What you’ll want to do is bring in a specialist to assist you with the gap assessment and creating a plan going forward. A specialist can also help you with writing new procedures, specifically tailored to your organization and the type of content that you produce. If you’re going to be working with a web agency and having them build websites for you or do content updates for you, you’ll want to ask questions about their training and expertise. You want to ask them for examples of WCAG 2.1 level AA compliant websites that they’ve built.
Once they provide you with some examples of what they’ve done, don’t take their word for it. Bring in an accessibility specialist to do a brief audit of those example websites and make sure they are, in fact, accessible and the agency isn’t just blowing smoke. Ask to speak with the agency’s accessibility specialist. You want to be able to speak directly to this person, and you also want to find out how much access you will have to this person going forward, and of course, find out how long this person has been with the agency and whether they are going to be around for the long term or not.
You want to ask about this person’s experience and training, and you also want to ask how they contribute to the accessibility community and what ongoing learning they participate in. You want someone who has continuing education as a part of their lifestyle. They should be contributing to the accessibility community and regularly talking with people who have real disabilities.
You also want to ask any web agency about what points in the project, accessibility will be checked. The correct answer is, during each phase, it will be assessed and checked. The reason for this is that problems that are found early in the process can be 100 times less expensive to fix. That is a massive amount of rework that you can avoid if you find the problems early. I have a separate video of how much does accessibility cost, and I’ll have that linked in the notes below.
You’ll want to have a plan in place to check on work done by any agency on your behalf. A recent lawsuit happened in California. The Parks Department hired an agency to build an accessible website. That was part of the contract. Unfortunately, the Parks Department did not, at any point, actually check the accessibility of the website. They just trusted the agency to deliver. The resulting website was definitely not accessible.
There was a lawsuit for millions of dollars because of that inaccessible website. You want to make sure that you are regularly checking on the agency and not just trusting their word. Of course, if an agency says, “Oh, we’ll just use an overlay,” it’s time to move on to the next agency. I have a video on accessibility overlays and why you shouldn’t use them linked in the notes below.
Recap
To wrap everything up, there are new rules from the Department of Justice applying to ADA Title II. This means state and local governments and organizations that receive funding or reimbursement from state and local governments. This means that WCAG 2.1 Level AA will apply to these websites starting in April 2026 or April 2027, depending upon the population that the organization or government serves.
To get started, you’ll want to do a gap assessment and get started correcting process for entering content. If you don’t have an in-house experienced accessibility professional, then you’ll want to work with a specialist. If you do hire a web agency to do work on your organization’s behalf, you want to check up on this agency and make sure they can actually deliver accessibility and not just promise it.
Thanks for watching. I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide, where we try to make accessibility easier to implement through done-for-you services, tools, and processes. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. It really helps our channel.
You can subscribe to our channel for more accessibility tips and to be notified when new videos are released. For more information on web accessibility, including services, tutorials, and more, please visit easya11yguide.com. Thank you so much again for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.