ADA Title II and You

If you work for a Wisconsin city, county, school district, or any other public entity, there is a federal rule with your name on it and a date attached. Here is the short version of what it says, who it covers, and where the exceptions people count on fall apart.

I gave this as a talk a few times in 2024 and 2025. The deadlines have moved since then, so I rewrote it.

What the rule requires

In April 2024 the Department of Justice published a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act covering the web content and mobile apps of state and local governments. It set a technical standard, which the ADA had never done before for websites. That standard is WCAG 2.1, Level AA.

The rule is at 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H. Before it existed, an entity being sued over an inaccessible website argued about what “effective communication” meant. Now there is a specific, measurable target, which cuts both directions: it tells you exactly what to build, and it tells a plaintiff exactly what to measure.

The deadlines, and the part that trips people

The original dates were April 24, 2026 and April 26, 2027. On April 20, 2026 the DOJ published an interim final rule pushing both back a year.

Three details decide which one applies to you, and I have watched all three catch people.

• Your population comes from the 2020 decennial Census, not from current estimates. If your city was under 50,000 in 2020 and has grown past it since, you are still in the 2028 group. Sheboygan counted 49,929 in 2020, which puts it in the later group no matter what this year’s state estimates say.
• Special district governments are in the 2028 group no matter their population. The rule says so in two places. The earlier deadline applies to “a public entity, other than a special district government,” and the later one sweeps in “any public entity that is a special district government.” A large special district does not move up. Appendix D of the rule spells this out: all special districts get the later date “without reference to their population.”
• Independent school districts use a different Census product. Not the decennial count, but the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. A district serving 50,000 or more people by that measure is in the 2027 group. City and county school systems take the population of the city or county they belong to.

One Wisconsin wrinkle worth naming: our sixteen technical colleges are organized as districts, and it is not settled whether they count as state instrumentalities (2027) or special districts (2028). The law firm write-ups all assume the first without addressing the second, and I could not find a DOJ source that resolves it. If you work for one, plan against the earlier date. The later one only helps if you are certain you qualify for it.

The exceptions are narrower than people hope

There are five, and most of the optimism I hear about them does not survive reading them.

• Archived content has to clear four separate tests: created before your compliance date, kept only for reference or research or recordkeeping, unchanged since it was archived, and stored in a dedicated area clearly labeled as archived. That fourth one is where it falls apart. Old pages sitting in the live site are not archived, they are just old. And if someone fixes a typo in an archived PDF and republishes it, the exception is gone.
• Documents posted before your deadline get an exception, unless they are currently used for applying for, accessing, or participating in a service. A fillable permit application you posted in 2019 is still in scope, because people are still using it to apply for a permit.
• Third-party content is exempt only where the third party is not posting under a contract or license with you. A resident commenting on your forum is outside the rule. Your vendor’s payment portal, your agenda management platform, and your job application system are not. You contracted for those, so they are yours.
• Password-protected individualized documents have to be both individualized and secured. A water bill behind a login qualifies. A general form behind the same login does not.
• Social media posts made before your compliance date are exempt. Anything after is not.

The obligation nobody is talking about is 35 years old

Separate from all of the above, 28 CFR 35.107 has required this since 1991: any public entity with 50 or more employees must designate an ADA Coordinator, publish that person’s name, office address, and phone number, and adopt and publish grievance procedures.

Fifty employees, not fifty thousand residents. It is a completely different test from the deadline tiers, and it has been in force for thirty-five years.

I checked eight of Wisconsin’s largest cities and counties. Three publish no ADA Coordinator at all. Two publish no accessibility statement. One has a statement that names no technical standard, which means it commits to nothing. Every one of those is fixable in an afternoon, and none of it depends on what happens to the 2027 deadline.

What the delay bought you

Calendar time, and nothing else.

Title II carries a private right of action. Someone who cannot use your website can file in federal court directly, with no requirement to complain to the DOJ first and no right-to-sue letter to wait for. The DOJ said as much in its own explanation for the extension, describing private lawsuits as a risk it “cannot control through prosecutorial discretion.” That is the agency admitting that delaying its own enforcement does not delay anyone else’s.

The National Federation of the Blind is also suing to have the extension thrown out and the original 2026 date restored. If that succeeds, the deadline for larger entities is already in the past.

The DOJ was direct about why it moved the dates. It said it had overestimated what entities could manage with the staff and technology available.

Generative AI cannot reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale.

U.S. Department of Justice

Worth keeping that quote handy the next time someone suggests a plugin will handle this.

Where to start

Run an audit first, because you cannot plan or budget remediation without knowing the size of it. Automated tools will find real problems and will miss whole categories of others, so expect the scan to be the beginning rather than the answer.

Fix globally before you fix locally. If your footer text fails contrast on all 340 pages, that is one CSS change, not 340 findings. Sorting by what repeats will collapse your list faster than working through it page by page.

Then train the people who touch content. Alt text is written by whoever uploads the image, and no developer can do that on their behalf. A site that passes on launch day and has nobody trained goes back out of compliance within a month.

If you want to know where you stand before anyone runs a scan, start with three questions you can answer yourself this morning.

1. Is your ADA Coordinator’s name, office address, and phone number published where a member of the public could find them.
2. Are your grievance procedures published.
3. Does your accessibility statement name a specific technical standard, or does it say you are committed to accessibility without saying to what.

Those three have nothing to do with the 2027 deadline and everything to do with whether someone can reach you when something breaks. If you want the fuller picture after that, I run scans, and I am always up for a conversation about what the results mean. Let me know if that would help.