ADA Title II Web Accessibility Requirements for Public Entities

What does ADA Title II mean for your website?

Title II has been on the books since 1990, and it has always covered everything a public entity does. The courts and DOJ treated websites as part of your services for years, but the law never said exactly what an accessible website looked like. That ambiguity ended in 2024.

Today the obligation is concrete. A resident who is blind must be able to pay a water bill on your site with a screen reader. A parent with low vision must be able to read the school lunch menu. A veteran with a motor disability must be able to renew a license using only a keyboard. When your website is the front door to government services, an inaccessible website is a locked door, and Title II says the door has to open for everyone.

The rule lives in 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H, and the core mandate is section 35.200. Two facts about it surprise most administrators. First, it applies regardless of federal funding. Title II is not a strings-attached grant condition like Section 504; it covers every state and local government entity, full stop. Second, it covers content you provide through vendors and contractors. If a third party runs your payment portal, your agenda software, or your mass notification system, that content is still yours under the rule. You cannot outsource your way out of compliance.

Who does Title II apply to?

Every state and local government entity: states, cities, towns, counties, school districts, public colleges, courts, police and sheriff departments, transit agencies, public libraries, and the thousands of special purpose districts that handle water, fire, parks, and utilities. If your paycheck or your board's authority traces back to state or local government, assume you are covered. Our Who It Applies To hub breaks down what the rule means for each type of entity:

• School districts and K-12 schools, where course content, parent portals, and enrollment forms are all in scope
• Community colleges and public universities, including learning management systems and online courses
• Cities, towns, and counties, from the main municipal site to online permits and utility billing
• Public libraries, including catalogs, databases, and event registration
• Police departments and courts, including records requests, e-filing, and jury management
• Public health departments, including clinic scheduling and health alerts
• Parks and recreation departments, including program registration and facility reservations
• Election offices, including voter registration, sample ballots, and results

One distinction matters for deadlines: special district governments, meaning independent special purpose units like water districts, library districts, and transit authorities, all get the April 26, 2028 date regardless of how many people they serve.

What changed in the 2024 DOJ rule?

On April 24, 2024, the Department of Justice published the final rule "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities" (89 FR 31320). It added Subpart H to the Title II regulations, and it did something DOJ had never done in three decades of ADA regulation: it named a specific technical standard.

Before the rule, "accessible" was argued case by case, complaint by complaint. After the rule, there is a measurable definition. Section 35.200 requires that web content and mobile apps a public entity provides or makes available conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That includes:

• Your public websites and any microsites, subdomains, and department pages
• Mobile apps, from parking payment to school communication apps
• Documents posted online: PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, and slide decks are web content too
• Password-protected content such as student portals, utility accounts, and employee systems
• Content provided through contractors, vendors, and licensing arrangements

The rule also includes five narrow exceptions, found in section 35.201: archived web content, preexisting conventional electronic documents, certain content posted by third parties, individualized password-protected documents, and preexisting social media posts. Each one has strict conditions, and the exceptions are narrower than most people hope. A pre-2027 PDF is not excepted if residents currently need it to apply for or access a service. For the full story on the rule itself, see our web accessibility rule explainer.

What is WCAG 2.1 AA, in plain terms?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for digital accessibility, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. Version 2.1, Level AA is the specific edition and level written into the regulation. It contains 50 testable success criteria organized around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

In practice, that means things like: images have text alternatives so screen readers can describe them. Videos have captions. Text has enough contrast against its background to be readable. Everything works with a keyboard alone, because not everyone uses a mouse. Forms have labels, errors are explained in words, and pages are built so assistive technology can interpret them reliably.

None of it is exotic. Most WCAG failures on government sites are ordinary, fixable defects: missing alt text, vague link text like "click here," low-contrast gray text, PDFs scanned as images, and forms a keyboard cannot complete. Our guide to WCAG 2.1 AA walks through the criteria in plain language, and the Title II checklist turns them into a working punch list for your team.

What should a public agency do first?

The entities that hit these deadlines comfortably all follow roughly the same sequence. You do not need to fix everything at once. You need to start in the right order:

• Name an owner. Somebody, often the ADA coordinator, owns web accessibility, with authority to involve IT, communications, and procurement
• Inventory your digital footprint. Websites, subdomains, mobile apps, vendor portals, and the documents on all of them. Most entities are surprised by how much they find
• Get a baseline assessment. Test your highest-traffic pages and most critical services against WCAG 2.1 AA so you know the size of the gap before you budget for it
• Fix the front door first. Prioritize the services residents depend on: payments, applications, registration, emergency information
• Write accessibility into contracts. Every new website, app, or software purchase should require WCAG 2.1 AA conformance and proof of it
• Train the people who publish. Most new accessibility problems come from content added after the audit, not from the original code

We walk through each of these in detail in First Steps, and the checklist gives you a printable version to bring to your next leadership meeting.

What are the most common mistakes?

• Waiting for the deadline. The extension to 2027 and 2028 is time to do the work, not time to delay it. Remediation of a large site routinely takes 12 to 18 months, and effective communication obligations under Title II apply right now
• Buying an overlay widget. Overlay toolbars do not change your underlying code and do not make content conform to WCAG 2.1 AA. Entities that rely on them still fail testing and still get complaints
• Assuming the vendor handled it. "Our CMS is accessible" is a claim, not a test result. The legal obligation stays with you, so verify vendor claims against real WCAG testing
• Forgetting the documents. The website gets remediated and the 4,000 PDFs behind it do not. Documents people currently use to access services must conform, and they are usually the largest part of the job
• Treating it as a one-time project. A site that passes in 2027 will drift out of conformance by 2028 without publishing standards, training, and periodic re-testing
• Misreading the exceptions. Archived content must actually meet the four-part definition in section 35.201, including being kept only for reference or recordkeeping. Moving live content into an "archive" folder does not except it

Keep going: the rest of the guide

• Deadlines: the 2027 and 2028 dates and which one applies to you
• WCAG 2.1 AA explained: the standard, criterion by criterion, in plain language
• First Steps: the six moves to make in your first 90 days
• The Title II checklist: a printable punch list for your team
• Subpart H: the full regulatory text with plain-language explanations
• Section 35.200: the core requirement, straight from the regulation