Accessibility funding inconsistent despite growing importance, report finds

DENVER — The clock is ticking for governments to comply with a federal rule to improve the accessibility of their websites, and state tech leaders warned in a recent survey that, while they are forging ahead to comply, those efforts need more money.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers found in its 2025 State CIO Survey that 70% of CIOs have incorporated IT accessibility efforts into their organization’s directives, while 42% have said it is incorporated into their state’s regulations. Just over half of states — 52% — said that implementation is in progress, while 34% said they have a plan under development but are yet to implement it.

Governments with more than 50,000 people have until April 24, 2026, to comply with a final rule from the Department of Justice that mandated, under the Americans With Disabilities Act, that various standards and technical requirements for state and local websites  intended to break down barriers that prevent people with disabilities from accessing those sites and mobile apps. Smaller governments have an extra year to comply.

“It’s a welcome focus on something that we probably should have been paying attention to more, especially as it relates to eventually the consumption of these services by citizens, and what that really means,” said Mississippi CIO Craig Orgeron during a panel discussion at NASCIO’s annual conference last week in Denver.

NASCIO found that many states are going beyond ADA compliance when they approach digital accessibility to exceed those requirements, including by codifying and enforcing state statutes, conducting formal annual reviews and establishing statewide design frameworks that prioritize accessibility on the same level as cybersecurity and privacy.

But those efforts, like many, are stymied by a lack of funding that prevents them from being fully realized. Fifty-four percent of states said their CIO organization does not have funding to support IT accessibility services, meaning states instead fund it by using general fund revenues, agency self-funding and one-time appropriations. DOJ has previously said compliance costs could total in the millions of dollars.

Convincing legislators to put money aside to comply with the DOJ rule has been challenging for many states, however, especially in these current times with budget constraints and the end of many federal funding streams.

“I think there's still some people that live in the world that seems like 2026, that's so far from now, we could all be dead by then, why are we even trying? Is that really going to be the rule?” said North Dakota CIO Corey Mock during the panel discussion. “I think there were a lot of folks, a lot of agency leaders, people working on the budget that said, ‘Well, we'll keep an eye on it, and we'll do as best as we can. Then if we need to, we can address it later.’”

States have various compliance goals for their web content under this rule, including making pages easily navigable, understandable and readable; having pages available in landscape and portrait orientation; providing services like text captions for audio and video; adding alternative text for images; and allowing users to resize text. Websites must be completely usable with just a keyboard, and not be designed to provoke seizures or physical reactions.

To help with those efforts, NASCIO recommended in 2023 that CIO offices hire a digital accessibility coordinator, something that more than half have done, while 34% have not. NASCIO said one state tech office was denied funding on three separate occasions to hire a coordinator. 

Governments need to realize that while this compliance effort is led by their technologists, it is far more than a tech problem, speakers said.

“A lot of our agencies are looking at this as an IT problem, because they see technology as that gate, that first experience with citizens and agencies,” Mock said. “It's not. It's a content problem. We're the tools and the facilitators of it, but it's the content. For us, one of the challenges is getting other agencies to recognize they own this challenge as much as we do. We want to make sure that the foundation of the tools are accessible, but we're having to adjust our content just as much as every other agency.”

NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson said some states have been “kicking the can down the road” on compliance with this rule, but warned of the potential consequences if they do not take it seriously. Those consequences include lawsuits under the ADA and reputational damage, with the former already on the rise, according to recent NASCIO research.

But whether the new rule will be fully enforced by the Department of Justice remains to be seen, as the initiative was introduced by former Attorney General Merrick Garland during the last administration. Robinson said what happens next is unclear.

“At this point, quite frankly, I don't think any of us have any idea what the Department of Justice is going to do, whether there actually are any compliance requirements that will be articulated beyond that [April deadline], but are they going to monitor that? Nobody knows right now what's going to happen,” he said.