Amid rule delay, website accessibility must be ‘ongoing practice,’ leaders say
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By
Chris Teale
Governments received a one-year extension to comply with a federal rule for their websites. Regardless of its future, experts said accessibility must be the norm.
The Department of Justice said Monday it would give state and local governments another year to comply with a rule to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities.
A post in the Federal Register said states and localities with populations above 50,000 people now have until April 26, 2027 to comply with a rule from the Department of Justice that websites comply with various internationally recognized standards from the World Wide Web Consortium under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Those with populations under 50,000 also received a one-year extension and have until April 26, 2028 to comply.
The effort had been under regulatory review at the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an effort that an OMB spokesperson said in an email had concluded on April 6. Government groups said the extension was the right move.
“Communities have made great strides in recent years to make local government more transparent and accessible to all residents through digital services and online access to information, transactions and public meetings,” National League of Cities CEO Clarence Anthony said in a statement. “However, the cost and staff time necessary to ensure that online content is fully compliant with the rule’s accessibility standards is significant, particularly for smaller communities.”
In the meantime, state and local experts said they hope that this multi-year push for accessibility, which began under former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024, will spark a longer-term interest in making websites easier for people with disabilities to navigate, especially as agencies rely more on online services and modernize their operations.
“I really hope this is not a one and done mentality,” Marie Cohan, statewide digital accessibility officer at the Texas Department of Information Resources, said during the Accessibility Jam event hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University last week. “It really needs to be baked into all technology, right up there with security and privacy. These are human rights and technology.”
Agencies would be required to comply with rigorous standards under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, known as WCAG. Those standards include that websites be easily navigable; be available in portrait and landscape orientation; provide services like text captions for audio and video; add alternative text for images; and allow users to resize text. Websites must be completely usable with just a keyboard and not be designed to provoke seizures or physical reactions.
Previously, the Department of Justice estimated that the price tag for compliance would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide as governments would need to bring existing pages up to compliance and ensure new pages fit the standards. And the cost of compliance was one of the issues brought up by government associations, including NLC and the National Association of Counties, during the recent lobbying blitz ahead of the previous deadline.
Speakers said they recognized that it could feel like a lot of work and expense to get into compliance, but getting there is worth the effort and will stand governments in good stead.
“We have to shift away from treating accessibility as a one-time project to making it ongoing practice for our future users, and really focus on universal access and better user experience,” said Hailey Leek, innovation team lead for Salt Lake City.
“The biggest misconception is that accessibility is a one-time technical fix, and it's not,” said Kristopher Adams, chief accessibility officer at the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Office of Digital Experience. “It's an operational discipline. If you don't change how you design, procure, develop and publish, the problem will simply repeat itself over and over again.”
Getting government agencies to include accessibility by default will be tricky, observers said, and will need a lot of work. Central IT and accessibility offices cannot be the only ones to lead the way, Adams said, as that work is too difficult for them to scale out. Those bodies can set standards, but individual agencies and departments need to take the work seriously too, he added.
“Accessibility must be distributed into the existing roles that are out there: our product owners, our developers, our content authors, our procurement folks,” Adams said. “Without that, distribution becomes a bottleneck, and it's just not sustainable.”
Recent legislation shows how important accessibility will continue to be, such as a recent law passed in Utah, which requires governments to provide an electronic option to submit a form, record or information, as opposed to just being in person. State Rep. Jordan Teuscher, who sponsored the bill, said in a handout that it “modernizes government processes and aligns state practices with the way people conduct business today.”
Leek said laws like this make it even more important to get accessibility right the first time, not just for the disabled community but for residents at-large.
“No one wants to fill out a confusing, disorganized form,” she said.