In April 2024, the Department of Justice finalized a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local government websites and mobile apps to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA — a standard covering roughly 50 specific success criteria for things like screen-reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, and color contrast. The rule took effect in June 2024, but gave public entities time to comply. If your agency's website hasn't been through an accessibility review yet, here's where things actually stand.
The deadlines, and the recent extension
The original compliance dates were April 24, 2026 for public entities serving a population of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2027 for smaller entities and special district governments. In April 2026, the DOJ issued an interim final rule pushing both dates back by one year — to April 26, 2027 for larger entities and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. The substance of the rule didn't change, only the timeline. For a lot of park districts, utility authorities, and smaller municipalities, that means the deadline is April 26, 2028 — which sounds comfortably far off, until you consider how much a real accessibility review usually turns up.
What actually falls under the rule
The rule isn't limited to your homepage. It covers anything a government entity provides digitally — the main website, online bill pay and permit portals, PDFs and downloadable forms, and mobile apps. Years of accumulated PDFs, embedded forms, and third-party widgets are usually where compliance gaps hide, and they take real time to find and fix. Agencies that treat the extension as a reason to wait often end up in the same time crunch they were trying to avoid — just a year later. Non-compliance carries real consequences too: DOJ enforcement action, civil complaints, and accessibility-related lawsuits are all on the table for entities that miss the deadline.
Where to start
A reasonable first step is a plain-language accessibility audit of your public-facing site and the documents linked from it, benchmarked against WCAG 2.1 AA — not just a homepage check, but a look at the payment portals, agendas, and forms residents actually use. From there, most agencies are looking at some combination of template and CMS fixes, document remediation, and an ongoing process for keeping new content accessible as it's published, since compliance isn't a one-time fix.
How Spectrum can help
This is exactly the kind of project we built LocaleOne to help with — Spectrum's municipal website solution, built with WCAG 2.1 AA in mind from the ground up, with an implementation designed for small teams without dedicated IT that has you live in days, so your public-facing site is in a stronger position well ahead of the 2027/2028 deadlines. If you'd like to talk through where your agency stands today, our team is happy to help you figure out next steps.