The notice went up on a Tuesday. Water in three neighbourhoods needed boiling, and the whole advisory sat on the utility's website as a scanned image of a signed letter. To a resident using a screen reader, the page announced a graphic and then stopped. The information had been published. It had not been made available.
That gap is why the United States now has a specific rule about government websites rather than a general principle, and why this year is confusing. The rule exists, the standard is settled, and the date by which anybody must meet it just shifted a year to the right.
What the 2024 rule actually requires
On 24 April 2024 the Department of Justice issued a final rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, covering web content and mobile apps run by state and local government. The department's own summary of the rule names the technical standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, roughly fifty testable success criteria.
The reach goes well past city hall. Title II covers state agencies, counties, towns, school districts, public universities, courts, police departments, libraries, transit systems and special purpose districts, along with Amtrak and commuter authorities.
What changed in 2024 was the specificity, not the duty. Title II already required public entities to communicate effectively with disabled people, and has since 1990. A general duty gets argued case by case. A named standard with a date turns the argument into a checklist, which is worth more to a resident than a principle.
One extra year, written in April
Then the calendar slipped. In April 2026 the department published an interim final rule pushing both compliance dates back by twelve months. Entities serving 50,000 residents or more, originally due on 24 April 2026, now have until 26 April 2027. Smaller entities and special district governments moved from 26 April 2027 to 26 April 2028.
Two details matter more than the dates themselves. The technical standard did not change, so WCAG 2.1 Level AA remains the target. And the underlying obligation never paused: extending a compliance date is not a suspension of the ADA, so a town unable to deliver a boil-water advisory in usable form is not sheltered by a 2027 deadline.
For a resident the practical effect is a longer wait and no change in what to ask for. Inside a small district the relief is genuine, because fifty criteria across two decades of accumulated pages is real work with a real budget line, which is the argument for fixing the pages people need this week first.
Ninety-six percent of the errors are six problems
The encouraging part of accessibility work is how repetitive the failures turn out to be. WebAIM, an accessibility centre at Utah State University, runs an automated scan each year across the home pages of the top one million websites. The February 2026 edition detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9 percent of those pages, up from 94.8 percent the year before, at an average of 56.1 detected errors per page.
Six categories accounted for 96 percent of everything the scan found.
| Failure | Share of home pages | What it costs the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Low contrast text | 83.9% | Unreadable in sunlight or with ageing eyes |
| Images with no alternative text | 53.1% | A screen reader announces nothing usable |
| Form inputs with no label | 51.0% | The field never says what it wants |
| Links with no discernible text | 46.3% | Destination unknown before clicking |
| Buttons with no discernible text | 30.6% | Controls that cannot be identified |
| No document language set | 13.5% | Text read aloud in the wrong accent or voice |
Notice what is absent from that list. None of it calls for a rebuild, a consultant or a new content system. A contrast failure is a colour value. A missing label is one attribute. This is unglamorous maintenance left undone, not a hard engineering problem.
Two caveats. That scan covers popular websites in general rather than government ones, so treat it as weather and not a measurement of your county. And automated tools catch only what a machine can see: a keyboard trap, or alternative text reading image1.jpg, needs a person.
The exceptions are where the record hides
The rule carries exceptions, and they fall almost exactly where public memory tends to live. Archived content that predates the rule, is kept only for reference and has not been altered since is excepted. So are conventional documents, meaning word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs, posted before the compliance date, unless they are currently used to apply for or take part in a service. Third-party postings, password-protected individual records, and a government's own earlier social media posts also sit outside the standard.
Those carve-outs are defensible. Retrofitting thirty years of scanned minutes would eat a budget that could make this year's application forms work. But look at what lands in the gap: old zoning decisions, historical budgets, the minutes explaining why a road runs where it does. It is a quieter cousin of a public record whose addresses stop resolving.
The other half of the sentence still holds. The general duty to communicate effectively survives every one of those exceptions, so an excepted document must still be provided in usable form when somebody asks. That request route is the part nobody advertises.
Five checks on a page you rely on
Pick one page that genuinely matters where you live: the bill payment form, the transit alerts, the permit application. Then run these.
- Put the mouse down. Reach every link, field and button using Tab and Enter alone. If focus disappears, or you cannot get out of a menu, the page excludes anyone who does not point and click.
- Zoom to 200 percent. Text should reflow and stay readable. Content that overlaps or slides off the side fails a criterion a great many ageing eyes depend on.
- Ask whether the notice is text or a picture of text. A scanned PDF of a signed letter carries nothing to a screen reader. Whether an announcement exists as ordinary web text is the single most consequential choice on most municipal sites.
- Click the label, not the box. On a properly built form, clicking the words beside a field moves the cursor into it. If nothing happens the label is not attached, and the page turns a form into a guessing game.
- Look for a named human. An accessibility page listing a person, an email address and a stated response time means somebody owns this. A vague statement with no contact means nobody does.
Anything you turn up is reportable now, deadline or not. Reporting one broken page, with a date and the browser you used, gets further than a general complaint about the website ever will.
What to ask before April 2027
If you take this to one meeting, put three questions to the clerk or the board rather than to the web team, because the answers are budget decisions rather than technical ones.
Ask which pages the entity has ranked first, and whether emergency notices, benefit applications and payment forms sit at the top of that ranking. Ask whether documents produced from today onward are being made accessible as they are created, since nothing published after the compliance date is excepted and a year of new PDFs is a year of fresh debt. Then ask who a resident contacts when a page fails them, and whether that route is published where a person in a hurry would find it.
The extension bought institutions time, not permission. A notice nobody can read was never a notice, and that was true long before any rule put a date on it.