Image generated with AI. Art direction: Grafica.
If you build or maintain websites for a city, a county, a school district or a public university in the United States, the ADA Title II deadline you were working to has changed.
On 20 April 2026 the Justice Department published an interim final rule that moves the compliance dates in its 2024 rule on the web content and mobile apps of state and local governments. It took effect the day it was published.
The new dates
- Public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more: from 24 April 2026 to 26 April 2027.
- Public entities with a population under 50,000, and special district governments: from 26 April 2027 to 26 April 2028.
The rule invited public comments until 22 June 2026. We read the dates above in the rule itself on 12 October 2026. It is an interim rule, so check the Federal Register for any later change before you plan around it.
What did not change
The standard. The rule still points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, level AA. The year buys time to meet that standard, not a different one.
Who it reaches is set by the 2024 rule. The Justice Department’s fact sheet on the 2024 rule (read 12 October 2026) says it covers content a contractor or other third party provides on a government’s behalf, and documents such as PDFs, with exceptions for older files and archived pages. If your firm builds or hosts that content, your client’s date applies to what you deliver.
A clean scan is where the review starts
On 12 October 2026 we ran a free scanner, axe-core 4.10, on the home page of grafica.group and on our mortgage calculator, against the WCAG 2.1 AA rules it tests. It found no failures on either. It also left 8 colour checks on the home page and 43 on the calculator that it could not decide, for a person to look at. A scanner reports what software can settle. The rest needs a person on the page itself.
What to do with the year
- List every public site and app you build or maintain, with the population band of the body that owns it, so each one has its date.
- Run a free scanner on each page type and keep the report with its date. It is a start, not a pass.
- Check by hand what a scanner cannot settle: where the Tab key goes, whether the focus can be seen, whether text over a picture can be read, whether each link says where it goes.
- Read the 2024 rule’s exceptions for documents and archived pages before you decide what to fix first.
- Write down what you checked, when, and on which page.
We do not give legal advice, and no check makes a site safe from a complaint. What we do is design and build work aimed at WCAG 2.1 AA, and the review by hand that a scanner leaves out. If a public site of yours has a date on it, talk to us.
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