The ADA Title II deadline. April 26, 2027. April 26, 2028.

In April 2024 the Justice Department published a final rule under Title II of the ADA setting a technical standard for the web content and mobile applications of state and local government entities. That standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. It is not a recommendation, a target or a best practice — it is the conformance level the rule names.

On April 20, 2026 the Department published an interim final rule extending both compliance dates by one year. The substantive requirements did not change; only the dates did. The Department cited resource and staffing constraints, slower-than-expected remediation technology — including the limits of generative AI for this work — and litigation risk.

The practical consequence is that a large amount of published guidance, vendor marketing and internal planning documentation is now wrong by twelve months in both directions. Some agencies believe a deadline has already passed. Others have quietly relaxed. Both are working from the same stale dates. If you are a California agency, we have written this up for cities and counties and for special districts and JPAs, including what a district should budget.

Almost none of the real gap is in the visual design. It is in the documents. Agendas, minutes, board packets, budgets, notices and staff reports are published as PDFs, frequently scanned, frequently with no text layer at all — unreadable to a screen reader and unsearchable to everybody. On most public sites this is the single largest body of non-conforming content, and it is the part a redesign does not touch.

The second cluster is the systems you did not build. Agenda management, permitting, utility payment, job application and reservation platforms are embedded into the site and inherit none of its accessibility work. They are your obligation because you make them available to the public, but the fix is a vendor conversation rather than a code change, and those conversations take months. Starting them late is the most common reason an otherwise well-run remediation misses. It is also why a joint powers authority, whose budget has to come from member agencies, needs to begin earlier than its members do.

Third is video. Automatic captions are not captions for compliance purposes. Meeting recordings, public-service announcements and training material need corrected captions, and live-streamed meetings raise their own questions worth resolving early rather than at the deadline.

Fourth, and least discussed: everything published after remediation. A site brought to conformance in 2027 is non-conforming again within a month if the people posting agendas were never given accessible templates and thirty minutes of training. Remediation without a publishing process is a one-time expense that buys a temporary result.