The ADA website deadline: what it covers and what it doesn't

If you run a park district, a library, a city or any other public body, there's a federal deadline that applies to your website. Most of the districts we talk to know the rule exists, but far fewer have read what it covers.

This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice, and on the exceptions in particular you should read the rule itself.

Who has to comply

The rule falls under Title II of the ADA, which covers state and local government: cities, counties, school districts, libraries and special district governments, the category park districts fall into. Being small doesn't exempt you. A district with three parks is covered just as a major city is. Size only changes your deadline.

Private businesses fall under Title III, and as of this writing there's no matching technical rule for them, though that doesn't make private websites safe from accessibility claims.

The standard and the dates

The rule adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA, a specific, testable set of requirements covering things like color contrast, using a site with only a keyboard, labels on form fields and captions.

As of September 2026, the compliance dates are April 26, 2027 for public entities serving 50,000 or more people, and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and for special district governments regardless of population. Those dates have already been extended once, so check them at ada.gov and have your attorney confirm which group you're in before you plan around them.

The 2027 date is only months away, and buying a website through an RFP, from award to launch, routinely takes most of a year.

It covers more than web pages

The rule applies to web content, which takes in a lot more than your pages. That's where budgets go wrong.

PDFs are the big one: the program guide, the board packets, the permit forms. For most districts this is the largest pile of work, and nobody has counted it. Online forms are covered, including ones a vendor hosts for you. So are outside tools you use to deliver services. If residents register for programs through a vendor's portal, that's part of how you serve them, and choosing a vendor doesn't hand the obligation over. Mobile apps are covered too, if you offer one.

The exceptions are narrower than they sound

Each exception has a catch the one-line summaries leave out. Two are worth reading closely.

Archived content is excepted, but "archived" has a specific meaning: kept only for reference or record-keeping, held in a designated archive area, and not changed since it was archived. A 2019 program guide that residents still use to find out about a recurring event doesn't qualify.

Preexisting documents, meaning files posted before the deadline, are excepted unless they're currently used to apply for or take part in your services. Those are exactly the documents people care about. A permit form posted in 2020 gets no protection from having been posted in 2020.

The exceptions are short and they're in the rule's own text at ada.gov. Which ones apply to your content is a call for your attorney, not your web vendor.

Be wary of one-line fixes

Some products, known as accessibility overlays, promise to make a website conform if you add one line of code. The consistent experience of the accessibility community is that they don't deliver conformance and often make a site harder to use with a screen reader. The FTC has already taken action against an overlay vendor for overstating what its product does. If a proposal's accessibility plan is just a widget, read the rest of it with the same suspicion.

What to do with the time you have

Start with an inventory of pages, forms, documents and outside tools. You can't plan work you haven't counted, and the PDF count usually surprises people.

Then test what you have. Automated scanning catches only a minority of WCAG failures, like poor contrast and missing labels. The rest takes a person with a keyboard and a screen reader, so ask any vendor how they test and expect both in the answer.

Fix the documents residents use, properly archive the ones they don't, and fix your templates so new ones come out accessible. Put the standard into your contracts with every vendor involved, including whoever builds your next website. We covered the wording in what to put in a website RFP.

And plan for after launch. A site that passes on launch day can fall short the first time someone uploads a scanned flyer as page one of the fall guide. That's why no vendor can hand you "a compliant website" as a finished product. What a vendor can do is build and test its own work to the standard, give you templates that keep new content accessible, and say plainly which parts stay yours. That's how we scope this for park districts, and our accessibility statement describes the same testing, done on this site.

If your deadline is April 2027 and the inventory hasn't started, start the conversation now, with us or with anyone else.