Digital Accessibility

On April 24, 2024, the Department of Justice published a final rule updating Title II (State and Local Governments) of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which included requirements to ensure the accessibility of web content and apps. 

View the full Department of Justice Fact Sheet about this ruling.

The ruling specifies the Web Content and Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, level AA as the technical standard for all web assets provided by state and local governments. This standard applies regardless of whether the state or local government was the entity to create the web content or app. For example, a parking payment app provided by a municipality is required to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA even if it is developed by a third party.

The ruling also specifies the definition of web content as "the information and experiences available on the web, like text, images, sound, videos, and documents."

All publicly funded entities fall under this ruling, including library consortia, public libraries, school libraries, and publicly-funded academic libraries.

The ruling provides the following compliance dates:

• Entities with 0-49,999 persons: April 26, 2027
• Special district governments: April 26, 2027
• 50,000 or more persons: April 24, 2026

Libraries can determine their compliance date by using the population of the local government of which they are a part of. For example, a school library in a city school district would use the population of the city in which it resides. Library consortia could arguably fall under the special district government designation but would likely be safer counting the population of their service area.

The ruling does provide exceptions for a small subset of content, and each exception has specific qualifications that must be met. If the exception has qualifications, all listed qualifications must be met.

Archived web content

Web content must meet all four qualifications to be considered archival:

1. The content was created before the compliance date or reproduces physical media created before the compliance date.
2. The content is only kept for reference, research, or recordkeeping.
3. The content is kept in a special area for archived content.
4. The content has not been changed since it was archived.

Preexisting conventional electronic documents

Old documents must meet two qualifications to be exempt from the ruling:

1. The documents are word processing, presentation, PDF, or spreadsheet files.
2. The files were available before the compliance date.

Documents used as applications or forms do not fall under this exception even if they were posted before the compliance date.

Content posted by a third party

Specifically, this is content where the third party is not posting due to contractual, licensing, or other arrangements with a public entity. For this exception, third parties are "members of the public or others who are not controlled by or acting for state or local governments."

For example, a site designed by a vendor is required to be accessible; a comment made by the public on a library's social media account is not required to be accessible.

Individualized documents that are password-protected

This exception is due to the difficulty of how these documents are usually generated, and these documents must meet three qualifications:

1. The documents are word processing, presentation, PDF, or spreadsheet files.
2. The documents are about a specific person, property, or account.
3. The documents are password-protected or otherwise secured.