If you sit on a state board, a commission, or a small public agency in Alabama, you’ve probably heard that your website has to meet a federal accessibility standard. You may have also heard the deadline moved. Both are true, and the second one is causing a lot of boards to file this under “next year’s problem.”
Here’s why that’s a mistake, and why the real question isn’t when but how.
The deadline moved. The obligation didn’t.
In April 2024, the Department of Justice finalized a rule under ADA Title II requiring state and local government web content and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That’s a specific technical standard, not a vague “make it accessible” instruction.
On April 20, 2026, DOJ issued an interim final rule pushing both compliance dates back one year. Entities with a total population of 50,000 or more now have until April 26, 2027. Entities under 50,000 and special district governments have until April 26, 2028.
Nothing else changed. Same standard. Same scope. Same coverage of PDFs, forms, and vendor-built content.
And here’s the part that trips up small boards: your deadline probably isn’t the one you think it is. DOJ guidance ties the population figure to the jurisdiction you’re part of, not to your own headcount or budget. A state university uses its state’s population, not its enrollment. By the same logic, a state licensing board in Alabama is measured against Alabama, not against its five-person staff.
Translation: a lot of small state boards are in the 2027 tier, not the 2028 tier. That’s roughly eight months from today.
Remediation isn’t automatically the cheap option
For many, the instinct is to patch what you have. It feels smaller. It usually isn’t.
Fixing a site built on aging code often costs as much as building a new one, sometimes more. You’re paying someone to work around structural decisions that were made years ago by a developer nobody can reach anymore. Every fix has to be tested, and half of them have the potential to break something else.
Building a new site to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start adds only a modest premium over building the same site without accessibility in mind. Semantic structure, keyboard navigation, contrast, and labeled form fields are cheap when they’re designed in. They’re expensive when they’re retrofitted.
So, for a small board sitting on a site that’s five, eight, ten years old, “rebuild it accessible” is frequently the honest cheaper recommendation. Not the upsell. The cheaper one.
The exception is a reasonably modern site with a handful of specific failures. Those are worth remediating. A review tells you which situation you’re in, and that’s the whole point of doing one early instead of late.
Run the cost of doing nothing
Most boards don’t have a line item for this. Fair enough. So compare it to the alternative.
A single accessibility demand letter that settles quickly tends to land somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000. That’s the settlement alone. Add your own attorney fees. Then add remediation, which you’re now doing on someone else’s timeline at rush rates, with a legal deadline instead of a planning window.
Suddenly a planned project looks less like an expense and more like insurance.
There’s also the part that doesn’t show up on an invoice. Your site is how the public renews a license, finds a meeting notice, downloads a form, files a complaint. If a screen reader user can’t do those things, they can’t access a government service. That’s the actual point of the rule.
What to do in the next 90 days
You don’t need a budget approved this month. You need to know what you’re dealing with.
- Get a review. Automated scan plus manual testing. You want a real punch list, not a score.
- Decide rebuild vs. remediate based on the review, not on a guess.
- Check your vendors. If a third party runs your licensing portal or hosts your forms, the rule reaches them through you.
- Put it on an agenda. Budget cycles are slow. Eight months goes fast when the request has to clear a meeting first.
The boards that handle this well won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones that started while they still had choices.
