The Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to require state and local governments to meet certain accessibility standards for services, programs, and activities offered via web or mobile apps. AWC is requesting information by September 29 on how the proposed rule may impact your city.
Summary of the proposed rulemaking
DOJ is revising its regulations under title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The Department proposes adopting an internationally recognized accessibility standard for web access, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, as the technical standard for web content and mobile app accessibility under title II of the ADA.
Some of these requirements include making websites and mobile applications understandable by screen readers or other assistive technologies. Other technical standards include adding alt text (text descriptions of images and navigational links that facilitate using a screen reader). The proposal would also require captions on all videos and audio files on local government websites. A full description of the proposed requirements can be found on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2) Overview.
Proposed exempted content includes:
- Archived web content;
- Preexisting conventional electronic documents;
- Web content posted by third parties on a public entity's website;
- Third-party web content linked from a public entity's website;
- Course content on a public entity's password-protected or otherwise secured website for admitted students enrolled in a specific course offered by a public postsecondary institution;
- Class or course content on a public entity's password-protected or otherwise secured website for students enrolled, or parents of students enrolled, in a specific class or course at a public elementary or secondary school; and
- Conventional electronic documents that are about a specific individual, their property, or their account and that are password-protected or otherwise secured.
DOJ is proposing different compliance dates by population size of the public entity:
Size | Compliance date |
|---|
Population of 50,000 or more | Two years after the publication of the rule |
Population of less than 50,000 | Three years after the publication of the rule |
Learn more and provide feedback:
Provide AWC with information on expected impacts by Friday, September 29
The National League of Cities (NLC) will be providing comments on the impacts of the proposed rule. To assist the response, AWC wants to know how this change will impact cities:
- Is your city’s web content already compliant with the proposed standard (WCAG 2.1) already?
- Where are the gaps? How close are you to compliance?
- How much would it cost for your city to comply with these new standards? As much detail as you can provide about startup costs as well as ongoing expenses would be appreciated. For example, "A city with a population of approximately 65,000 shared that the initial cost to reach compliance would be $XX, with an anticipated ongoing annual cost of $XX."
- Do you believe the compliance timeline is reasonable for your community? If not, is there a different timeline that would be manageable that we could propose?
- Are there specific forms of assistance, technical or otherwise, that the federal government could provide to make the compliance burden less for your community?
- Are there other issues that advocacy staff should be aware of?
Please send your feedback to Katherine Walton at katherinew@awcnet.org.