Federal rules had mandated that state, and local governments fully comply with American with Disability Act (ADA) for their websites by last April. When that deadline proved to be an impossibility, the requirement was extended to April 26, 2027 for places with a total population of over 50,000 and another year for smaller entities.

But even that extra time still has state and local governments in a crunch.

An early September report from the National Conference of State Legislatures summarized the discussion of that challenge that was held  in a Legislative Summit Session.

One of the participants, Arielle Anderson-Schneider, Chief Information Security Officer for the Colorado General Assembly, was quoted in the report as saying that website ADA compliance is one of the “most pressing operational and legal issues facing state legislatures today.”

Minnesota is a leader in achieving compliance. Matt Gehring, research director at the Minnesota House and NCSL staff vice chair, said that “accessibility becomes manageable when it stops feeling like an extra step.”

As he says, “we want it to be an inherent part of the process, so you don’t notice that it’s happening. . . I think that’s the best way to think about how to build a system to ensure compliance. You don’t want this to be an extra step. You want this to be a normal step that people are used to taking.”

Meanwhile, Nate Rowan, Deputy Director of the state Legislative Technology Services Bureau in Wisconsin singled out one of the biggest challenges. He explained that “legislatures produce documents that rely heavily on visual cues, such as strike-throughs to show deleted language and underlines to show additions. . .Those cues are central to lawmaking, but they may not translate for people using screen readers.”

“Those things visually convey information pretty directly,” Rowan was quoted as saying. “But if I am blind, I can’t see, then that information is lost to me.”

It may be that full compliance is something of a worthwhile, but an impossible dream, at least for now, according to Rowan who was quoted as saying, “It’s frankly impossible to implement a system where a person can create automatically accessible content all the time.”

(Note: In the weeks prior to the original April 2026 deadline for ADA website accessibility, an article on this website, titled “Accessible Websites and the Public Sector” covered both the importance and some of the challenges of achieving accessibility.)

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