• Who’s covered: Public entities (including public school districts) under ADA Title II.

• What’s required: Web content and mobile apps must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

• When you must comply (based on total population served):

  • 50,000+ people: April 24, 2026

  • Under 50,000 people (and special district governments): April 26, 2027

• What to do first: Inventory your digital “surface area” (websites, subdomains, PDFs, forms, videos, and key vendor tools), then prioritize what families and students rely on most.

As school leaders and communicators, you’re no strangers to the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA—a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. Title II of the ADA in particular requires public entities—such as public school districts—to provide disabled students with equal access to all programs, services and activities, as well as reasonable accommodations when needed.

When the ADA was passed in 1990, “digital accessibility” wasn’t yet a concern; after all, the digital world as we know it today had barely begun to exist. But in the decades since, technology has become an integral part of everyday school life—and with it has come considerable accessibility challenges. To address these, the Department of Justice issued a final rule updating Title II web accessibility requirements last year. (You can read the rule in full here.)

Your deadline for compliance depends on the size of the population you serve. Districts serving communities of 50,000 people or more must come into compliance by April 24, 2026; those serving communities of fewer than 50,000 have until April 26, 2027. (Keep in mind that those numbers refer to the size of your overall population, not your student body.)

With the first compliance deadline approaching in April 2026, it’s worth reviewing the major facets of the Title II updates. No doubt you have already begun to make changes in order to meet these requirements, but have you missed something? Does everyone you work with understand these changes? And how can you make the transition easier on everyone? Let’s discuss.

The current WCAG standards focus on four key principles of accessibility: perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness.

Here we’ll give a short explanation of each principle, based on guidance provided by the W3C, along with examples of WCAG requirements that fall under each one. While this isn’t a complete overview of WCAG 2.1 AA, it will give you an idea of what makes digital content accessible and the types of changes you may need to make to your district’s digital presence.

Perceivable

Visitors to your website, app, digital learning platform or other online tools must be able to consume your content—regardless of any disabilities they might have. Blind people who rely on screen readers, for example, must have the same access to information as sighted users.

Examples:

• Images must have descriptive alternative text that can be read by screen readers.

• Audio-only content (like podcasts) must have descriptive transcripts.

• Videos must have synchronized captions.

• Text must contrast with its background at a minimum ratio of 4.5:1.

Operable

Your digital content should be easy for anyone to navigate and use—including those with disabilities. This means your website should be easy to operate whether someone is using a screen reader, a joystick or simply a keyboard.

Examples:

• Users must have access to all functionality using only a keyboard.

• Web pages must have descriptive and informative page titles.

• Users should be able to determine where a link will take them from the linked text alone.

Understandable

Digital content that your district shares should be easy to understand and presented in a logical way. This will make things easier for your entire audience—but especially people using adaptive technologies to navigate your digital spaces.

Examples:

• A web page’s code should indicate the language its content is written in.

• Elements that remain consistent throughout a website (such as the top navigation) should be labeled the same way and presented in the same order on every page.

• Online forms must clearly identify potential errors (such as a skipped input), provide easy access to the problematic element, and indicate how the error can be fixed.

Robust

To be “robust,” your digital content must be able to be reliably interpreted by a variety of different browsers and assistive technologies. Your content should remain accessible even as these various technologies update and evolve.

Examples:

• Your content must be coded correctly and have complete start and end tags.

• Your content should be accessible even if someone is using an older version of an operating system or browser.

Believe it or not, we’ve just scratched the surface of WCAG 2.1 AA—but the nonprofit Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) offers even more detailed guidance and materials, including checklists, for meeting the new rule’s requirements.

Over the past few decades, your schools have likely accrued lots of what Shaheen calls “technical debt”—inaccessible apps, software, digital curriculum, or other technologies that will now have to be either replaced or brought into compliance.

“That’s not a small thing,” she says. “But this work is an equity imperative. You can’t provide equitable education unless and until all of the digital technologies and instructional materials you use are accessible to all your students.” It’s a big job, but there are a few steps you can take to make rolling out new accessible features as smooth as possible.

Make sure your staff understands what’s required.

One reason this process is so complicated is that technology has become so prevalent even at the classroom level. Teachers often find and use their own digital tools to communicate with families or even to present curriculum. “I approve of teachers having some liberty to choose instructional materials and to be able to create content for their courses,” says Dr. Mary Rice, an associate professor of literacy at the University of New Mexico. “But they need some tools for how to evaluate those, especially for these basic things about accessibility.”

And often, teachers don’t have these tools. Sometimes, no one in the district does. “A big, big challenge in all this is going to be the lack of knowledge about accessibility among educators—both teachers and administrators,” Shaheen says. Rice agrees: “For the most part, K-12 school districts don't have, and maybe have not ever had, an administrator with responsibility for knowledge about digital accessibility,” says Rice.

Coming into compliance is going to be too much work for one person or even one department. “Don’t just assign it to the special education department,” says Shaheen. “If you do that, you’ve already failed. Previous research has shown us that is not how to get it done.” Instead, she says, “the overall approach really does have to be collective. You need to establish accessibility as a collective districtwide priority.”

So make sure your teachers and other staff members are aware of the updates to Title II. Send them the WCAG checklist. Run a professional development session on it. If each individual member of your team can identify the technical debt existing in their own work, it will be that much easier to catalog and tackle.

Seek your vendors’ support.

Before the updates, third-party digital content produced by vendors was exempt from the ADA. “There used to be some sense that the regulations only applied to content that you generated as an institution, not that third-party vendors created for you,” Rice explains. “So the workaround was that schools would just third-party everything out. But that is no longer the case. Whatever your district has done in the past, you’ll now need to make sure all your content—third-party or not—is ADA compliant.

“It's not like a teacher or an administrator is going to get in there and recode all the stuff in order to make it Title II compliant,” Rice says.

At the end of the day, it’s your district—and not your vendors—that will be held responsible for compliance. “Even with these new regulations, vendors have no liability in this work whatsoever,” Shaheen explains. “If a school chooses to use some personalized learning app that is completely inaccessible, the app developers don't get in trouble. The school district gets in trouble.” That is why it’s so hugely important that you contract with vendors that are knowledgeable, trustworthy and supportive. They shouldn’t just know the requirements and comply with them. Ideally, they’re providing guidance that will make the transition easier on you.

Remember who it’s for.

Shaheen has seen a lot of organizations go through this process, and she says people’s motivation for doing the work often goes through three distinct phases. “As it starts out, they're doing it because they have to comply with the law, and when that's their motivation, they're angry and they're resentful,” she explains. “Then they progress to this idea that their purpose for doing this accessibility work is to help disabled people. When they're at that place, they feel ownership of the work—but they also feel overwhelmed because they see how much there is to do.”

But the most significant shift, she says, comes when the people doing the accessibility work—whether they’re teachers, administrators, IT directors, or even vendors—actually talk to students about their experiences with inaccessible technologies. “If you have had the privilege of living or working in a world where most everybody around you is not disabled, and you haven't had to confront what happens when technology is inaccessible to a student, then you don't realize the harm that's happening,” Shaheen explains. “But when you have the opportunity to talk with those kids and learn about that harm, you realize you're doing accessibility because it's an educational imperative. And when you get to that place, you start to feel really fulfilled and proud of the work.”

Shaheen is quick to point out that having this new perspective doesn't magically make the work easy, or make money grow on trees. “But it changes people's motivation, and that helps them to feel a different way about the work, which creates a little bit less internal friction,” she says.

“The school leaders I've talked to who've gone through the whole process of working on accessibility say that though enacting digital accessibility was difficult, overwhelming, frustrating and definitely time-consuming, it was worth the effort,” Shaheen says. “Because addressing accessibility was imperative to their mission to provide education for all.”

So yes, ADA compliance is required by law. You’ve got to do it. But that’s not the reason to do this work. The real reason is the same as for all your work: to help kids thrive.