Our Zoom calendar is really starting to heat up in 2025. Public entities from cities and states throughout the U.S. are increasingly reaching out for help with their web accessibility projects.
We thought other state and local governments—and their instrumentalities—would like to know what their peers are asking us about when it comes to ADA Title II web compliance, so we’ve compiled the most common questions and concerns we’re hearing in our consulting sessions.
Here are the big topics from behind the closed doors of our Zoom meetings and what we tell clients (we’ve provided the general answers since they depend on the client’s situation).
Table of Contents
We feel like we’re behind – Are We Behind?
If you’re past the planning stage and already taking action, you’re ahead of most other public entities. That said, there’s a reason the Department of Justice (DOJ) gave you 2-3 years for compliance: there’s a fair amount of work to be done and if you have several digital assets, you need to push now to ensure you’re ahead of the compliance deadline.
Where Should We Start?
Start by having 2 people read and understand the requirements, exceptions, and deadline. Once you have that set, next you take inventory of your digital assets. Third, devise a plan for moving forward. Along with your plan, decide who will be the project coordinator and start assigning roles and responsibilities.
The exact order of your next steps might vary, but it’s important you are progressing on these 4 starting blocks and quickly making tangible progress towards WCAG 2.1 AA conformance.
How Many Staff Members Should Be Involved?
This depends on the size of your organization, but we typically recommend having dedicated team that spans across multiple departments. Obviously, if your organization is small, it will be just a few people working on ADA Title II. For larger public entities, your staff participation might look like this:
- IT/web development team (1-3 people)
- Content creators/managers (1-3 people)
- Procurement specialist (1 person)
- Department representatives (1 per major department)
- Project coordinator (1 person, possibly part-time)
What’s critical is ensuring you have someone from both technical and content creation sides of office. What’s also very important is that you have leaders from all departments who will spread the message and ensure everyone is implementing accessibility.
This isn’t only an IT project, everyone needs to contribute or staff members outside of the core project team will be working against your efforts.
Note that we provide training on WCAG 2.1 AA requirements as well as how to create accessible web content (images, text, audio, video, Word documents, PowerPoints).
What About Our Third-Party Vendors?
Product and services from third-parties are a big, overlooked part of ADA Title II compliance. We can’t reach WCAG 2.1 AA conformance for our website if our website relies upon inaccessible apps or portals. Here are some next steps for third-party providers you are reliant upon.
- Inventory all third-party services and integrations
- Request VPATs/ACRs from your vendors
- Evaluate the accessibility of their offerings
- Make future procurement decisions with accessibility as a requirement
For existing vendors with inaccessible products, document your requests for improvement and begin exploring alternatives if they cannot provide accessible options by the compliance deadline.
Remember that public entities can leverage their collective purchasing power to push vendors toward accessibility. If your accessibility requests receive a frosty response, consider joining forces with other public entities using the same vendors.
Do We Need to Hire a Full-Time Accessibility Coordinator?
Not necessarily. While larger organizations (state agencies, major cities) often benefit from a dedicated coordinator, smaller entities can assign these responsibilities to existing staff with proper training.
One alternative to hiring a full-time accessibility coordinator is to hire us on a fractional basis. You can hire us for a retainer of 10 hours a month and have us get to work.
Another option is to purchase a subscription to our Accessibility Help Desk. With Help Desk, your team will have access to our accessibility and compliance experts every weekday from 8-5 CST.
Even if you don’t hire a full-time employee, what’s critical is having clear ownership of accessibility responsibilities documented in your accessibility policy. This includes:
- Who handles technical remediation
- Who ensures new content meets standards
- Who responds to accessibility feedback
- Who manages testing and validation
Some public entities are sharing accessibility specialists across multiple departments or even between smaller local governments to distribute costs while maintaining expertise.
How Much Will Full Compliance Cost Us?
Some public entities have 5 websites, a mobile app, and thousands of PDF documents that need remediation while others have 1 website and 25 PDFs that they aren’t archiving so the answer is it truly does depend.
However, if you visit our pricing page, you can already start putting together estimates. And – if you email us and let us know what your digital asset inventory is, we can put together a proposal for your project.
Of course, if you have in-house expertise, this can significantly reduce your cost because you won’t have to outsource as much work.
If your entity has very few digital assets, a good starting budget is $10,000.
Next Steps
We highly recommend setting aside just 2 hours and reading as much of our ADA Title II web compliance material as possible. Our ADA Title II Fact Sheet guide is a great start.
We’ve also got a really helpful ADA Title II Web Series playlist (how to get started) on YouTube.
Also, feel free to contact us for project consulting, we’re always happy to help our clients.
And one final note, we’re almost ready to publish our new course, How to Build an Accessibility Program, which is absolutely perfect for organizing efforts on ADA Title II compliance.
