DOJ Delays the Title II Web Accessibility Deadline — Don’t Sit Back

The IFR offers several rationales for the delay. Some are legitimate. Others range from legally reckless to genuinely embarrassing.

The strongest argument is resource constraints. Higher education associations, K–12 groups, and the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy all told DOJ that staffing and budget limitations made the original timeline unworkable for many public entities. That concern is real and we’ve written about it ourselves. We’ll give DOJ that one. It’s worth noting that the SBA’s Office of Advocacy has emerged as an unusually influential player in this rulemaking, one that accessibility advocates will need to monitor going forward. Title II covers state and local governments, not small businesses, which makes Advocacy’s prominent seat at this table more than a little ironic.

The rest is harder to swallow.

DOJ invented an AI rationale it never had. The IFR claims DOJ “overestimated” the role of AI in making compliance feasible. Search the 2024 rule yourself — “artificial intelligence” isn't there. The only technology passage is a brief discussion of auto-captioning quality in live audio. DOJ invented a reliance it never expressed, declared it misplaced, and called it new information. This is flatly disingenuous.

The WCAG argument is legally reckless. DOJ argues that WCAG 2.1’s supplementary materials — which link to dynamically updated pages — make compliance requirements unknowable. This undercuts the agency's own settlement documents for over twenty years. Every major government that has adopted a web accessibility standard points to WCAG. The only alternative is the ISO version, which requires payment to access — so DOJ’s complaint is essentially that it chose the free, universally recognized standard and is unhappy that it lives on the internet. Worse, by calling WCAG unknowable, DOJ has handed a weapon to every defendant in every future accessibility case. That damage may outlast the delay itself.

The foreign actors rationale is embarrassing. The IFR warns that “international actors may attempt to access websites and file litigation” funded by foreign interests “to intentionally disrupt government operations in the United States.” Anyone who knows anything about the basics of law and litigation would find this hard to swallow. Title II lawsuits require a plaintiff to have an actual need to use the public entity’s services. The idea that a foreign-funded "bad hombre" is going to destabilize American democracy by suing cities over inaccessible PDFs is not a legal argument. It’s laughable and it didn’t belong in a federal regulation.

This isn’t a policy rationale. It’s a participation trophy for failing to do your homework.

DOJ is rewarding ignorance. Perhaps the most remarkable rationale is buried in footnote 70. The IFR justifies part of the delay on the grounds that some educational institutions were still operating under the assumption that the 2023 proposed rule’s course content exemptions were still in effect — even though those exemptions were removed in the 2024 final rule after public comment. Rather than concluding that covered entities should read the regulations they are required to follow, DOJ gives them another year. This isn’t a policy rationale. It’s a participation trophy for failing to do your homework.