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A federal deadline, already in force

Your website has an ADA deadline. Here is the date.

Every Ohio public library, school district and park district must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA by 26 April 2027 or 26 April 2028.

The rule is the U.S. Department of Justice regulation at 28 CFR Part 35, and it is already law. Which of the two dates applies to you depends on population, and for an Ohio school district that is not the population most people assume. Start with the free check. It reads your site, works out your date, and gives you a dated report you can hand to a board.

Check my site free Which date applies to us?

No account, no email required. • Reads your site, changes nothing. • PDF report, yours to keep.

The two compliance dates

26 April 2027
Public entity with a total population of 50,000 or more.
26 April 2028
Public entity under 50,000, and any special district government regardless of size.

Source: the Department of Justice compliance table at ada.gov. An interim final rule published 20 April 2026 moved both dates one year later than the 2024 final rule; these are the current ones.

Which date applies to you

The rule keys on how the Census Bureau classifies your organization, not on what it is called.

Your organization Population that decides Deadline
Public library district Special district government, so no lookup 26 April 2028
Park district Special district government, so no lookup 26 April 2028
School district Your own district population, from the Census SAIPE 2027 at 50,000+, otherwise 2028
City, village or township Its own total population 2027 at 50,000+, otherwise 2028

The trap for Ohio school districts

An Ohio district named "Lakewood City School District" does not use the population of the City of Lakewood. "City School District" is an Ohio Revised Code 3311.02 name. The Census Bureau counts every Ohio school district as an independent district government, and 28 CFR 35.104(2) sends an independent school district to its own population in the most recent Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates.

It matters because the two answers give different years. Read against the city, Lakewood looks like a 2027 entity. Read correctly, the district population is 49,878 and the answer is 2028. Getting this backwards either costs you a year of runway or has you spending a year you did not need to spend.

One caveat on libraries

Ohio libraries are not all special district governments. Some are departments of a city or a county, and in that case 28 CFR 35.104(3) takes the parent government's population, which can put you on 26 April 2027 instead. No tool can read your governance off your website, so the free check states 2028 as a condition rather than an assumption. If your library is a city or county department, use the earlier date.

What WCAG 2.1 AA actually asks of you

In board language, not developer language.

Images carry a description

Someone using a screen reader hears the description instead of seeing the photo. An image with none is announced as its file name, or skipped.

Links say where they go

Screen reader users often pull up a list of every link on the page. A page of links that all read "click here" or "read more" is a list of nothing.

Form fields have labels

A card renewal form or a registration form with unlabeled boxes cannot be filled in without sight. Placeholder text inside the box is not a label.

Pages have real structure

Headings are how a screen reader user skims. Text made large and bold to look like a heading is not one, and the page becomes a wall.

The page declares its language

Without it a screen reader may read English text with the wrong pronunciation rules. It is one attribute and it is missed constantly.

Documents count too

Minutes, budgets, policies and forms are web content. A scanned image saved as a PDF reads as nothing at all.

Being honest about what a scan can do. Automated testing of any kind finds roughly a third of the barriers WCAG describes. Color contrast and keyboard focus need a live browser to measure. Nothing that needs human judgment can be automated at all.

So the free check is a starting inventory and a dated record, not a certificate. Anyone selling you a certificate from a scan is selling you something that does not exist.

Start with the free check

Enter your address. It reads up to 20 pages, obeys your robots.txt, samples the PDFs those pages link to, and works out your compliance date. Then it writes a dated PDF that says what was found, what it means for a visitor, and what was not checked.

Free with no account. An email address raises the number of sites you can check in a day, and that is the only thing it does.

Check my site
  • Your deadline, and why it is that one
  • Every finding in plain English
  • The PDFs your pages link to
  • An honest list of what was not checked
  • A dated document for the board packet

Common questions

Yes. The U.S. Department of Justice rule at 28 CFR Part 35 applies to state and local government entities, and public libraries, school districts, park districts, villages and townships are all covered. It sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for web content and mobile apps.

26 April 2027 if your total population is 50,000 or more. 26 April 2028 if it is under 50,000, and 26 April 2028 for any special district government. Ohio public libraries and park districts are usually special district governments, so most of them land on 2028.

No. "City School District" is an Ohio Revised Code 3311.02 name, not a Census classification. The Census Bureau counts every Ohio district as an independent district government, so 28 CFR 35.104(2) sends you to your own district population in the most recent Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. Lakewood City School District uses the district figure, not the population of the City of Lakewood, and the two give different years.

Five categories are excepted in the rule: archived web content, conventional electronic documents already posted before your compliance date, third-party content you have no arrangement with, individualized password-protected documents, and social media posts made before the date. The document exception is narrower than it sounds, because a form or policy still in active use is not "preexisting" in the sense that matters. There is also a limit for anything that would be a fundamental alteration or an undue burden.

No. An overlay adds a script on top of the page; it does not change the content underneath, and the content is what the standard is about. If you already pay for one, keep the receipt and read the report anyway - the findings are about your markup, and the overlay does not remove them.

Often not. A lot of what a scan finds is small and repeated: images with no alternative text, links that read as "click here", form fields with no label, a page title that is the same on every page. Those are edits inside the site you have. A rebuild is worth discussing when the platform itself makes the fixes impossible, or when it is old enough that the accessibility work is the smaller half of the problem.

They are usually the biggest gap and almost nothing checks them. Board minutes, budgets, policies and forms are scanned images as often as they are documents, and a scanned image reads as nothing at all to a screen reader. The free check samples the PDFs your pages link to and counts what it finds. It does not decide whether the archived-document exception covers any of them, because that depends on how you use the file.

No, and none of this is legal advice. I am the developer who would do the work. The dates and citations here come from the rule and from ada.gov, and they are all named so your counsel or your state library consultant can check them. Take the report to them.

Or talk to the developer who would fix it

Run the free check first if you want numbers to point at. If you already know where you stand, tell me and I'll reply within 24 hours.

Prefer to skip the form? Book directly on Calendly or call (440) 836-3059.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. The dates and citations are named so your counsel can check them.