From the Editor: The following is recent correspondence from the President of the National Federation of the Blind to the United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. Both letters are official comments regarding regulatory actions that have been taken by these officials. The letter to the Assistant Attorney General is presented without the footnotes and reference links that were in the original version. To see the document in its original form, visit https://nfb.org/advocacy, then click on Policy Statements.
April 30, 2026
The Honorable Harmeet Dhillon
Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division
United States Department of Justice
150 M Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
RE: RIN 1190-AA82
Dear Assistant Attorney General Dhillon:
The National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans, appreciates the opportunity to comment on the Interim Final Rule (IFR) regarding the regulation to establish specific requirements for web and mobile apps offered by state and local governments to the public, in accordance with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We were pleased to see the Department of Justice (DOJ) moving forward with the regulation addressing website and mobile application accessibility after fourteen years of rulemaking and public comments. However, this IFR delaying the rule’s implementation for a year, while also proposing to consider further changes to the final rule, is deeply concerning.
First and foremost, as we stated in our June 2025 and two March 2026 letters to the administration, any delay of the compliance deadline for the rule is utterly unnecessary. The DOJ even referenced our 2025 letter in the IFR, noting that we argued the rule “went through fourteen years of consideration, public input, and adjustment, and the Department accurately estimated the costs and burdens of the rule.” To contest our point, the Department argued in the IFR “the length of time spent considering the issues covered by the 2024 final rule is irrelevant to whether covered entities can comply with the deadlines.” We respectfully disagree with this assertion.
Covered entities have known for more than a decade that a digital accessibility rule was in the works, that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA—an internationally recognized consensus standard for digital accessibility—was published in June 2018, and that the WCAG 2.1 AA standard was proposed in the August 2023 NPRM. No matter how we choose to look at this, covered entities have had a minimum of three years to familiarize themselves with a set of guidelines that has existed since 2018. Delaying implementation or enforcement for another year only acknowledges that covered entities knew the law, did not meet it, and are now being given a pass rather than being held to the standards they could have been meeting for years.
Furthermore, the Department of Justice itself has been requiring WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance in settlements and Project Civic Access agreements for years. There is, quite literally, no need to delay the compliance dates when the DOJ, private attorneys, and courts are already using the standard. Additionally, the tools, techniques, and expertise needed to implement WCAG 2.1 are well established and commercially available, and thousands of organizations, including many state and local governments, have already achieved compliance. Far from underestimating the burden of coming into compliance, given the rapid development of simple and inexpensive tools for making existing and new content accessible, if anything, the final rule overestimated the cost and difficulty of compliance.
Moreover, the ADA already provides two general defenses to deal with any burden: (1) undue burden and (2) fundamental alteration. Both of these longstanding exceptions are well-recognized by Americans with disabilities and by the United States legal system. The IFR explicitly acknowledges this. To be frank, the relevance of the undue burden defense is being mitigated through the advancement of technology. We are living in an era where digital accessibility is already relatively easy to attain, and it is only getting easier. Therefore, there is simply no basis for an assumption that covered entities will face a significant burden to make their websites and mobile apps accessible.
However, the final rule goes further; adding five new classes of exception to the requirement to make web and app content accessible. These exceptions relieve covered entities of the need to make much pre-existing content accessible, thus further reducing any burden. As we indicated in our 2023 comments on this subject, the proposed exceptions go far beyond the current undue burden and fundamental alteration defenses and therefore substantively decrease the obligations of existing law. The proposed exceptions exempt broad swaths of new and existing content regardless of how easy the content is to make accessible, regardless of the resources available to do so, and regardless of whether a covered entity ever actually raised and defended an affirmative defense in the first place. These exceptions allow covered entities to focus their efforts on making new content accessible—which is inexpensive and simple to accomplish.
Two to three years was more than enough time for covered entities to develop processes and procedures to ensure new content is accessible. Any delay in compliance does not “lead to greater accessibility for individuals with disabilities because more time and resources will be devoted directly to compliance with the substantive requirements of the 2024 final rule” as the IFR claims. It compounds the problem by allowing for the creation of more new and inaccessible content. Providing accessibility for new web content is neither unduly burdensome nor costly, and covered entities should not be able to avoid providing accessibility for new content unless they can demonstrate that doing so would actually constitute an undue burden or fundamental alteration. Requiring still another year before being in compliance with the law is an outrageous admission that the civil rights of Americans with disabilities are not a priority.
It is true that some existing content may properly be subject to an exception because it may arguably be presumed that it will be burdensome in most instances. However, new content should never be presumed to be burdensome to make accessible in the absence of some unusual constraint on the resources of the particular covered entity. The entity is in the best position to determine what those constraints are, to document them in real-time, and to respond affirmatively to assertions of liability. People with disabilities should not lose access to important government information, including new content by large entities, simply because some small entities may, for reasons unique to them, have difficulty complying. Those entities already have an additional year to comply and a defense available to them.
Here again, failing to implement and enforce the rule now because of the Department’s belief that entities will fail to comply only serves to provide a pretextual justification for continuing to deny people with disabilities the access guaranteed by law. It is preposterous for the Department to say simultaneously that the law already protects people with disabilities, that the law must be enhanced because it is not actually protecting people with disabilities, and also that such enhancements will come eventually, but not today, not this year, but maybe next year or the year after that, all because some entities may have an undue burden that they have yet to raise or support.
Although the Department says that covered entities were surprised by how difficult it was to remediate barriers using AI, did not have the resources to provide manual remediation, and did not understand the relevant technical guidelines, we remind the Department that the National Federation of the Blind did raise each of those issues in its comments in 2023. Covered entities who failed to be in compliance could have, but chose not to, collaborate with us and other affected parties to attend proactively to each of those issues across the past three years. Failing to attempt to comply with the law is not an appropriate defense to breaking it.
Third, as the IFR states, “If the 2024 final rule’s compliance dates take effect before the covered entities have had sufficient time to make their web content and mobile apps comply with the terms of the rule, those entities would face significant litigation risks. Congress created a private right of action in Title II.” This is only partially true. As the IFR notes, a private right of action is already available under the ADA. The thousands of lawsuits that get filed every year, targeting digital accessibility specifically, are not dependent upon this rule. For example, in 2025 3,117 ADA Title III website accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal courts. Note that statistic is for ADA Title III website accessibility suits, and that rulemaking for Title III has not progressed beyond an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) published on July 26, 2010, coincidentally the same exact date as the Title II ANPRM. Lawsuits regarding digital accessibility under both Title II and Title III of the ADA proceed directly under the ADA statute and the existing regulations.
If anything, further delaying the compliance deadline does not reduce litigation risk; it increases it by removing the one clear, predictable technical standard and exceptions that Title II covered entities could rely on. Without the rule’s compliance framework, courts will be at leisure to continue applying the ADA’s general effective-communication standard for digital content without defined benchmarks for compliance. The Department posits, somewhat incorrectly, that letting covered entities “face lawsuits for failure to comply with such unreasonable compliance deadlines would conflict with one of the foundational precepts of law, that no one is bound to do what is impossible.” We would counter with another foundational legal precept: ignorance of the law is not a valid defense.
Finally, in what is by far the most concerning part of the IFR, the Department states: “... the Department plans to engage in future rulemaking processes related to the substantive requirements of the 2024 final rule. During the extension period, the Department will consider issuing an NPRM providing members of the public with an opportunity to comment on the substance of the 2024 final rule and any changes proposed by the Department.” This sentence transforms the IFR from a mere delay into a staging action for a far more consequential attack on the rule itself. The National Federation of the Blind is categorically opposed to further limiting the scope of the final rule as published in 2024. As we have repeatedly pointed out, the rule offers covered entities five additional exemptions beyond those provided by undue burden and fundamental alteration. This watering down of our rights is wrong enough. Any additional reduction in our rights is not merely a subtraction of those rights, but an exponential decrease. The National Federation of the Blind would stand in direct opposition to such degradation and would work tirelessly to ensure it does not come to fruition.
In closing, the National Federation of the Blind again appreciates the opportunity to comment on the ADA Title II Website Accessibility Interim Final Rule. We urge the Department of Justice to let the rule go into effect with no further delay. We further urge the Department of Justice to immediately cease any plans or efforts toward additional rulemaking on this regulation. We look forward to the entire rule being implemented and enforced. If there are any further questions, or if we can be of assistance in any way, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Riccobono, President
National Federation of the Blind
May 5, 2026
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Secretary
Department of Health and Human Services
200 Independence Avenue
Washington, DC 20201
RE: RIN 0945-AA30
Dear Secretary Kennedy:
The National Federation of the Blind is the transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans. Throughout our more than eighty-five year history, we have sought to advance the lives of all blind people in the United States. A major driver of that advancement during our existence has been equal access to information, particularly digital information.
It is for this reason that we oppose any attempt to delay, rescind, or otherwise undermine the effectiveness of the Final Rule regarding Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance (89 FR 40066) that is set to take effect on May 11, 2026.
The Section 504 final rule, published on May 9, 2024, pertains to entities that receive HHS funding under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 including public and private schools, public and private colleges, hospitals, and social service agencies.
While reflecting a compromise between the needs of people with disabilities and the resources of covered entities, the clarity provided by the final rule is important to the lives of people with disabilities. The inaccessibility of digital materials is one of the most significant barriers to blind people being able to achieve their full potential and make their rightful contribution to American society.
Moreover, the final rule provides exactly the clarity that covered entities have been requesting regarding their obligations under Section 504 to make their websites and mobile applications accessible. Since 1973, Section 504 has required covered entities to ensure their communications with individuals with disabilities are “as effective as” communications with nondisabled individuals.
In the more than five decades since, the Department has made it clear that this standard also applies to websites and mobile applications and has issued guidance documents providing technical assistance to covered entities.
The final rule clarifies what is required to meet Section 504’s equally effective communication requirement in the context of digital information. It provides a clear technical standard based on an internationally recognized and widely adopted consensus standard.
It also provides flexibility by allowing covered entities to achieve equivalent facilitation and preventing liability for inaccessible elements that do not substantively affect the usability of a website or mobile application.
Notably, the rule also provides a series of exceptions, presumably implemented at the behest of covered entities, establishing web and mobile application elements and content that do not have to be made accessible. These exceptions are not available under the pre-existing equally effective communication requirement.
Although the equally effective communication requirement has been in effect for decades, the final rule also provides delayed effective dates of two or three years, depending on the size of the covered entity. Thus, rather than burdening those entities, the rule actually reduces their burdens.
The final rule reflects exactly what public entities have been seeking for years—a clear, transparent shared understanding of the applicable legal requirements. The final rule is clear and comprehensible, does not stray from legislative intent, and provides additional exceptions beyond what was established in the law.
There is no basis for reconsidering the Section 504 final rule, which has already gone through the traditional process of public input and adjustment, and which is based on a requirement in existence for nearly fifty years.
Additionally, public entities have had numerous years to prepare for the requirements that have been actively requested by stakeholders on all sides. Conversely, delaying or amending the regulation at this point would severely harm blind and other disabled Americans by denying us access to critical information. We urge that you withdraw the Interim Final Rule immediately.
Thank you for your attention to this important issue.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Riccobono, President
National Federation of the Blind
I pledge to participate actively in the efforts of the National Federation of the Blind to achieve equality, opportunity, and security for the blind; to support the policies and programs of the Federation; and to abide by its constitution.