May 29, 2026
Paula Stannard
Director
Office for Civil Rights
United States Department of Health and Human Services
200 Independence Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20001
RE: RIN 0945-AA30
Dear Director Stannard:
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 covered entities to the public, in accordance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (The Rehab Act).
In 2024, we were pleased to see the Department of Health and Human Services (the Department) moving forward with a regulation addressing website and mobile application accessibility. However, this IFR delaying the rule’s implementation for another year, while also proposing to consider further changes to the final rule, is deeply concerning.
First and foremost, any delay of the compliance deadline for the rule is utterly unnecessary. Covered entities have known for many years 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 2023 NPRM and then officially adopted in the May 2024 final rule.
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.
While Section 504 covered entities, such as hospitals and medical diagnostics labs, are able to postpone implementation of accessibility requirements for their websites, blind Americans are not afforded the same luxury to postpone paying the bill. Consider the story of Chris, a blind Marylander in Baltimore who was forced to go through extraordinary measures just to pay an approximately 10 dollar charge from LabCorp because the company’s mobile app is inaccessible:
I received a text message from LabCorp stating that the bill for recent tests I had at Mercy Hospital here in Baltimore was available and inviting me to pay it online. I was busy so did not get to it until the next day. I thought I would quickly access the link in the text message and pay the bill, which was a small one of just over 10 dollars. I was able to double tap on the link on my iPhone, and I was able to get through the first screen, where my invoice number was pre-populated and I only had to add my ZIP and birth date.
When I got to the page where I could view and pay the bill, however, I was unable to enter my credit card information, even with the help of auto-fill features. The system threw errors without letting me know what they were, and form fields where I was supposed to insert information randomly disappeared or did not perform as expected.
I finally gave up and called the toll-free phone number for help. The first thing it did, after letting me know how wonderful LabCorp is, was to ask for my invoice number. This would have been printed on the invoice they mailed me, which I did not have, so I had to hang up, find the invoice number on the initial web page I accessed from the text message, and memorize it.
I dialed back in and was able to enter it, but then the system wanted my credit card number. It did not give me enough time to enter the entire number using my iPhone keypad. I finally had to dial in from my land line (which fortunately I haven’t gotten rid of) so that I could use the tactile keypad on my land line phone to enter all the information. After roughly a half hour to 45 minutes of doing all this, I was finally able to pay them the 10 dollars they wanted. Had their online portal been accessible, I probably could have paid the bill in two minutes or less.
Or Kelsey, who was unable to even schedule an appointment due to an inaccessible online patient portal and had to wait on hold for an unacceptable amount of time:
I visited my primary care doctor back in March for my annual physical. Prior to that, I was asked to complete blood work. The hospital where my doctor is affiliated recently switched their lab services to Quest Diagnostics. Unfortunately, their website and mobile app are completely inaccessible, so just to make an appointment, I had no option but to wait on hold for over an hour to talk to a person at corporate.
The person I spoke with was extremely rude and when I tried to explain that I couldn't use the website or the app because it is inaccessible to blind people, all I got from her was "I apologize," but no offer to try to escalate to the appropriate department. When the day of the appointment came, had my dad not been there, I would have been unable to sign in.
These are not offhand experiences for blind Americans, but rather near daily barriers caused by inaccessible website and mobile applications used by Section 504 covered entities.
Fortunately for these covered entities, the tools, techniques, and expertise needed to implement WCAG 2.1 are well established and commercially available. Thousands of organizations, including many state and local governments, have already achieved compliance. This is not difficult, and covered entities have no excuse to still be out of compliance with the requirements of the 2024 final rule.
The IFR states that "the Department underestimated burdens to recipients, especially smaller recipients, when setting the compliance dates in the 2024 final rule."1 We know the opposite to be true. 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 2024 final rule likely overestimated the cost and difficulty of compliance.
Moreover, Section 504 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.2 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.3 These exceptions relieve covered entities of the need to make much pre-existing content accessible, thus further reducing any burden. These 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 and regardless of the resources available to do so. 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 further delay in compliance only 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 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.
Furthermore, as the IFR states, "the Department is concerned that noncompliance among a significant portion of those recipients would lead to a significant increase in litigation."4 This is only partially true. As the IFR notes, a private right of action is already available under Section 504.5 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.6 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. Lawsuits regarding digital accessibility under Section 504 can proceed directly under the 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 Section 504 covered entities could rely on. Without the rule’s compliance framework, courts will be at leisure to continue applying the Rehab Act’s general effective-communication standard for digital content without defined benchmarks for compliance.
Finally, in what is by far the most concerning part of the IFR, the Department states: "the Department plans to engage in future rulemaking 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, including any changes that would affect the web content and mobile app accessibility requirements."7
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 Section 504 Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance Final Rule.
We urge the Department to let the rule go into effect with no further delay. We further urge the Department 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
Footnotes
- 91 FR 25503.
- 91 FR 25500.
- 45 CFR § 84.85.
- 91 FR 25499.
- 91 FR 25499.
- Kristina M. Launey & Minh N. Vu. "Federal Court Website Accessibility Lawsuit Filings Bounce Back in 2025," ADA Title III, March 25, 2026, https://www.adatitleiii.com/2026/03/federal-court-website-accessibility-lawsuit-filings-bounce-back-in-2025/.
- 91 FR 25501.