Comments in response to the Interim Final Rule regarding ADA Title II website accessibility


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 20251 and two March 20262 3 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 14 years of consideration, public input, and adjustment, and the Department accurately estimated the costs and burdens of the rule."4

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."5

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 agreements6 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.7

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 comments8 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"9 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."10 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.11

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."12 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."13

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

References

  1. Letter for Russell T. Vought, Director, OMB, from Mark A. Riccobono, President, National Federation of the Blind (June 9, 2025), https://nfb.org/programs-services/advocacy/policy-statements/letter-office-management-and-budget-response-letter.
  2. Letter for Mark Paoletta, Administrator, OIRA, from Mark A. Riccobono, President, National Federation of the Blind (March 5, 2026), https://nfb.org/programs-services/advocacy/policy-statements/letter-office-information-and-regulatory-affairs.
  3. Letter for Pam Bondi, Attorney General, DOJ, from Mark A. Riccobono, President, National Federation of the Blind (March 19, 2026), https://nfb.org/programs-services/advocacy/policy-statements/letter-attorney-general-pam-bondi-regarding.
  4. 91 FR 20906.
  5. 91 FR 20906.
  6. See, e.g., Press Release, Justice Department Secures Agreement to Improve Web Accessibility for Public Transportation Users with Disabilities in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, DOJ (Dec. 14, 2021), https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-agreement-improve-web-accessibility-public-transportation-users; Press Release, Justice Department Secures Settlement With Rite Aid Corporation To Make Its Online Covid-19 Vaccine Portal Accessible To Individuals With Disabilities, DOJ (Nov. 1, 2021), https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdpa/pr/justice-department-secures-settlement-rite-aid-corporation-make-its-online-covid-19.
  7. 91 FR 20907.
  8. National Federation of the Blind Response to the NPRM Regarding RIN 1190-AA79 (September 19, 2023), https://nfb.org/programs-services/advocacy/policy-statements/comments-ada-title-ii-website-and-mobile-app-notice.
  9. 91 FR 20907.
  10. 91 FR 20906
  11. 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/.
  12. 91 FR 20907.
  13. 91 FR 20908.