March 19, 2026
The Honorable Pam Bondi
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
RE: RIN 1190-AA82, Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities
Dear Attorney General Bondi:
The National Federation of the Blind is the nation’s premier transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans. Similar to all other Americans, blind Americans depend on access to information on state and local government websites and mobile applications to participate fully in civic life.
We respectfully urge that the Department of Justice withdraw the Interim Final Rule submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and preserve the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II web accessibility rule, finalized on April 24, 2024, in its current form and on its current timeline.
We are aware of concerns raised by the National League of Cities (NLC) and the National Association of Counties (NACo) regarding compliance costs and timelines. We take those concerns seriously.
However, we believe that weakening, delaying, or rescinding this rule would cause far greater harm to the 44 million Americans with disabilities (according to the 2023 American Community Survey), to the rule of law, and ultimately to the very local governments that are subject to the web accessibility rule.
I. The ADA Is a Bipartisan Achievement and a Conservative Legacy
The ADA was conceived by a commission created under President Ronald Reagan, championed through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and signed into law on July 26, 1990, by President George H.W. Bush.
At the signing ceremony on the White House South Lawn—attended by more than three thousand Americans with disabilities—President Bush declared, "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down."
At a celebration marking the ADA’s tenth anniversary in 2000, President Bush said that enacting the ADA was his greatest achievement as President. When conservative voices questioned whether the law imposed undue costs on the private sector, the Bush administration responded with a fundamentally conservative argument: the ADA made it possible for people with disabilities to be less dependent on government by giving them the opportunity to hold jobs and leave welfare rolls.
That principle—independence over dependence, participation over exclusion, equal access to opportunity—is the beating heart of both the ADA and the 2024 web accessibility rule. Weakening this rule would increase the number of Americans who must rely on government assistance, telephone hotlines, or the help of others simply to access the public services their tax dollars fund.
II. The Rule Provides Clarity That Public Entities Have Requested for Decades
The 2024 rule does not create a new obligation. Since 1990, Title II of the ADA has required state and local governments to ensure that their communications with individuals with disabilities are "as effective as" communications with nondisabled individuals. The ADA does not distinguish between different communication formats whether in person, by phone, or over the Internet.
The Department of Justice has made clear since at least 1996 that this obligation extends to digital communications, and has enforced this standard through litigation and settlements, as well as through its Project Civic Access settlements, for over a decade, regularly requiring compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA—the same technical standard adopted in the 2024 rule.
The 2024 rule provides the very clarity that covered entities have been requesting. For years, state and local government entities claimed they did not know how to comply with the ADA’s effective communication requirements in the digital context. The rule answers that question by adopting an internationally recognized, widely used technical standard that has been in existence since 2018.
The development of this rule was neither hasty nor unilateral. The Department issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) in 2010, receiving approximately four hundred comments. It issued a supplemental ANPRM in 2016, receiving over two hundred comments. It issued a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in 2023, with more than sixty specific questions for public input, and received nearly three hundred fifty comments.
The Department also attended numerous listening sessions to gather additional perspectives. The final rule was issued after fourteen years of public engagement and deliberation. To suggest that this process was insufficient is without foundation.
Notably, the rule provides a series of exceptions—for archived content, pre-existing documents, individualized password-protected documents, and third-party content—that do not exist under the pre-existing effective communication requirement. It also provides delayed compliance dates of two and three years, depending on entity size. Rather than burdening state and local governments, the rule actually reduces the burdens on those entities.
III. The Human Cost of Digital Inaccessibility Is Profound and Measurable
More than 44 million Americans live with some type of disability. This includes more than eight million Americans who are blind or have low vision, and that population is only growing larger. These are not abstract numbers.
They are your neighbors, your constituents, and your fellow citizens who encounter concrete barriers when government websites fail to meet basic accessibility standards. Consider the following:
Maria, a blind mother of two, spent three days trying to access her daughter’s school district website after the child was referred for a special education evaluation. The forms were PDF images—invisible to a screen reader. The contact directory was a graphic with no text alternative. The navigation was impenetrable to assistive technology.
Maria was ultimately forced to ask a sighted neighbor to access the forms on her behalf, surrendering her privacy, her independence, and her dignity—all because a taxpayer-funded website was built without accessibility in mind.
Angela, a longtime member of the National Federation of the Blind, earned a provisional job offer from an insurance carrier contingent on passing California’s online licensing examination. The state-administered testing platform was completely inaccessible to her screen reader.
When she requested accommodation, she was told to submit private medical records—a requirement not imposed on nondisabled applicants. The job offer expired. In 2021, Angela and a second blind applicant filed suit, and in August 2024, the case settled with meaningful reforms. But Angela lost the career opportunity she had earned.
Voters who are blind or have low vision routinely face barriers to exercising their fundamental right to vote. One blind voter in Washington State fell ill near Election Day and, unable to visit a voting center, was forced to ask a friend to fill out and submit her ballot—hoping the friend marked it correctly.
She described not being able to vote privately and independently as something that "hurt me a lot." The Department of Justice itself has found Title II violations in multiple states involving inaccessible election websites that prevented people with disabilities from determining where, when, or how to vote.
These stories are not exceptional. They are the everyday experience of millions of Americans navigating a digital public infrastructure that was built without them. During the DOJ’s own rulemaking process, commenters emphasized that when using inaccessible government websites for interactions involving confidential information, individuals with disabilities must forfeit privacy and independence to seek assistance.
IV. Inaccessible Government Websites Are a Taxpayer Injustice
State and local government websites—the portals that serve parks departments, public schools, public hospitals, elections offices, libraries, transit authorities, courts, and social services—are funded by all taxpayers, including the 44 million Americans with disabilities.
Property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes flow from every resident into the systems that build and maintain these digital public squares.
Americans with disabilities pay these taxes. And then, in far too many cases, are locked out of the very services their money built. This is not merely bad policy. It is taxation without full participation. The 2024 rule seeks to ensure that when government spends public money on digital infrastructure, all the public can actually use it.
V. The Concerns Raised by NLC and NACo Do Not Justify Weakening the Rule
We have reviewed the letters submitted to OIRA by the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties. We acknowledge that local governments face real resource constraints, and we do not dismiss the practical challenges of compliance. However, the remedies proposed by NLC and NACo would cause far greater harm than the problems they seek to address.
Compliance costs and benefits have already been taken into consideration in the rule:
NACo’s own survey data shows that actual remediation costs for small counties average approximately 33,000 dollars—closely aligning with the DOJ’s Regulatory Impact Analysis estimate of 32,000 dollars. The gap NACo identifies is not between costs and affordability, but between costs and allocated budgets. This is a prioritization challenge, not an impossibility.
Entities have had two full years since the rule’s publication and fourteen years of advance notice since the rulemaking process began. Many state and local governments that have already achieved compliance report that following the WCAG standard has actually lowered their ongoing accessibility costs by embedding good practices into daily operations.
In addition, the rule focuses on proactive, or born-accessible, design, thus encouraging covered entities to incorporate accessibility into new content, and providing substantial exceptions for existing content (such as preexisting conventional electronic documents). Focusing on making new web content accessible ensures covered entities are approaching accessibility in the way that is easiest and least costly.
In addition, having an inaccessible website actually costs covered entities more than having an accessible one. An inaccessible website means a covered entity must maintain far more expensive staff-based mechanisms for constituents to get services in person or by telephone. The alternative to an accessible website is not that entities are excused from making their services accessible, they must simply make them accessible in much more expensive ways.
An exception for communities under ten thousand would significantly undermine access:
The ADA contains no population-based exemptions, and for good reason. A blind veteran in a rural town of five thousand has the same right to access government services as a blind veteran in a city of five hundred thousand. The size of the community does not diminish the civil rights of its disabled residents.
Moreover, assuming that small towns have small IT budgets, they likely have much smaller websites, requiring much less remediation than larger entities. The obligation, therefore, is already proportional to their resources. In addition, they always have available to them the undue burden defense, which explicitly excuses compliance when an entity does not have adequate resources to comply.
Finally, an exception for governments with fewer than ten thousand residents would fundamentally undermine the ADA’s goals because it would exempt approximately 80 percent of incorporated towns in the United States.
Creating a population threshold would establish an unprecedented carve-out suggesting that disability rights are negotiable based on geography. Such a principle is fundamentally at odds with the ADA’s universal mandate.
A deadline extension is unnecessary:
Public entities have had thirty-six years since the ADA was signed in 1990 to make their services accessible to people with disabilities. The Department first made clear that the ADA applied to websites in 1996 and issued its first guidance on the topic in 2003. Since then, courts have uniformly applied the ADA to websites, both under Title II and Title III.
Covered entities have had since 2010, when the Department issued its first ANPRM, to begin planning. They have had two full years since the rule was published in April 2024 to comply. Extending the deadline further sends the message that the civil rights of Americans with disabilities can be perpetually deferred.
The web accessibility rule increases the compliance of third-party technology vendors:
NLC and NACo raise legitimate concerns about third-party technology vendors. We know that vendors are already making their products accessible in response to the website rule. But the solution to vendor non-compliance is stronger procurement requirements and contractual accountability—not weakening the rule that protects disabled residents.
Covered entities need only use the tools they have available and contract with vendors who achieve compliance. Rather than seeking to escape liability for third-party tools, local governments should use their considerable purchasing power to demand accessibility from the technology marketplace.
Weakening the rule removes the very leverage that compels vendors to improve their products. The DOJ has consistently held that public entities cannot contract away their ADA responsibilities.
A notice-and-cure provision disserves both people with disabilities and covered entities:
A notice-and-cure provision will not achieve equal access for people with disabilities. Each time a person encounters an accessibility barrier, they would have to notify the covered entity and await remediation.
This is not timely access, particularly for services that involve a deadline, such as tax payments, or an immediate need, such as parking. Moreover, pushing covered entities to wait until after inaccessible content is created and posted increases their costs and difficulty.
While born-accessible web content costs nothing and is simple to accomplish, remediation of existing content (much of which is excepted from the current rule) is much more expensive and difficult.
VI. Weakening the Rule Increases—Rather Than Decreases—Legal Exposure for Local Governments
A critical fact that the opposition letters overlook: private ADA lawsuits do not depend on this rule. In 2025, over 8,600 federal ADA lawsuits were filed, with more than five thousand targeting digital accessibility specifically. These lawsuits proceed directly under the ADA statute and existing regulations—the web accessibility rule was not at issue.
The 2024 rule actually protects local governments by establishing clear, predictable technical standards. Without the rule, courts will continue to apply the ADA’s general effective-communication requirements to digital content—but without the clarity that WCAG 2.1 Level AA provides.
Entities that meet the standard have a clear safe harbor, along with exceptions that do not exist under the pre-existing regulation. Entities operating without that standard face unpredictable litigation with no defined benchmark for compliance.
Furthermore, multiple states—including California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New Mexico—have their own digital accessibility laws that will continue to be enforced regardless of any federal action. Weakening the federal rule does not reduce legal exposure; it fragments it across inconsistent state standards while removing the one federal framework that provides certainty.
VII. Blind Students and Citizens Are Counting on This Rule
The inaccessibility of educational materials is one of the most significant barriers to blind people achieving their full potential and making their rightful contribution to American society. Blind students are too often excluded from the curricula their sighted peers experience because educational materials are offered through inaccessible websites and applications.
As a result, they are unable to compete on a level playing field, are unable to benefit fully from their education, and are delayed in attaining their degrees and entering the workforce.
When blind students cannot access course materials, they do not become more independent—they become more dependent on institutional accommodation processes, on sighted assistants, and ultimately on government support systems.
The 2024 rule promotes the independence and self-sufficiency that this administration values. Weakening it would push more Americans with disabilities toward the very government dependency that sound policy should seek to reduce.
We note that in May 2025, the American Council on Education, on behalf of a coalition of educational associations including EDUCAUSE, asked this administration to pause implementation of the rule. We respectfully submit that this request was not well-founded.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been actively investigating digital accessibility at schools, colleges, and universities for over a decade, using WCAG as its benchmark throughout. Between 2016 and 2018 alone, OCR resolved more than one thousand cases related to digital accessibility in K-12 school systems, resulting in binding resolution agreements requiring WCAG compliance.
The claim that educational institutions do not understand what is required is contradicted by a decade of OCR enforcement actions, resolution agreements, and Dear Colleague letters issued jointly by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education.
The 2024 rule did not create a surprise for educational institutions, it codified what OCR has been requiring through individual enforcement actions for years.
Weakening or delaying the rule based on requests from institutions that have long been aware of their obligations would reward delay and penalize the blind students, deaf students, and students with other disabilities who have waited decades for equal access to the digital learning environments their peers take for granted.
VIII. The Use of an Interim Final Rule to Modify This Regulation Is Unprecedented and Procedurally Unjustified
We note with concern that the Department has chosen to submit a revised rule to OIRA as an Interim Final Rule rather than through the standard Notice of Proposed Rulemaking process.
An Interim Final Rule does not require public comment before taking effect. To our knowledge, this process is reserved for rules needed because of an emergency and has never before been used for an accessibility or civil rights regulation.
The web accessibility rule was developed through fourteen years of public engagement, with multiple rounds of notice-and-comment that generated nearly one thousand public submissions.
Modifying that rule through a process that bypasses public comment would undermine the legitimacy of the administrative process and expose any resulting changes to significant legal challenge.
IX. Our Request
Attorney General Bondi, we respectfully urge you to preserve the ADA Title II web accessibility rule in its current form, including its current compliance deadlines. The rule reflects fourteen years of careful deliberation, public input, and compromise. It provides the clarity that both disability advocates and covered entities have sought.
Additionally, we urge you to withdraw the pending Interim Final Rule from OIRA review. If modifications are to be considered, they should be pursued through the standard notice-and-comment rulemaking process that respects the voices of the millions of Americans with disabilities who stand to be affected.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of this nation’s most important civil rights achievements—a law conceived under President Reagan, signed by President George H.W. Bush, and strengthened under President George W. Bush. The 2024 web accessibility rule carries forward that bipartisan legacy into the digital age. We urge you to protect it.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Riccobono, President
National Federation of the Blind
cc: Mark Paoletta, Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs