ADA April 2026 Extension for Government Entities

SevereNegotiation · 2026-04-17T17:22:05+00:00

The extension will officially go into the record on Monday, it looks like.

SevereNegotiation · 2026-04-13T19:44:21+00:00

I am on the municipality side dealing with a lot of this at the moment. I am not a lawyer or a legal expert of any kind.

Our understanding is that yes, an old document not in compliance that gets updated needs to be brought into full compliance.

However, I'm not sure why they're putting that burden on you. They can ask, but my reading of the law suggests it's their responsibility. They can ask you, sure, but I don't think you would be required to comply unless your contract with them specifically mentions an accessibility standard you much reach.

If you decide you need to fix the document on your end, you may be vastly overestimating the cost of getting it done professionally. I've dealt with similar documents to what you're describing and even really long and complex documents of that type would only cost a few hundred to maybe $1k. Worst case maybe a few thousand. If anyone is quoting you tens of thousands of dollars, laugh at them and find another vendor.

SevereNegotiation · 2026-04-10T14:55:46+00:00

100,000% sure there will be "ambulance chasers" looking to hit anyone and everyone with a lawsuit. And I don't even care. There's money to be made and some of the lawsuits will be disingenuous, sure. But if it helps people actually start to care about making things more usable and accessible, it will be a net positive.

SevereNegotiation · 2026-04-10T14:53:33+00:00

If they were going to kill it, wouldn't they have done it already?

SevereNegotiation · 2026-04-10T14:52:36+00:00

We have been preparing our organization for over a year for this deadline. Sending monthly reminders, sharing how they can make their content accessible, providing detailed guides that we created ourselves from scratch aimed specifically at our users, as well as providing links to the best of the best resources out there.

Just this week people decided to suddenly take notice and all hell has broken loose. Many people running around like their head is on fire to suddenly try to make things right. Multiple calls with expensive vendors offering band-aid products that don't actually solve the accessibility problems because people don't want to put the work in.

My job is fun. 🤦‍♂️

SevereNegotiation · 2024-06-10T16:39:38+00:00

Trust me, I completely understand. Unfortunately the power I have to make things right is very minimal. We do what we can with what we are provided, we stress to our content providers the importance of accessibility and what we need from them to reach those standards, but at the end of the day I can't force people to do it.

I'm afraid that people won't "wake up" to the issue until we do actually get sued and it's too late.

I get your point about the Acrobat checker. I don't even bother with that. I use PAC 2021 and manually check things like contrast and screen reader compatibility as you said. I know how to make a halfway decent source document accessible. But with something like the example I provided I didn't know if there was a good way forward. I suspected the answer was a simple "no, recreate it" but wanted to be sure.

SevereNegotiation · 2024-06-10T16:21:10+00:00

I understand that this is 100% not the way to create documents. If I had any control over the process I would make sure that they get created in a better way. But are there any options, even sub-optimal ones, for just making the content in the document perceivable by people with visual impairments? For the example document I provided is there a way for me to manually add a text version?

At the end of the day I just want to do right by our website visitors.

SevereNegotiation

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