03 — ADA Title II
ADA Title II: effective communication, including online.
Title II covers all public K-12 districts and public colleges. The 2024 DOJ final rule on web accessibility brings significant new requirements — with hard deadlines in 2027 and 2028.
In 60 seconds
The summary.
Title II requires public entities — including school districts and Early Intervention agencies and public colleges — to provide effective communication for individuals with vision, hearing, or speech disabilities. That means qualified sign-language interpreters, CART, captioning, accessible electronic formats, and other auxiliary aids, at no cost to the person. This is the effective-communication duty at 28 CFR § 35.160.
The April 2024 DOJ final rule extended Title II to web content and mobile apps, codified at 28 CFR § 35.200. All public entities must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Compliance deadlines were extended one year by the DOJ's April 2026 Interim Final Rule.
The deadlines
When you have to comply.
- April 26, 2027 — public entities serving populations of 50,000+ (most large districts and EI agencies and public universities).
- April 26, 2028 — smaller public entities and special-district governments.
WCAG 2.1 AA contains 50 success criteria, including alt-text, keyboard navigation, captions for prerecorded video, audio descriptions, color-contrast minimums, and consistent navigation.
What this creates demand for
The translation-and-captioning intersection.
WCAG 2.1 AA's captioning and audio-description requirements directly create demand for multilingual captioning, subtitling, and audio description — for instructional video, school-board recordings, public-meeting broadcasts, and any video served from a public-school website.
The accessible-document requirements (PDF remediation, alt-text, screen-reader compatibility) cross over with translation when those documents need to exist in multiple languages for LEP families.
Captioning and accessible documents