ADA Title II web rule
The ADA Title II web accessibility rule, published by the US Department of Justice in 2024, sets a technical standard for the web content and mobile applications of state and local government entities — including public school districts — and adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as that standard.
| Exception | A school example that fits | A school example districts wrongly assume fits |
|---|---|---|
| Archived web content | A 2011 bond campaign microsite kept in an archive area, unchanged, and identified as archived | Last year's handbook still linked from the current parent page |
| Pre-existing conventional electronic documents | A 2019 board packet PDF nobody has touched since | The enrolment form families are told to download today |
| Third-party content not posted by or for the entity | A comment a member of the public leaves on a district post | A flyer the district asked a partner to produce and then posted |
| Individualised password-protected documents | One student's IEP delivered inside a portal to that family | The whole parent portal, on the theory that it is behind a login |
| Pre-existing social media posts | A 2022 photo post | This morning's closure announcement |
Scope and timing
The rule covers web content and mobile applications that a public entity provides or makes available, directly or through contractual, licensing or other arrangements. That last phrase is the one to read twice: content delivered through a vendor's platform on the district's behalf is the district's content for these purposes.
Compliance dates run on entity size. The rule set 24 April 2026 for public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more, and 24 April 2027 for smaller entities and for special district governments. Which of those a given school district falls under depends on how the entity is classified, and that classification question belongs with your counsel rather than with a vendor's sales engineer — it is the single most common thing districts get wrong about this rule.
The rule also carries the ADA's existing limits: measures that would result in a fundamental alteration or in undue financial and administrative burdens are not required, but a public entity relying on that has to document the determination at a senior level and still provide access by other means.
What it means when your vendor is not accessible
A district cannot contract out of Title II. If a communications platform sends an inaccessible newsletter to families, the content is still the district's, and the obligation is still the district's.
The practical consequence is that accessibility moves from a nice-to-have in an RFP to a scored requirement with a legal deadline attached. What to ask for:
- A current Accessibility Conformance Report against WCAG 2.1 AA, dated, with the evaluation method stated.
- Which surfaces it covers — staff console, family web view, mobile app, and the rendered output that reaches a family's inbox are four different products.
- Whether accessibility is tested automatically in the vendor's build, or assessed once by a consultancy in a year they are reluctant to name.
- What happens to a PDF or a document a staff member uploads. Most platforms pass it through untouched, which means the district's own authoring practice is the control.
Kastr's status, stated plainly. We have no VPAT and no Accessibility Conformance Report, and no automated accessibility testing in CI. We are pre-launch and have not commissioned an audit. If your procurement requires a current ACR at submission, we will fail that requirement today. We would rather be excluded on an accurate answer than shortlisted on a template with "Supports" typed into every row.
The parts districts underestimate
PDFs. The single largest volume of inaccessible school content is documents: newsletters exported from a design tool, scanned permission slips, board packets. An untagged scan is an image, and a screen reader gets nothing from it. This is an authoring and workflow problem inside the district, and no vendor solves it.
Video. Captions on board meeting recordings and on principal messages. Auto-captions are a starting point, not a compliant end state, particularly for proper nouns and for students' names.
Third-party embeds. Calendars, payment portals, athletics schedules, translation widgets. Each is content the district makes available, and each has its own conformance position.
Translated content. A page translated into Spanish has its own language attribute, its own reading order and its own contrast considerations. Translation and accessibility are usually owned by different people who have never met.
This entry describes what the rule says. Whether and how it applies to your district is a question for your own counsel, not for a vendor.
Questions people actually ask
When is the ADA Title II web rule deadline for my district?
The rule set 24 April 2026 for public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more and 24 April 2027 for smaller entities and special district governments. Which applies to a specific district depends on how that entity is classified, which is a question for district counsel.
Does the rule cover documents posted by a PTA or a vendor?
Content a public entity provides or makes available through contractual or other arrangements is covered, so material a district asks a partner to produce and then posts is generally in scope. Content posted independently by a third party that the entity did not procure is treated differently.
Are archived school board minutes exempt?
The archived web content exception is narrow: the content has to be kept for reference, be unchanged since archiving, be stored in a designated archive area, and be identified as archived. Old documents still linked from live parent pages generally do not qualify.
Does using an accessible vendor platform make a district compliant?
No. It removes one source of failure. The obligation stays with the district, and most remaining failures are in district-authored content: untagged PDFs, uncaptioned video, and images posted without alternative text.
One price. Every feature. Locked for three years.
$3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students. No tiers, no add-on modules, no per-message fees. Published on the site because you should not have to book a call to learn a price.