That Deadline Email Is Not About Your Shop

The email

There is a particular email going around, and if one has reached you it probably looked official. A federal deadline for web accessibility. Your business needs to comply. A number attached, a fine or a lawsuit risk or a date. Sometimes a free scan of your site comes with it, and the scan found problems.

I want to be straight about how I know: I have not received one of these. I have read a lot of accounts from people who have, and then gone and read the rule those accounts describe. So treat this as someone who checked the source, not someone with a story about the inbox.

The frustrating part is that it is not a straightforward scam. There is a real federal rule. It has real dates. Somebody read it, understood roughly a third of it, and built a sales process on the third they understood. That is harder to argue with than an outright lie, because every individual sentence sounds checkable.

So let me do the boring thing and separate the parts.

Two different laws with confusingly similar names

The Americans with Disabilities Act has titles, and two of them come up in web conversations.

Title II covers state and local government. Cities. Counties. Ports. Transit districts. Public universities. Special districts, which on the Oregon coast means a lot of things people do not immediately picture as government: water districts, fire districts, port authorities.

In April 2024 the Department of Justice adopted a technical standard for those entities, and it named a specific version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The compliance dates were later extended. As things stand, entities serving a population of fifty thousand or more have until 26 April 2027, and smaller entities — along with all special districts, regardless of size — have until 26 April 2028.

Those dates are real. If you run a port or a city department, that paragraph is about you, and it is worth taking seriously.

Title III covers private business. Shops, restaurants, studios, clinics, galleries, most of what I work with.

For Title III, the Department of Justice has not adopted a technical web standard. That is the sentence the email leaves out, and it is the sentence that changes what the email means.

What that does and does not mean

It does not mean private businesses are outside the ADA. They are not, and I am not going to pretend the situation is simpler than it is.

What it means is narrower and more specific: there is no adopted federal technical standard for private business websites, and therefore there is no federal countdown clock aimed at your shop. When a vendor writes that a particular guidelines version is federally required for your business, that claim is not accurate as stated.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. What I can tell you is what the rule says and where to read it, which is a different job and the only one I am qualified for.

The right place to read it is ada.gov. Not my site, not a vendor's summary, not a blog post — including this one. The Department of Justice publishes guidance in plain language, for free, and it is genuinely readable. I checked their pages on 7 August and again on 9 August, and nothing had moved between those two dates.

I mention the second check because these dates have already been extended once. Anything I write about them has a shelf life, and the source outlives my summary of it.

Why I would follow the standard anyway

Here is where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to read all of this as so ignore it, and that is not what I think.

The guidelines are a good description of how to build a site that people can actually use. Most of what they ask for is unglamorous: describe your images, label your form fields, do not rely on faint grey text, make sure a keyboard can reach everything a mouse can. None of that is exotic and none of it is expensive to do while you are already in the file.

The difference is the reason for doing it. Following a standard because it is a reasonable description of good work is sturdy. Following it because someone emailed you a countdown is not, and it tends to produce the wrong purchase, a compliance product rather than a fixed website.

There is also something I keep coming back to. When people build things, they build for themselves by default, which quietly means they build for other people like themselves. Accessibility is one of the few places where that habit becomes visible and correctable in an afternoon. That is a decent reason to care, and it does not require a deadline.

If you got the email

Two things worth doing, in this order.

Work out which title applies to you. If you are a private business, the specific deadline in that email is not aimed at you. If you are a public entity, it probably is, and the dates above are the ones to check against the source.

Then read ada.gov yourself rather than taking my word for it. That is the point of this post. Someone who sends you to the primary source is not the one selling you something.

If you read it and it does not make sense, that is a normal reaction to a federal rule. Text me at 503-664-0546 and I will go through it with you free, and I will tell you plainly if I think it does not apply to you. Email works too: eog@ernestofgaia.xyz.

And if it turns out the rule does apply to you, I will say so just as plainly. That is the only version of this that is worth anything.

#ernestGoesToAI