Why the 2027 accessibility deadline is really a 2026 problem, according to Granicus

The company is warning governments against treating the extension as breathing room, pointing to governments that have already done the work

Washington, D.C. – Governments that are treating the extended federal accessibility deadline as breathing room are making a costly mistake, according to Granicus, the global leader in digital experience technologies and services for the public sector. The work involved takes the better part of a year to do properly, which means the time to start is now.

Under the Department of Justice’s Title II rule, state and local governments serving populations of 50,000 or more must meet the WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standard by April 26, 2027. Smaller jurisdictions and special districts have until April 26, 2028. The deadline for larger jurisdictions was moved from April 2026 earlier this year, but the underlying legal obligation has not changed. Accessibility has been required for years. The updated rule simply brings clearer expectations and stronger consequences.

Granicus is urging public sector leaders to treat the additional year as a planning cycle instead of a postponement. Bringing a government’s websites, applications and documents up to standard means auditing large volumes of content, remediating it, training staff and testing throughout. For most agencies that work runs across many months, and often longer. A government that waits until the deadline feels close will already be behind.

Granicus has developed an Accessibility Maturity Model to help governments understand where they stand and what comes next. The model identifies five stages, from Ground Zero, where agencies are in a reactive state of patchwork fixing, through to Stage 4, where accessible service design is built into how a government publishes and operates every day. Granicus’s own research found that 69 percent of agencies surveyed currently sit in the two earliest stages, still finding their footing rather than taking systematic control.

Recent polling by Granicus also suggests many agencies are some distance from ready. In live polls during a recent Granicus accessibility webinar, not one government professional felt their agency was staying ahead of regulatory change and public needs. Nearly two thirds (64%) said they were either hesitant about the right path forward or new to the standard and unsure of their plans. When asked about the biggest barrier to accessible public meetings, government professionals named multilingual access most often, ahead of virtual access such as streaming and captioning.

“Accessibility is not a box you tick once and forget. Much like cybersecurity, it is an ongoing responsibility that has to be managed every day,” said Katy Jones, Quality Engineering and Accessibility Manager, Granicus. “The agencies getting this right are the ones that started early and built accessibility into how they work, instead of treating it as a one-time audit. The deadline moved, but the task did not get any smaller. The good news is that it is achievable, and we have governments proving it.”

One of those governments is the City of West Palm Beach, Florida, which treated the original 2026 date as its target and met it. The city has identified and begun remediating more than 3,000 PDFs and now supports 1.3 million website users with a more accessible digital experience.

“Preparing for ADA Title II compliance has been a multi-year effort that required collaboration across departments, continuous training, and a commitment to making accessibility part of everything we do. By taking a proactive approach and beginning this work early, we were able to make meaningful progress, better serve all members of our community, and successfully meet the original 2026 compliance deadline,” said Kathleen Joy, Director of Communications, City of West Palm Beach.

Richland County, South Carolina tells a similar story. The county converted and replaced more than 8,000 PDFs with accessible web content and saw more than 220,000 additional quarterly page views, alongside a measurable improvement in its digital quality score.

Kyle Holsclaw, Director of Information Technology, Richland County said:

“Richland County has made web accessibility a strategic priority by replacing our aging on-premises website with a modern, hosted Granicus platform designed to provide a more accessible and user-friendly experience for all residents. We have also undertaken a significant effort to archive older, less accessible PDF documents and are continuing to transition information into accessible web pages and online forms, making County services easier to find and use. Building the new site in less than a year gave us a fantastic opportunity to completely audit every piece of content and decide what would move over and in what form. We had tools like Siteimprove to help with document inventory and concurrently ran internal trainings around accessibility, usability and writing in plain language for our content creators. We partnered with our local disability-led nonprofit to underscore the importance of the work. It’s easier to ask staff to change when they can understand and experience the why.”

The experience of County of Monterey, California illustrates just how deep that work can go.

“When we began rebuilding our Housing and Community Development website, I found almost 19,000 PDFs, most of which were still live. After archiving the low-hanging fruit, we were still left with around 4,000 necessary documents, some of which were 900 pages long. It became clear this wasn’t something we could solve by remediating documents one by one. We had to rethink the way information and services are delivered online entirely. It has taken us nearly four years to become compliant by the deadline, but this work is helping us change processes, not just patch the problem,” said Dina Northcutt, Management Analyst, Housing and Community Development, County of Monterey.

The need is significant. Around 70 million adults in the United States live with a disability, just over a quarter of the adult population (source link). For many of them, an inaccessible government website is the difference between reaching a public service independently and being shut out of it.

Document accessibility remains one of the most common points of failure. Most governments rely heavily on PDFs, which are not accessible by default and cannot be made compliant by automated tools alone. They require manual review to meet the standard, which is one reason the work takes time and cannot be rushed at the last minute.

About Granicus

Granicus is the global leader in digital experiences for government, supporting more than 7,000 public sector organizations worldwide and managing more than 30 billion digital interactions each year. Through its Government Experience Cloud (GXC), Government Experience Agent (GXA), and Government Experience Insights (GXI), Granicus helps governments deliver trusted, accessible, and efficient services — at scale, and with accountability built in.