Marie Moyer
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
State and local governments will be given one more year to update their websites and apps to match requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act following an extension by the Department of Justice.
The Department of Justice announced the initial order on April 24, 2024. Local governments with a total population of 50,000 or more were required to make web and mobile applications compliant with the ADA by April 24, 2026.
Effective April 20, 2026 the new deadline will be April 26, 2027. Local governments with a population of 50,000 and below will also get a deadline extension from April 26, 2027 to April 26, 2028.
The requirement falls under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The title focuses on the nondiscrimination based on disability in state and local government services. This includes how local governments communicate with people with disabilities. This also includes all public entities within the local government like county departments and public school districts.
Accessibility improvements are intended to support people with a broad range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, neurological, and physical conditions.
Visual accessibility improvements may include increasing text spacing and using sans-serif fonts to enhance readability. Governments may also adjust color contrast to ensure text stands out clearly against backgrounds. Websites are also recommended to avoid relying on colors like red and green for buttons or links that may be hard to distinguish for color-blind users.
Visually impaired users may also use screen readers, which read website pages to the user. These often follow the page from top to bottom and rely on a clear website order and headlines.
“It’s doable, it’s not impossible, but it’s really, really difficult,” Julie Brinkoff, Project Director of Great Plains ADA Center said. “By adding this one thing, all of a sudden you just change the ability for someone to go through a document easily, to find content, to go back and review content.”
Other additions include making websites friendly for keyboard users who do not use a mouse and including an option to add more time when filling out forms. Alternative text may also be added to describe images on a website through screen readers.
Brinkoff adds that when training organizations in following ADA guidelines, online forms often have many errors.
“When you’re having difficulty with a form or a form can’t be submitted, there should be a pop-up or some type of way that the user is informed that there is a difficulty and what that difficulty is, how it can be remediated,” Brinkoff said. “Think again for the blind user who’s getting no information and, you know, they don’t have a way to even know if the form went through or what’s going on.”
The Boone County government tells ABC 17 NEws website accommodations are moving along smoothly. According to the last U.S. Census from 2020, Boone County has a population of over 183,000. They were initially notified of the updated deadline on April 17.
“It’s a continual effort to make these improvements,” Boone County Southern District Commissioner Justin Aldred said. “When we implement these changes for ADA, it also makes things better for the wider group of users and the community at large that uses it.”
Aldred adds that many changes, like descriptive text, are also helpful for rural residents with limited internet.
“This is something that we want to make really, really good for our users because ultimately for a lot of people that live across the county, this may be their first time interacting with local government,” Aldred said.
The Boone County Government reports to have been working on overall website improvements since 2007, focusing specifically on ADA guidelines after the order in 2024. The team has updated around 455 web pages.
Aldered adds that the changes have not resulted in additional costs, just extra hours for those working on Boone County Government websites.
“We have our local government here with 13 independent elected officials, all sorts of individuals that have different offices, different goals, different objectives,” Aldred said. “Ultimately we have a wonderful I.T. team that supported them and putting changes together and making sure that everything is up to date.”
With the additional time, Boone County’s current plan is to manage how the county’s website interacts with third-party products.
“Just making sure that everything talks to each other properly and that everything works as it should,” Aldered said.
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