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The Deadline Moved, the Obligation Didn’t: ADA Website Compliance for Pennsylvania Townships
Web Design & Development | Adam Post | Thursday, September 10, 2026
If you serve on a township board, you’ve probably heard your website must meet a federal accessibility standard by April 2027. That date is no longer right.
On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule pushing every Title II web accessibility deadline back a year. For Pennsylvania townships, nearly all of which serve fewer than 50,000 residents, the deadline is now April 26, 2028. The change came late and quietly, and the old date is still sitting in a lot of guidance documents, vendor emails and training slides written before April.
The extension is narrower than it sounds. DOJ moved the date and left every requirement alone.
Still, a year is some breathing room for a small township. It turns this from a scramble into something you can plan across two budget cycles, and the first of those budgets is on your desk right now.
What Changed About the
ADA
Title II Website Deadline?
DOJ published the original rule in April 2024. It was the first time the federal government said precisely what “accessible” meant for a government website, naming WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard. The 2026 interim final rule left that standard untouched and moved only the dates.
When Must Pennsylvania Townships Comply?
- Serving 50,000 or more people: April 26, 2027
- Serving fewer than 50,000, and all special district governments: April 26, 2028
Pennsylvania has 1,454 townships serving 5.6 million residents, about 44 percent of the state. The overwhelming majority fall under 50,000, so April 26, 2028 is your date.
That second category also covers special district governments, which matters if your township sits on a joint authority. Municipal authorities, joint sewer and water authorities, regional police commissions, library districts: each carries its own obligation for its own web content. That’s easy to miss, because those sites usually sit on a different domain, were often built by a different vendor, and nobody thinks of them as “the township website.”
Why Did DOJ Extend It?
Two reasons, both of which will sound familiar to anyone running a township. Small entities don’t have staff with the technical expertise this requires. And the automated remediation tools being marketed as the answer, including the
One thing worth being clear about, because it’s easy to misread: the extension changed the compliance date only. The underlying obligations didn’t move. A resident who can’t use your site to request a permit or read an agenda has the same rights this month they had last year. The new date tells you when a specific technical standard becomes the yardstick — not when any of this starts to matter.
What Does WCAG 2.1 Level AA Require of a Township Website?
Conforming at Level AA means meeting fifty success criteria: the twenty at AA, plus the thirty at Level A underneath them. Five criteria come up again and again:
- Scanned PDFs: A scanned meeting minute is a photograph of a document. Screen reader software gets nothing from it. This is the biggest problem on the average township site by a wide margin, and it’s usually measured in hundreds of files.
- Uncaptioned meeting video: If you stream or post supervisor meetings, those recordings need captions.
- Forms you can’t complete with a keyboard: Permit applications and right-to-know requests fail here constantly.
- Color contrast: Light grey text on white, or text sitting on a photo. Fails more often than people expect, and it’s usually a five-minute fix.
- Missing headings and alt text: A page can look perfectly organized and have no underlying structure at all.
We’ve written a fuller walkthrough of what
Third-party tools you link under contract count too. Tax payment portals, GIS viewers, agenda management systems. It’s worth asking each of those vendors in writing for their WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance status. Most will have an accessibility conformance report ready to send, and a few will tell you they’re already working on it. Either answer is useful, and it’s a short email to write.
What’s Exempt?
Five exceptions, all narrower than they look. Archived content kept purely for recordkeeping in a separate archive area and never modified. Documents that existed before your compliance date, but not if residents still use them to apply for or access services. That’s the part that catches people out. A permit form from 2019 that people still fill out isn’t exempt. Third-party comments posted without any arrangement with the township. Individualized password-protected documents. Social media posts predating your compliance date.
The practical read: your genuine archive is probably fine, and anything residents actively use probably isn’t, regardless of when it went up.
Not sure where your township stands? Ask Intrada to take a look at your site and we’ll tell you what you’re actually working with.
How Should a Township Use the Extra Year?
Mostly by turning it into two ordinary budget lines instead of one emergency one.
Pennsylvania township budgets are drafted in the fall and adopted in December, so the budget in front of you now is the first of the two that can carry this. Splitting the work across both is what keeps it manageable on a township budget.
2027: assessment and structure. A professional audit producing a prioritized remediation list. Fixes to the site template itself: heading structure, contrast, keyboard navigation, form labels. Template-level fixes resolve issues across every page at once and are the highest-value dollars you’ll spend. A written accessibility policy and a named staff contact.
2028: content and continuity. Remediating the document backlog, prioritized by what residents actually use. Captioning for meeting video. Staff training so new content doesn’t recreate the problem.
Worth raising with your board: if a website redesign was already anywhere on your five-year plan, moving it up is probably the cheapest route to compliance you have. Building a template to WCAG 2.1 Level AA from the start costs little more than building one that ignores it. Retrofitting a site that was never structured for it costs a great deal more. Same destination — very different invoice.
What Can You Do This Month for Free?
Quite a lot, actually. None of these need a budget line or a vendor, and each one keeps the pile from growing while you plan the rest.
- Stop making new inaccessible PDFs. Post agendas, minutes and notices as ordinary web pages. Most valuable single change most townships can make, and it costs nothing.
- Never post a scanned document again. If it has to be a PDF, generate it from the original file.
- Turn on captions in whatever you use to stream meetings. Most platforms have it built in and switched off by default.
- Write alt text for new images. It doesn't take long and the benefits add up over time.
- Count your PDFs. How many are on the site, how far back do they go? That number sizes your 2028 line item, and you can’t budget without it.
In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered one of the best-known overlay vendors to pay $1 million over misleading claims about what its automated tool actually did. Sites running overlays have gone on being sued anyway.
There’s no one-line fix for this.
PSATS has run training on these requirements and has said more is coming before the rule takes effect. Worth attending. Worth double-checking any date you’re given against the current DOJ rule too, since a lot of material still in circulation was written before the April 2026 change.
Find Out Where Your Township Stands
The range here is wide. Some township sites need a few hours of template work. Others have twenty years of scanned minutes behind them. Until you know which one you’re looking at, it’s hard to put a number in a budget.
Guessing high is as unhelpful as guessing low.
Ask us to review your township’s website and we’ll tell you what you’re dealing with, in plain English: how many documents are on the site, which issues would fail WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and which ones to fix first. That’s the sort of thing you can take into a budget meeting and point at.
We work with municipalities and public sector organizations across the commonwealth on website development, accessibility and IT infrastructure, and we’re regulars at the PSATS annual conference.
Request a website accessibility review or call us at (570) 321-7370. If you’d rather just ask a question first, that’s fine too.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is the deadline for Pennsylvania townships?
April 26, 2028 for townships serving fewer than 50,000 residents, which is nearly all of them. Entities serving 50,000 or more have until April 26, 2027. Both were extended a year by DOJ’s interim final rule of April 20, 2026.
Does the extension change what we have to do?
No. Only when the technical standard applies. The practical value of the extra year is that it lets you split the work and the cost across the 2027 and 2028 budgets rather than finding it all in one.
Do our old meeting minutes have to be fixed?
Depends on how they’re stored and used. Genuinely archived material kept for recordkeeping in a separate archive area and unmodified since may qualify. Anything residents still use to apply for or participate in services does not, regardless of when it was posted.
Are municipal authorities covered separately?
Yes, with the same April 26, 2028 date. A township that’s handled its own site may still have an authority page nobody has looked at.
Will an accessibility widget make us compliant?
No. Overlay products don’t produce WCAG conformance and have been the subject of litigation themselves.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam is a core member of the Intrada team, working in software engineering, Linux system administration, and web development.
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