DOJ Just Shut Disabled People Out of Essential Online Services for Another Year

A last-minute change from the Department of Justice (DOJ) has outraged disabled people and disability rights groups and could affect access to the ballot box come the midterm elections this November. The agency issued an interim final rule on April 20, pushing back a planned April 24, 2026, deadline for large municipalities to ensure their apps and online offerings are accessible in accordance with certain technical standards.

“It is outrageous that the Justice Department thinks that they can delay this regulation for one more year,” Chris Danielsen, a spokesperson for the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), told Truthout. “This is a real betrayal of the promise of the ADA and the promise of equal access to our government that applies to all Americans.”

Ensuring access to the websites and mobile apps of government entities is required under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which forbids discrimination based on disability in state and local government services. Since 1996, the DOJ has consistently held that the law applies to digital content.

A vast number of state and local government services are now online, including forms, payment processors, and information from election offices, courts, public hospitals, parks, libraries, utilities, transit agencies, school districts, universities, and more. Those online services often lack basic features, such as zoomable content, high-contrast text, keyboard navigation, autocomplete options, or compatibility with screen readers, which would make them accessible to users with certain visual, motor, or cognitive disabilities. Over 70 million Americans have a disability; 7.6 million have a visual disability.

The DOJ, which is responsible for issuing regulations to clarify the rights and obligations of those covered by the ADA, has been slow to issue specific regulations for online content. The rule that was meant to take effect this April was only finalized in 2024, more than three decades after the landmark disability rights legislation was signed into law. Initially, the new rule gave state and local governments in cities of 50,000 or more residents until this April to comply. Smaller municipalities were given until next April. Under the interim final rule, both deadlines have been extended by a year.

The change comes after some school districts, small governments, and other affected entities lobbied for it. The National Association of Counties, an organization representing over 3,000 county governments, cited costs and “technical difficulties” in a March letter to the Office of Management and Budget advocating for a deadline extension and other changes to the rule, including exemptions for municipalities with less than 10,000 residents and a cure period that would allow out-of-compliance municipalities to address issues without penalties.

The DOJ has not made further changes at this point but indicated that it “plans to engage in future rulemaking processes related to the substantive requirements” of the 2024 rule, a statement that could mean the department is considering limiting the rule’s scope before the new compliance deadlines.

Danielsen told Truthout that members of the disability community have little patience for these arguments and would mobilize against any effort to narrow the regulations. “The governments that asked for this, and now our federal government by granting this delay, are saying to blind and deaf-blind and low-vision people, ‘Your ability to use government services is not as important as other people’s ability to do that,’” he told Truthout. “We are relegated to second-class citizen status because while everybody else can access the services and programs of their government online, we cannot.”

Andy Slater, a Chicago-based artist working in immersive media, told Truthout the interim final rule “is absolutely an admission that blind people don’t matter, and that businesses matter more, government budgets matter more than me and my life.”

The deadline extension means at least one more year without DOJ enforcement to ensure disabled people can access online government services — even after decades of the DOJ and various courts holding that access is a right. “DOJ is supposed to come up with regulations that say ‘Okay, this is how you comply,’ [but] it doesn’t change the law that says you cannot discriminate against a person with a disability,” Larry Canada, a disability rights lawyer and legal director at the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, told Truthout. “Whether the regulations are there or not, that would be a violation.”

Previously, in the absence of federal enforcement, advocacy groups have lobbied individual entities or turned to the courts. The NFB has reached settlements with public universities requiring their web-based material be made accessible and participated in litigation over inaccessible online voter registration forms. But the average web user has little recourse.

Margie Donovan, a retiree living in Folsom, California, told Truthout she had been looking forward to this April’s compliance deadline so she could use it to pressure her local government to update its website. “Without an accessible website from the city in which I live, it leaves me out of almost everything,” Donovan told Truthout. “I had planned to move forward with a bigger push going, ‘Now you guys have to do this,’ and now I have to wait at least another year, and I don’t get to participate in anything that sighted people get to participate in in the City of Folsom because of lack of accessibility to our website.”

Donovan said she has raised her concerns with several city officials, but most aspects of the city’s online presence remain inaccessible to her as a screen reader user. She pays out of pocket for a sighted person to help with some vital tasks, including reviewing her city utility bills. But that service is cost-prohibitive, not available on demand, and requires allowing another person access to her sensitive personal information, such as log-in or bank account details — compromises that could put her at risk and that most sighted people never even have to consider.

“It feels to me that the city doesn’t care about people who have sight loss, to not even put one ounce forward of effort to make their city website, probably the most important tool for everyone in this city, fully accessible,” Donovan told Truthout. “I find it extremely infuriating that the can’s being kicked down the road another year.”

For Slater, the interim rule change came after he had spent weeks struggling to file and follow up on an unemployment insurance claim after he was laid off at the end of March. “There are a lot of accessibility barriers that should not be there, shouldn’t have even been there 10 years ago, like really basic web design stuff,” Slater told Truthout of the series of online verifications, forms, and uploads required. “It also feeds what society thinks of blind folks, that we can’t do anything and that we’re helpless and hopeless. The reason is because we’re not getting the access and the support and the respect that we deserve.”

Another aspect of government that has increasingly been shifted online is election administration. Disability rights advocates are especially concerned that the recent interim final rule comes just months before the upcoming midterm elections. “It will disrupt access to those parts of the voting process that are handled online,” Danielsen told Truthout. “We have to be able to register to vote online [and] find our polling location. If it’s accessible, the most convenient way for a blind person to do that is online because we’re not going to be able to read the printed voter registration information that we’re sent in the mail.”

Research published in the lead-up to the 2024 general election found that less than a third of 43 online voter registration forms for 42 states and Washington, D.C., could likely be navigated and completed independently by disabled users. Many were hopeful that this year’s deadline would bring vast improvements ahead of November’s midterms. While some gains have likely been made, lack of enforcement means there are no guarantees.

Shortcomings in web accessibility can also make it difficult or impossible for some disabled people to find information on when, where, and how to vote. When the information is difficult to find, more would-be voters are likely to be discouraged from casting their ballots.

Groups like NFB and the American Association of People with Disabilities have issued statements or written to the DOJ to condemn the interim final rule. Many disabled people are also raising the alarm about how the change fits into a larger trend of the Trump administration undermining the rights of disabled Americans. “It goes along with all the other ways that this current administration feels about disabled people — all the eugenics and ableism that’s part of the platform,” Slater told Truthout.

Canada told Truthout that, with each move the government makes to roll back the rights of disabled people, no matter how small those steps may seem, he recalls Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 exposé on Willowbrook State School, which revealed that residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities at the state-run institution in New York were being subjected to beatings, experimented on, and deprived of fundamental rights.

“What’s to stop us from going back to warehousing people, kids, adults, like that again, but the law?” Canada said. “If you’re not going to enforce the law, to me, that’s where we’re going to end up.”