DOJ Title II web rule: which deadline is yours, and the duty it doesn't cover

The rule sits at 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H. It adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard, and it applies to two things: the web content a public entity provides or makes available, and the mobile apps it provides or makes available. That includes content a contractor publishes on your behalf.

It does not cover your printed signage. It does not cover the information posted at a stop, on a platform, or inside a vehicle. A station can be fully WCAG 2.1 AA on the website and still leave a blind rider with no way to know which bay they are standing at.

The trigger is the total population of the public entity, not the size of its budget, its headcount or its ridership. And there is a second criterion that catches a lot of transit authorities off guard.

• April 24, 2026 — public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more.
• April 26, 2027 — public entities with a total population under 50,000, and special district governments regardless of population.

That second line is the one worth reading twice. A large share of transit authorities in the United States are constituted as special district governments, which means the later date applies to them even when they serve a metropolitan area of millions. If nobody on your team has checked how your agency is legally constituted, that is the first thing to establish — before you scope any remediation work.

The reverse trap is just as common. A city department that runs transit as one of its services is not a special district; it inherits the city's population figure and, in most metros, the 2026 date.

The rule carves out several categories. They are genuine, but each is tightly drawn, and reading them as a general escape hatch is a reliable way to fail an audit.

• Archived web content, kept for reference and not altered since being archived.
• Preexisting conventional electronic documents, unless they are currently used to apply for, access or participate in a service.
• Content posted by third parties that the entity neither provides nor makes available.
• Individualized documents that are password-protected.
• Preexisting social media posts.

Note the second one. A PDF schedule from 2019 sitting in an archive is one thing; the same PDF still being the way riders find out when the bus comes is a document currently used to access a service, and it is in scope. Most agencies have more of the second kind than they think.

Here is what makes the next eighteen months genuinely useful rather than merely expensive. To scope the web work, you have to inventory how riders actually get information. That inventory almost always surfaces a gap that predates the 2024 rule by decades.

Under 28 CFR 35.160, a public entity must take appropriate steps to ensure that communication with people with disabilities is as effective as communication with everyone else, furnishing auxiliary aids and services where needed, and giving primary consideration to what the individual requests. That duty has been in force since the ADA's implementing regulations. It is not satisfied by a compliant website.

The Department of Transportation's rules add operational specifics for transit: 49 CFR Part 37 governs the provision of transportation services, including announcing stops and identifying routes to riders who need it, and 49 CFR Part 38 sets accessibility specifications for vehicles. These are the obligations that live at the stop and inside the vehicle, exactly where a website cannot reach.

So the honest sequence is: the web rule sets the clock, the audit finds the physical information gap, and closing that gap is a separate piece of work answering to a separate rule.

• Establish how your agency is legally constituted, and therefore which date binds you. Put the answer in writing.
• Inventory rider-facing information by channel — website, app, printed schedules, stop signage, in-vehicle announcements — not by department. The gaps live between departments.
• Separate the WCAG 2.1 AA remediation backlog from the effective-communication backlog. They have different owners, different budgets and different rules behind them.
• Ask every vendor for an accessibility conformance report. In federally funded procurement it will be requested anyway, and a vendor who cannot produce one is telling you something.
• Check whether the physical work is fundable. Section 5310 and USDOT discretionary programs have supported accessibility deployments, and grant calendars are slower than remediation calendars.

NaviLens is an auxiliary aid for effective communication. Printed markers at entrances, on platforms, at stops and inside vehicles are detected by the rider's own phone from a distance and without aiming, and the information is read aloud through the screen reader they already use, in their own language. No power, no wiring, no construction.

What that does not do is make you compliant with anything. It closes one specific gap — riders who cannot read printed signage getting the same information as everyone else — and it produces usage evidence you can cite when you document how you are meeting the effective-communication duty.

In the United States it is running at the MTA in New York, where a pilot at Jay Street–MetroTech grew into a deployment across dozens of subway stations and bus stops funded by a USDOT SMART grant, and at NJ TRANSIT, MBTA, CapMetro in Austin and VIA in San Antonio. Those agencies are the useful reference points, because they have already had the conversation you are about to have.