ADA Title II compliance for Massachusetts retirement boards.
The deadline you may have missed: April 24, 2026.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s final rule under ADA Title II requires state and local government websites — including the websites of public retirement boards — to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 24, 2026 for jurisdictions with population over 50,000, and by April 24, 2027 for smaller jurisdictions.
If your board is on Drupal 7, an unmaintained vendor template, a Wix or WordPress freelancer build, or a placeholder page on a parked domain, you are almost certainly out of compliance today.
What “WCAG 2.1 Level AA” actually requires
| Principle | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Perceivable | Every image has alt text; every video has captions; color contrast hits 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large text |
| Operable | Everything works with a keyboard alone; a "skip to main content" link exists; no content flashes more than 3× per second |
| Understandable | Pages declare a language; forms label every input; error messages identify the field that errored |
| Robust | The HTML parses cleanly; ARIA roles aren’t lying about widget state; assistive tech can name and operate every UI control |
A visitor-facing accessibility widget — the third-party blue circle that “adds dyslexia mode” or “increases contrast” — is not a substitute. The DOJ rule applies to the underlying site, not to overlays. Several class-action firms specifically litigate widget-only implementations.
Concrete failures we audit for (and our competitors ship)
In a sample of 16 retirement-board websites built on Revize, the DJ-22 template, and Drupal 7:
- Only 6% ship a skip-to-content link
- 44% of pages have no
<h1>element (or have multiple) - 25% of forms have empty or duplicate labels
- 31% of images carry no alt attribute
- 18% of color-contrast checks fail at body-text size
These aren’t subjective design choices. They are concrete WCAG 2.1 AA failures, and exactly the kind of finding that shows up first in an automated audit and surfaces in a plaintiff’s complaint.
What BoardSites does about it
We build to WCAG 2.1 AA as a floor, not a marketing claim:
- axe-core in CI.Every code change runs the same accessibility audit a plaintiff’s expert would run. We don’t merge code that introduces a new violation.
- Skip-to-content on every page. Built into the site shell.
- One
<h1>per page, semantic landmarks (<header>,<main>,<nav>,<footer>) on every template. - Labels for every form input. No empty labels, no duplicates.
- Keyboard navigation is a tested first-class path. Tab order, focus visibility, and skip-link visibility are tested.
- Color contrast is tokenized. The brand color you pick gets paired with text colors that meet 4.5:1.
- Documents. PDFs uploaded through our admin keep their accessibility metadata. We surface OCR text for scanned legacy documents (Premium tier).
Switching when you’re already non-compliant
The 2026 deadline is when complaint filings become well-founded; DOJ enforcement and remediation under court supervision typically follow the complaint, not the deadline. Switching now puts you in front of any reasonable enforcement timeline.
Standard-tier migration ships in two to four weeks. Premium-tier white-glove migration ships in 30 days.
Sources
- DOJ final rule: 28 C.F.R. § 35.200 — Web and Mobile Accessibility for State and Local Government Entities.
- WCAG 2.1 AA quick reference
- DOJ ADA Title II information