ADA Title II

The United States Department of Justice Americans with Disabilities Act regulations mandate that, with limited exceptions, websites and mobile applications be readily accessible to people with disabilities by April 24, 2026. Readily accessible typically means compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards.

What is WCAG?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a documented set of practices and standards created to aid web developers and digital content authors in making their digital content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines were first published in 1999 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the standards body credited with defining how the Web works - and have been periodically updated since then, with each version aligning with device usage and information consumption trends present at the time of publish.

The current WCAG version is 2.2.

Why does the ADA require conformance with WCAG 2.1 and not WCAG 2.2?

Authoring and publishing regulatory requirements, whether at the federal or university-level (i.e., UC policies) are lengthy processes and often lag behind any externally referenced guidelines.

 

Conformance levels

WCAG is organized into ascending conformance levels A ("single-A"), AA ("double-A") and AAA ("triple-A"). Each conformance level builds upon the former, adding a more stringent layer of success criteria. Level A defines the most basic and fundamental practices; AA incorporates additional practices and enhanced targets; AAA is the most thorough and stringent. Level AA is commonly seen as a reasonable balance between meeting accessibility needs and technical achievability.

WCAG 2.1 level AA is the de factor industry standard adhered to by both public and private entities.

What digital content is covered by this rule?

With few exceptions, anything that exists on the web is subject to the ADA requirements. This includes, but isn't necessarily limited to:

  • Web content
  • PDFs
  • Email
  • Electronic office documents
  • Social media
  • Online courses
  • Course materials
  • Procurement
  • Video

What about print projects?

Technically, printed products are out of scope of the ADA. However....

Consider the full lifecycle of your print projects. Do they ever find their way onto the web as ads, infographics, or pdfs? If so, they do become subject to ADA. In such cases, it may be more economical and lower effort to incorporate digital accessibility into print projects during their creation.

 

Getting started

Prioritizing your work

If you're facing mountains of digital content, it may be difficult to know where to start. For each digital project or product, you may what to consider the following:

  • Project age
  • Audience constitution and size
  • Time frame
  • Vendor vs in-house
  • Previous or outstanding accommodation requests

Each of the above attributes may impact the priority you assign to a particular project or product.

You may also want to look at UCOP's prioritization guide.

Testing, measuring and monitoring

Siteimprove is UC's selected platform for monitoring web content accessibility. Licensing has been negotiated at the system level and costs are covered at the campus level. There are no trickle-down costs to the campus units and there are no usage limitations.

Get started with Siteimprove

Once a url is registered in Siteimprove, it will be crawled every five days and updated site report will be generated that includes an overall accessibility score and a list of outstanding issues. A site history is maintained, which is helpful in assessing progress toward compliance.

Testing

When working on content remediation, it is often desireable to repeatedly retest a webpage after small changes are made. For this type of rapid testing, browser extensions are particularly helpful. Two such extensions are:

Getting help

If you're feeling stuck or need a second perspective on something, there are several resources across campus that can help:

Getting trained and learning more

The Sitimprove platform includes a Learning Hub with a large catalog of on-demand modules covering a wide array of accessibility topics. When you're logged into Siteimprove, you can access the Learning Hub via the Help Center and Training menu item in the upper-right of the screen —

If you're looking for a hands-on learning experience, consider the AccessibiliTrees Badging Program.

Project prioritization, management and funding

Reach out to the UC Irvine ADA Coordinator if you need assistance in prioritizing your accessibility efforts, managing them or finding funding.

Faculty and courseware support

The Digital Accessibility Support & Help (DASH) team is ready and available to help faculty and staff educators improve the accessibility of their courses and course materials.

Remediation advice and technical guidance

For technical assistance with implementing accessibiilty into your digital content, the UC Irvine IT Accessibilty Workgroup can help connect you with a subject matter expert appropriate for your particular needs. You can reach out to either of both co-chairs: