On April 24, 2024, the Federal Department of Justice (DOJ) published its rule, “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities.” This web accessibility rule was promulgated under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and is designed to ensure that web content and mobile apps provided by state and local governments are accessible to people with disabilities.¹

With implementation deadlines now around the corner, public health professionals working for state and local governments need to understand these rules to ensure that their websites are compliant with the new standards and, more importantly, are fully accessible to people with disabilities. This may prove challenging for health departments that use interactive data dashboards on their website. In those situations, health departments will need to exercise special care and creativity to make their data dashboards as accessible as possible.  

Background

Title II of the ADA provides that “no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity.” As public entities are increasingly delivering services through websites and mobile applications, access to these digital platforms has become essential. However, many state and local government web and mobile services are not designed with accessibility in mind and, therefore, are not equally available to individuals with disabilities. This can make it difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to access government services.² To address this gap, the DOJ’s web accessibility rule incorporates already established technical requirements in the broader community to provide standards for how public entities can meet their obligations under Title II in the digital context.

Specifically, the DOJ will require state and local jurisdictions to comply with Level A and Level AA success criteria and conformance requirements specified in WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1. Those guidelines, which were drafted by experts at the Web Content Initiative, include a broad set of recommendations for making web content more accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities. After issuing an extension on the compliance deadlines, the DOJ will now require jurisdictions to comply with the rule by April 26, 2027 (if their total population is 50,000 or more) or April 26, 2028 (if their total population is less than 50,000).

What Does the Rule Require?

The DOJ’s rule adopts an existing technical standard that provides success criteria, each of which has detailed implementation guidance, examples, and testing methods. The WCAG 2.1 is guided by the four principles that provide the foundation for web accessibility: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Accessibility must address a broad range of disabilities, including “visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities.”³ While these guidelines intend to address many common barriers, the WCAG drafters acknowledge that they do not fully account for all types, severities, or combinations of disabilities. They also intend to enhance usability for older adults experiencing age-related changes and improve user experience for everyone.

Overall, the guidelines are intended to expand access to digital content by reducing barriers and promoting more inclusive design. Examples of compliance include providing closed captions for audio materials, ensuring that information conveyed by color differences is also available in text, and ordering the content in a meaningful sequence that will allow assistive technologies to make sense of it.

A Special Case: Data Dashboards

Complying with many of the web accessibility’s rules will be straightforward for jurisdictions, but health departments may struggle with one type of online resource: interactive data dashboards. Increasingly, health departments are making public health data available through interactive dashboards that allow the user to select key variables, including things like health outcomes and demographic characteristics, which then populate a dynamic display with relevant information, tables, or charts. (The Massachusetts Health Data Tool is a good example).

There are methods jurisdictions could employ to make static tables and graphics more accessible, including by providing “alt-text” and descriptive text and by ensuring that they are compatible with assistive technology like screen readers. These solutions are more difficult to implement if the table and chart is dynamic and changes dependent upon the variables selected by the user. Any alt-text or textual description, for example, would need to change with the table it is describing.

Jurisdictions that struggle to make website elements like these accessible should be familiar with the exceptions to the WCAG standards. Those include:

• Categorical Exceptions, including exceptions for archived web content; preexisting conventional electronic documents; content posted by a third party; and preexisting social media posts. Unless a jurisdiction’s data dashboard is posted by a third party, this exception is unlikely to be applicable. But even if it is posted by a third party, note that these exceptions have exceptions themselves. For example, content posted by a third party would not meet this exception if it is posted pursuant to a contract or formal arrangement with the jurisdiction.

• Conforming Alternate Versions of Web Content. Where web content cannot be made directly accessible, jurisdictions are permitted to generate “conforming alternate versions” of the content that provide, to the “maximum extent possible,” the same benefits and overall experience as users of the original content. Examples of a conforming alternate version might include a text-only copy of a signed and scanned court document or, as applicable here, could include providing raw data in an Excel document to accompany a dynamic chart.⁴

Finally, there are also provisions for when compliance is practically impossible. If the jurisdiction can establish that compliance would alter the nature of the service or program or would require an undue financial or administrative burden, it can certify as much in a written statement that explains the relevant circumstances. But even in such circumstances, the jurisdiction must “take any other action that would not result in such an alteration or such burdens but would nevertheless ensure” the maximum extent possible of benefits or services are received by individuals with disabilities.⁵ Essentially, the jurisdiction should do everything it practically and reasonably can do to make its materials more accessible, both because that is what the web accessibility rule requires and because it’s the right thing to do. To emphasize that such decisions are not to be made lightly, the rule requires that they be made by the head of the public entity and that the entity document the reasons for its decisions.

Conclusion

Everyone deserves to be healthy, and everyone deserves to have full access to public health information. The DOJ’s new web accessibility rule applies important principles of accessibility to public entities’ websites and applications, ensuring that barriers to health information are reduced or eliminated for people with disabilities. These new rules, however, present administrative and technical challenges to jurisdictions, especially as they relate to things like interactive data dashboards. Public health professionals working to comply with the web accessibility rules should think creatively about how they can make their interactive data more accessible while keeping in mind that, if necessary, the rules provide narrow exceptions if compliance becomes unreasonably burdensome.

If you have questions about the DOJ’s new rule, please reach out for technical assistance at PHLC.PHI@mitchellhamline.edu.

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