The State of US County PDF Accessibility 2026

The deadline has not passed, and that is the point. On 20 April 2026 the DOJ extended ADA Title II compliance to 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people, and 26 April 2028 for smaller ones. There is still time. But the rule’s exception for documents posted before the compliance date does not cover documents people currently use to apply for, access, or take part in a service, and that describes most of what a county publishes: permit applications, tax forms, benefit paperwork, meeting agendas.

Retagging a back catalogue takes months, not weeks. A county that starts the week before the deadline has already missed it.

58.1 % of the 941 documents we could assess have no document structure tree. Weighted by county rather than by document, the average county’s untagged rate is 57 %. Both numbers are reported because they answer different questions: the first is what a resident encounters, the second is what a typical county publishes.