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What the ADA’s Title II rule means for agendas, packets and minutes

A city or town that posts its meeting documents online generally has to make them meet WCAG 2.1 AA: from April 26, 2027 if it has 50,000 people or more, and from April 26, 2028 if it is smaller. Older documents can be excepted. Anything created or changed after that date generally can’t.

Published
Last reviewed
Rule
28 CFR part 35, subpart H, as amended April 20, 2026

The short answer

Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers state and local governments. Its web rule, issued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in April 2024, says the web content a government “provides or makes available, directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements” must meet WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA. PDFs, Word files, slides and spreadsheets are web content once they’re posted, so agendas, packets and minutes are included.

The rule has exceptions for older documents and for archives, and DOJ’s own examples show where they stop: minutes written after the compliance date, or slides posted for an upcoming meeting, are not excepted. The dates moved once, in April 2026, and a lawsuit asks a court to set that change aside.

Who, and by when

  • A government with a total population of 50,000 or more: from April 26, 2027. Until April 20, 2026, this was April 24, 2026.
  • A government with fewer than 50,000 people, and every special district: from April 26, 2028. This was April 26, 2027.

For a city or town, “total population” is its population in the Census Bureau’s most recent decennial Census. A special district is a public entity, other than a county, municipality, township or independent school district, that State law authorizes to provide one or a limited number of functions, with enough autonomy to be a separate government, and whose population the Census Bureau doesn’t calculate.

The rule lets a government show that meeting it would fundamentally alter a service, or impose “undue financial and administrative burdens”. The rule puts that on the government to demonstrate, and DOJ says what counts differs from one government to the next. Even then the government must comply as far as it can without that alteration or burden, and the decision needs a written statement of reasons from its head or their designee.

Agendas, packets and minutes

The rule calls PDFs and word processor, presentation and spreadsheet files “conventional electronic documents”. Neither the rule nor WCAG mentions tags, but in practice most of what WCAG 2.1 AA asks of a PDF depends on them: the headings, reading order, table headers and image descriptions a screen reader follows, and the document’s language. A tagged PDF can still fail on other things, such as contrast. Our list of the checks Ada Editor runs names the WCAG success criterion behind each one.

DOJ’s fact sheet gives examples that read directly onto meeting documents:

  • Minutes. City council minutes “created after the date the city must comply” are not archived content, “even if they are posted in the ‘archive’ section of the city’s website”.
  • Material for an upcoming meeting. A PowerPoint posted after the compliance date “that will be used in an upcoming town council meeting” is not excepted, and “would probably have to meet WCAG 2.1, Level AA”.
  • An old document, left alone. A Word sample ballot a school district posted in 2014 would probably be excepted as a preexisting document.
  • An old document, edited. A Word document first posted in 2020 and updated after the compliance date with new contact information “would not qualify for the exception anymore”.

The fact sheet doesn’t mention agendas, but the 2024 rule does. Agendas, minutes and other documents for meetings held after the compliance date “would likely not” count as archived, and “would generally need to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA for their initial intended purpose related to the meetings”. Moving them into an archive later doesn’t change that.

The exceptions that matter here

Archived content

Content counts as archived only if all four are true:

  1. It was created before the compliance date, or reproduces paper documents or other physical media created before it.
  2. It is kept “exclusively for reference, research, or recordkeeping”.
  3. It is not altered or updated after it was archived.
  4. It is stored in an area “clearly identified as being archived”.

Preexisting documents

Documents posted before the compliance date are excepted, “unless such documents are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in” the government’s services, programs or activities.

Content posted by a third party

This exception doesn’t cover a third party posting “due to contractual, licensing, or other arrangements” with the government. DOJ’s fact sheet says content a company posts for a government it works for is not excepted. Our reading: that includes the agenda platform a town pays to publish its meetings, and the packets it builds. Our research on what agenda platforms do to tagged PDFs shows why that matters. Our reading again: a resident’s letter that the clerk puts in a packet is posted by the town, not by a third party, and DOJ says third-party content a government posts itself usually needs to meet WCAG 2.1 AA.

The other two exceptions, for documents about one person, their property or their account that are password-protected or otherwise secured, and for social media posts made before the compliance date, rarely touch meeting documents.

What’s still unsettled

  • The lawsuit (the docket shows). The National Federation of the Blind sued DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services on May 21, 2026, in federal court in Maryland (No. 1:26-cv-02007). It asks the court to declare the April 2026 extensions unlawful and set them aside, which would leave the 2024 dates in place. The Federation moved for summary judgment on September 28, 2026. As of this page’s review date, there is no ruling. We can’t predict what a court would order for a date that has already passed.
  • More rulemaking (DOJ says). In the April 2026 rule, DOJ said it plans future rulemaking “related to the substantive requirements of the 2024 final rule”. It hasn’t proposed any yet.
  • Whether the exceptions’ cutoff moved (our reading). The archive and preexisting-document exceptions are tied to “the date the public entity is required to comply”, and that date is now 2027 or 2028. Read plainly, the cutoff moved with it. DOJ hasn’t said so in words.
  • Old documents still in use (open). A document posted before the compliance date that people still use to take part in a meeting is not excepted, and DOJ says instructions for using such documents aren’t either. Public comment instructions likely fall there, but DOJ calls “currently used” “a fact-specific analysis”.

What a clerk can do now

  • Make new documents accessible as they are written, since new documents are covered. Our free agenda and minutes templates start you off with the structure in place.
  • Find out what your agenda system does to a tagged file. Some keep the tags, some strip them in the packet. Then follow our steps for posting a PDF to an agenda system.
  • Set up the archive the way the rule describes: a clearly labelled area, kept for reference only, with documents left unedited once they’re in it.
  • Say how to ask for an accessible copy of anything excepted. DOJ says that even then, a government “would likely still need to provide the content to a person with a disability” who needs it in an accessible format.

Ada Editor, which publishes this guide, checks a document while it is written and exports tagged PDF. It won’t tell you a document is compliant: no tool can.

Corrections and limits

This guide explains the rule. It isn’t legal advice: ask your government’s attorney about your documents. When the rule or the lawsuit changes, we update this page that week and list the change here with its date.

Found something wrong or out of date? Report a correction to this guide (public, on GitHub).

None yet.

Sources

Read on October 12, 2026.