Your District Received an OCR Complaint About Its Website. Now What?

First, some perspective

Getting a federal complaint about your website is jarring. It is also more common than you might think: website accessibility complaints against school districts have been filed in large numbers over the past several years, sometimes in waves covering many districts at once. A complaint being filed is not a finding that your district did anything wrong. It is the start of a process, the process has well-worn paths through it, and districts work through it routinely.

What OCR is

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is the office within the U.S. Department of Education that enforces federal civil rights laws in schools, including disability-rights laws such as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and, together with the Department of Justice, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Website accessibility complaints to OCR generally allege that a district's website has barriers that prevent people with disabilities from using it.

Anyone can file an OCR complaint. The person filing does not need to be a parent or student in your district, does not need to have been personally harmed in the way you might expect, and does not need to contact you first.

What typically happens

Every case is its own case, and your counsel will know the current procedures, but in general terms OCR complaints tend to move through recognizable stages:

• Evaluation. OCR reviews the complaint and decides whether to dismiss it or open an investigation. Opening an investigation is not a judgment on the merits.
• Investigation. If opened, OCR may request information and documents from the district, which come with response deadlines.
• Resolution. Many website accessibility cases have historically resolved through a voluntary resolution agreement, in which the district commits to steps such as auditing its site, fixing identified barriers on a schedule, adopting policies, training staff, and reporting progress to OCR for a monitoring period.

Timelines vary widely, from months to considerably longer. Your counsel can tell you what to expect for your case.

Sensible first steps

1. Read the letter carefully and calendar every deadline in it. Missed response dates make everything harder.
2. Involve your counsel before responding to anyone. That includes responses to OCR, public statements, and any contact with the complainant. Let counsel drive communications.
3. Do not retaliate. Federal law prohibits retaliation against people who file civil rights complaints. If the complainant turns out to be a parent or employee, treat that fact with real care and get counsel's guidance.
4. Ask counsel about preserving records. That can include copies of the pages the complaint cites, as they existed when the complaint arrived.
5. Get a factual picture of your site's current state. Whatever happens next goes better when the district knows, concretely, what is on its site and what the actual barriers are, rather than finding out during the process.
6. Start a dated record of fixes. Resolution agreements commonly involve remediation on a schedule with progress reporting. A record of what was found, what was fixed, and when is the kind of documentation that process asks for.

OCR complaint vs. demand letter: not the same thing

Districts sometimes receive a different document: a demand letter from a private law firm, often on behalf of a named client, alleging the website violates the ADA and proposing a settlement. That is not an OCR complaint. There is no federal agency involved unless one is later brought in, the dynamics and risks are different, and the response strategy is different. If you received a demand letter, the advice above about involving counsel immediately applies double, and the practical points below about knowing your site's actual state apply the same way.

Where a scan fits, and where it does not

To be direct about our own role: an automated scan does not resolve a complaint, does not make a website compliant by itself, and is not a legal defense. What it does is give the district and its counsel a concrete, factual inventory: here are the pages, here are the barriers found, here is the screenshot of each one, here is who can fix it, and here is a dated record as fixes happen. Districts and their counsel are usually better off having that picture early.

If that would be useful, we offer a free accessibility audit: we scan your site, and you get findings in plain English with screenshots. Nothing is installed on your site, and the report is yours to share with counsel either way. Our plain-English guide to the DOJ deadline covers the broader rule that makes this worth getting ahead of.