The Title II Website Accessibility Checklist for School Districts

Items marked Good practice are not spelled out in the rule itself. They are here because they make the required parts much easier to keep up.

1. Confirm your date and who owns this

• Confirm your compliance date with counsel. Entities with a population of 50,000 or more have until April 26, 2027. Smaller entities and special district governments have until April 26, 2028. For a school district, the population is the Census Bureau's estimate for the district, not its enrollment. Details in the deadline, in plain English.
• Name one person who owns the work. Accessibility touches technology, communications, curriculum and every building. Without a named owner it belongs to everyone, which means no one. Good practice
• Brief your superintendent and board. A short explanation of the rule, your date, and what the work will take, so the people who approve time and money hear it from you first. Good practice

2. Map what the rule covers

The rule covers the web content and mobile apps you make available to the public, whether you built them or a vendor did. Make a list of:

• Every website you run: the district site, each school's site, and any separate sites for athletics, the board, foundations or programs.
• Every mobile app the district offers families or the public.
• Every tool from another company that appears on your site: calendars, lunch menus, payment pages, athletics schedules, forms, enrollment systems. If you post it or a vendor posts it for you, it is generally your content.
• Your documents: PDFs, Word files, slideshows and spreadsheets linked from your pages, including board packets, handbooks, menus and forms.
• Your video and audio: board meeting recordings, announcements, and anything embedded from YouTube or another service.
• Your social media. Posts made before your compliance date are excepted. Posts made after it are not.

3. Find out where you stand today

• Run an automated scan of the whole site. Automated testing cannot find every barrier, but it finds the most common ones fast and gives you a concrete list to work from. Good practice
• Do the hand checks a scanner cannot. Use the site with only a keyboard, zoom to 200 percent, and listen to a few pages with a free screen reader. Seven tests you can run yourself. Good practice
• Count your documents. Most districts have far more PDFs than they think, and you cannot triage what you have not listed.
• Ask your website vendor for its accessibility report (an Accessibility Conformance Report, sometimes called a VPAT) and which version of WCAG the template is tested against. Seven questions to ask your vendor.

4. Fix what matters most, sorted by who fixes it

• Start with what people use. Enrollment, registration, calendars, lunch menus, transportation, the handbook, board meetings, and how to contact a school. DOJ's own guidance stresses prioritizing current and commonly used content.
• Send template problems to your vendor. Menus, page structure, theme colors and built-in components repeat on every page, so one ticket fixes them everywhere.
• Give content problems to the people who post. Missing or useless alt text, flyers posted as pictures, "click here" links, low-contrast custom colors.
• Take embedded-tool problems to that company, or treat them as a reason to replace the tool.
• Triage your documents. Retire what nobody needs (following your records retention schedule), put genuinely historical records in a clearly labeled archive area and leave them unchanged, and fix or replace anything people still use, like forms and handbooks. Which old PDFs have to be accessible.
• Caption your videos, and check that the captions are accurate. Automatic captions often get names and school terms wrong.

Not sure what is on your site yet? A free audit sorts every finding into what your content team can fix and what belongs with your vendor.

5. Change how new content gets made

Everything posted after your compliance date has to conform, so this step is what keeps the work from starting over every month.

• Train everyone who posts. Secretaries, coaches, principals and communications staff: write alt text that says what the image says, use real headings, write link text that makes sense on its own, and never post a flyer as only a picture. Good practice
• Fix the document workflow. Build from an accessible Word or Google Docs file, export a tagged PDF, run the built-in accessibility checker, and never scan a printed page to post it. Good practice
• Put WCAG 2.1 AA in your contracts. Name the standard in requests for proposals and contracts for any new website, app or online tool, and ask for an accessibility report before you buy. Good practice

6. Give people a way to ask

• Publish an accessibility page with a clear way to report a barrier or request an accessible version of something, and a real person behind it. Good practice
• Have a plan for answering quickly. Even content an exception covers is still subject to your other ADA duties, including effective communication. If a parent asks for an accessible version of an old document, someone should know how to provide it.

7. Keep it up after the deadline

• Check again on a schedule. The deadline is when conformance begins, not when it ends. School sites change every day, and a page that was fine in April can pick up problems in May.
• Re-check after big changes: a template update, a site redesign, a new embedded tool, or a new platform. Good practice
• Keep a simple log of what was found, who fixed it, and when. It makes progress visible to your board and answers the question "what have we done?" Good practice

Is a checklist enough?

No checklist can tell you that your site conforms. It can make sure you have not skipped a step. Conformance depends on what is actually on your pages and in your documents, which is why the list starts with a factual baseline and ends with ongoing checks.

Share this checklist

You are welcome to print this page, hand it out at a meeting, or link to it from a district, ESC or ITC resource page. The address is getadagenie.com/title-ii-checklist.html. We keep it current when the rule or DOJ's guidance changes.

From ADA Genie, getadagenie.com. General information, not legal advice. For how the rule applies to your organization, talk to your counsel.