You're the ADA Coordinator: The Law Behind the Job

Nobody handed you a statute with your business cards. Here's the part you actually need.

You don't need to become a lawyer. You need to know exactly enough law to know when you're exposed, when you're not, and when someone is trying to sell you something you don't need. That's three different skills, and most coordinators only ever learn the third one, usually the hard way, usually from a vendor.

Here's the part that actually matters, stripped of the parts that don't.

Your obligation didn't start with the web rule

Everyone talks about the ADA's new web accessibility rule like it's the starting gun. It isn't. It's the newest deadline on a much older obligation, and treating it as day one is the classic new-coordinator mistake — I watched three people make it before I figured out why it was wrong.

Title II of the ADA has required this the whole time: a self-evaluation of your services, policies, and practices. Public notice of ADA protections. A designated coordinator and a published grievance procedure, if you've got fifty or more employees. Effective communication with disabled residents — which has no compliance countdown attached to it at all, because it was never conditional on a rulemaking. DOJ's own guidance on web accessibility (opens in new window) is blunt about this: inaccessible web content denies people with disabilities equal access to information, full stop, regardless of what deadline is or isn't on the calendar yet. A resident who can't read your council packet has a complaint today.

If someone tells you "we've got time," ask them time for what, exactly — because the clock they're thinking of isn't the only one running.

Do the four free things now, this month, regardless of any deadline: publish or fix your accessibility statement, designate a coordinator formally (that's you — make it official, not just implied), stand up a grievance procedure, and open a complaint log. None of it costs money. All of it removes a category of exposure that has nothing to do with the web rule at all.

Which deadline is actually yours

If you do want to know your specific compliance date under the web rule — set out in full at 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H (opens in new window) — here's where people get it wrong, in order of how often I've seen it happen.

The population figure that sets your tier is your jurisdiction's decennial Census count — not an estimate, not last year's planning document number, the actual Census figure. If your entity doesn't have its own Census population — an authority, a joint agency, a commission — you use the population of whatever government it's an instrumentality of. Serve two parents, combine their populations. And special district governments land in the later tier no matter their size; the rule carves them out of the population test on purpose. Whether you're a "special district government" is a legal definition question, not a size question, and it's worth getting an actual answer rather than assuming — from your own counsel, not from me.

I'm not going to print the actual dates here, and neither should anyone else. They've already moved once by federal rulemaking, and the extension itself is being challenged in court. A printed date is a date that's already wrong by the time you read it. Go to the source instead of a PDF someone forwarded you eight months ago.

The five exceptions, and the two rules for using them

The web rule's exceptions (opens in new window) cover five things: archived content sitting in an actual designated archive; conventional documents — PDF, Word, PowerPoint, spreadsheets — posted before your compliance date, unless they're currently used to apply for, access, or participate in your services; content posted by genuine third parties with no contractual relationship to you; individualized password-protected documents about one specific person or account; and social media posts made before your compliance date.

Two rules keep people from getting this wrong. First: exceptions get tested one item at a time, in writing, with a named person making the call. Nobody gets to wave at a folder and call the whole thing archived. Second: an exception never removes your duty to provide that content accessibly the moment a specific person asks for it. It's not a permanent out. It's a "not right now, not by default" — which is a very different thing.

And notice what's conspicuously absent from that list: your vendor's portal. Your payment processor. The agenda-management platform some company built for you. Content you provide through a contract or licensing arrangement is your content under this rule, whoever's name is on the code. The third-party exception is for things you genuinely didn't arrange — public comments, mostly. Not the tools you pay for.

What actually lands on people in your seat

Here's the part nobody puts in the onboarding packet, because there is no onboarding packet: what actually happens to entities your size, in the order it actually happens. A resident complaint through your own grievance procedure, most likely. A state-law claim, if your state has its own accessibility statute — and a growing number do, some with earlier deadlines and real per-violation damages attached. A federal complaint to DOJ's Disability Rights Section (opens in new window). Private litigation under the effective-communication obligation that's been sitting there the whole time, deadline or no deadline.

The federal settlements DOJ actually publishes (opens in new window) with local governments follow a pattern so consistent it's almost boring: audit against WCAG, a corrective plan with actual dates, a policy, a named person responsible, training, and a public way to report problems. Which is, not coincidentally, most of what your job actually is.

One more thing worth knowing before you move on: some states' grace periods have already ended. Full exposure, today, years ahead of the federal calendar. If that's your state, the sentence "we're not required to do this yet" is not just optimistic, it's wrong, and somebody's counsel is going to find that out for you eventually if you don't find it out first.

Where the current numbers actually live

I'm not printing dates in this piece, and I meant it above. The state-by-state deadlines, the federal tiers, whatever's moved since I wrote this — that information belongs somewhere that gets updated, not in a paragraph that gets copied into a memo and forgotten. Check your state's current requirements before you make any decision that depends on a date. That's not me dodging the question. That's me telling you the honest answer changes, and anyone who prints it in permanent ink is asking you to trust something that's already starting to go stale.

Everything else in this piece — the structure of the law, the exceptions, what actually happens to people in your seat — that part doesn't move nearly as fast. That's the part worth actually knowing cold.

None of this is legal advice, and it isn't a substitute for your own counsel reviewing your specific facts — treat this piece as a map of where to look, not a ruling on your situation. If you want a second read on how a specific page or PDF actually measures up against WCAG 2.1 AA (opens in new window) before you bring it to counsel, ask Luke to run it and hand you something concrete to start from. Our WCAG success criteria reference and methodology page cover how we verify claims like the ones in this series.

Next: your first ninety days — what to actually do with all of this, starting Monday.

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Sources: DOJ guidance on web accessibility and the ADA (opens in new window) · 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H — Web and Mobile Accessibility (opens in new window) · 28 CFR 35.201 — Exceptions (opens in new window) · DOJ Disability Rights Section (opens in new window) · DOJ Disability Rights Cases and Settlements (opens in new window)