Your deadline
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ADA Title II · 28 CFR Part 35 · WCAG 2.1 Level AA
Burn permits, hydrant flow requests, inspection scheduling, evacuation maps, board agendas, CPR class signups. Federal law now treats every one of those as a program you deliver — and sets a date by which a resident using a screen reader has to be able to use them.
Your deadline
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Days remaining
—as of today
Standard
2.1WCAG Level AA
Grace period
0obligation is live now
Free automated WCAG 2.1 AA scan. You get the finding list and severity breakdown, no obligation, no card. · Or size your exposure first
Three separate rules can reach a fire agency
Most departments only know about the first one. The other two are what turn a compliance question into a funding question.
28 CFR § 35.200
Applies to every public entity regardless of size — cities, counties, and special districts alike. Sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for web content and mobile apps.
Enforced by DOJ complaint and by private lawsuit. No showing of damages required for injunctive relief.
Apr 26, 2027 | Apr 26, 2028 (districts & under 50k)
45 CFR § 84.84 (HHS)
If your department runs EMS and bills Medicare or Medicaid, you are a recipient of HHS federal financial assistance — and the same WCAG 2.1 AA standard applies through a second door.
When both rules cover you, the earlier deadline governs.
May 11, 2027 (15+ employees) | May 10, 2028
44 CFR Part 7 · FEMA OCR
AFG and SAFER awards carry civil rights assurances. FEMA’s Office of Civil Rights can open compliance reviews of recipients and subrecipients and investigate discrimination complaints.
Remedies reach the award itself — deferral, suspension, termination of assistance.
Continuous — applies for the life of the award
Enforcement record — emergency services defendants
These aren’t website cases. They’re bigger than that: courts holding that emergency services owe people with disabilities equal access to notification, response, and information. The web rule is the same principle with a filing date attached.
The court found the City liable under the ADA, Section 504, and the California Disabled Persons Act for failing to plan for emergency notification, evacuation, transportation, and accessible shelter for residents with disabilities. An injunction followed, then a court-approved settlement in 2013.
Held: liable — injunctive relief ordered
The court ruled that New York City’s emergency preparedness program violated the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and city human rights law. The U.S. Attorney filed a statement of interest supporting the plaintiffs. A comprehensive remedial settlement followed in 2014.
Held: liable — class-wide remedy
Title II requires telephone emergency services to give direct access to people who don’t use voice; routing them through a relay service does not satisfy the rule. DOJ enforced it repeatedly against PSAPs, including a 1998 D.C. settlement paying $15,000 in damages to two deaf residents who couldn’t get through.
Held: relay is not equal access
Nobody publishes a count of website lawsuits filed against fire departments, and any vendor who quotes you one is making it up. Title II filings aren’t tracked by industry. What is documented is the rule, the date, the funding conditions, and the fact that plaintiff firms find defendants by running automated scans across thousands of sites at once — the same kind of scan we’d run on yours in about ten minutes.
Money exposure — what it can actually cost
That sentence is where most accessibility vendors lie to government buyers, so here it is straight. There is no civil monetary penalty for a fire district under ADA Title II. The exposure is real, but it arrives through two other doors.
Door 1 — not applicable
The $118,225 first-violation / $236,451 subsequent figures you’ll see quoted are Title III penalties, assessable against private businesses in an Attorney General enforcement action. Title II enforcement borrows the Rehabilitation Act’s remedies instead. No penalty schedule attaches to a public entity.
Anyone quoting you those numbers for a fire district either doesn’t know the statute or is counting on you not knowing it.
$0Civil penalty exposure under Title II
Door 2 — real
A prevailing plaintiff recovers reasonable attorney’s fees from you under 42 U.S.C. § 12205. You also pay your own defense. Compensatory damages are available on a showing of deliberate indifference; punitive damages are not.
In California, a Title II violation may also support a claim under the Disabled Persons Act (Civ. Code §§ 54–54.3), which carries a $1,000-per-offense floor plus fees. Whether the Act reaches a public entity’s website has not been squarely decided — ask your counsel.
UncappedFees track the hours, not a schedule
Door 3 — the quiet one
Section 504 conditions your federal money on nondiscrimination. FEMA’s Office of Civil Rights can open a compliance review of any recipient or subrecipient, with or without a complaint.
The remedy reaches the award itself: deferral of new assistance, suspension, or termination. Termination is rare and requires a formal process — but the review itself consumes staff time you don’t have.
ReviewableAny award, at any time, with or without a complaint
Every line shows its math
Residents whose disability directly affects their ability to use a website. Any one of them can file a DOJ complaint at no cost to themselves.
These categories overlap — a resident may appear in more than one — so we don’t add them together and neither should anyone else.
One of these is a real number. The rest are ranges nobody can honestly quote you, so we don’t.
How the engagement runs
We are not an overlay widget. Overlays are the thing that gets agencies sued, not the thing that protects them.
STEP 01
Every public page crawled through axe-core, pa11y, and Lighthouse, deduplicated against the actual WCAG success criterion — not three tools triple-counting the same defect.
STEP 02
Automation can meaningfully test roughly 30% of the WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. A DHS Trusted Tester certified auditor works the rest by hand with assistive technology, including your PDFs — burn permits, inspection forms, board packets.
Source: Deque, Automated Accessibility Coverage Report.
STEP 03
You get a dated conformance report and continuous monitoring. When a complaint or a grant review lands, documented ongoing effort is the record you want to hand over.
Start here
Enter your department’s URL. You’ll get a scored WCAG 2.1 AA report with every finding ranked by severity, and a plain-English summary you can forward to your board or your city manager.
No card. No overlay pitch. If your site is clean, we'll tell you that.
Rather talk it through? 844-ADA-WCAG · fire@adawcag.org