John Hawley
Aug 27, 2026
ADA Compliance Is Gutting Government Online Records Archives
At an August meeting of the Jacksonville Ethics Commission, members confronted a question now facing governments across the country:
How much public information should remain online if the City cannot guarantee that every document, recording and webpage meets federal accessibility standards?
The issue arose from a worthy objective—ensuring that people with disabilities have equal access to government information. But the options presented to the Commission exposed an unintended consequence of the federal government’s new digital-accessibility rule.
Jacksonville could spend the time and money necessary to remediate years of Ethics Commission minutes, reports, disclosures and recordings. It could maintain a smaller collection of current records online. Or it could deactivate noncompliant material and require citizens to submit public-records requests to obtain it.
Public commenters Carnell Oliver and John Nooney objected to the retreat from direct access.
Contemporaneous handwritten notes from the August 19 meeting associate Oliver’s comments with Florida’s Sunshine Law, public participation, the need for a uniform policy and the argument that government should “post everything” in real time. Nooney likewise raised concerns about public participation and the disappearance of online information.
Their comments identified a growing national problem:
A federal regulation intended to give people with disabilities greater access to government is prompting some governments to make less information readily available to everyone.
Jacksonville begins taking ethics records offline
The local process began in April, when Ethics Program and Training Manager Andrea Myers reviewed the Ethics Commission and Office of Ethics, Compliance and Oversight websites.
Her emails document numerous problems. Some PDFs were not properly structured for screen readers. Tables had incorrect reading orders. Letterhead and seals caused complications. Audio and video raised questions about transcripts, captions and accessible media players.
Myers directed staff to deactivate links or remove material while the accessibility work proceeded. The affected information included:
Ethics Commission annual reports
Internal operating procedures
A lobbying report
Complaint procedures and dispositions
Resolutions and orders
Financial-disclosure links
Ethics legislation
Historical reports
Information for vendors and lobbyists
Secondary-employment materials
Training resources
Notices, agendas, minutes and meeting recordings
In several cases, entire pages were targeted for removal.
Myers’ emails show that she was not advocating secrecy as a policy objective. She described the removals as an urgent preliminary step and planned to restore accessible records beginning with the newest material and working backward.
She also found solutions. After struggling with the reading order of the Commission’s Word letterhead, she developed an accessible PowerPoint-based format for agendas and minutes. The office established a process for drafting minutes in Word, obtaining Commission approval and transferring the final version into the accessible format.
That work appears sincere and labor-intensive. But the practical consequence remained: information citizens previously could access immediately was increasingly available only through a public-records request.
“Available upon request” is not available online
The alternative presented in the Commission’s August materials was a website notice explaining that Jacksonville.gov is not the City’s official system of record.
The notice says the website publishes only current materials needed for active public business. Historical and inaccessible documents are retained offline and available through the City’s public-records process.
Regina Ross, an attorney in Jacksonville’s Office of General Counsel and the Ethics Commission’s legal adviser, appears to have been the clearest supporter of that compliance-oriented approach.
The meeting-preparation document specifically identifies a “Regina recommendation” immediately before presenting the public-records-notice option. Ross’ apparent position was that the Commission should follow a uniform rule: publish information that satisfies accessibility requirements and provide other records upon request.
Ethics Director Kirby Oberdorfer also treated request-based access as workable. The handwritten notes indicate that she asked whether audio should remain deactivated and said obtaining records by request was not especially difficult.
Commission Chair Erich Freiberger asked how difficult a request would be and what the Commission should do immediately. The notes suggest he accepted leaving the arrangement in place temporarily.
Other commissioners appeared less settled.
Sunny Gettinger asked about usage statistics for the website links and suggested posting transcripts. William Maule cautioned against “cherry-picking,” apparently favoring a consistent standard rather than selectively posting some records. Leah Palestrant raised the distinction between an individual department’s practice and a City-wide policy.
But the official account is deficient.
The draft August minutes list “Ethics Commission Website Update and ADA Accessibility Compliance” as an item of business but record none of the discussion, motions, votes or decisions. The Commission’s own incomplete minutes make it impossible to determine whether members formally approved reduced online access, accepted a temporary arrangement or deferred the question.
No clear three-year standard
The Commission’s internal material says 2025 and 2026 documents were accessible or being remediated, 2023 and 2024 links had been deactivated, and records from 2019 through 2022 would be removed because website content was limited to the most recent three years.
But the reviewed records do not identify the source of that three-year limit.
They cite no ordinance, administrative order, formal retention policy, webmaster directive or Commission resolution requiring that historical information be removed after three years.
Jacksonville also is not using one uniform model.
The Ethics Office increasingly relies on request-only access. Jacksonville’s Finance Department, by contrast, maintains online archives of annual financial reports, audits, budgets and capital-improvement plans—some dating back decades.
Those pages acknowledge that older documents may not fully meet current standards. They place the material in designated archives, warn users about possible accessibility limitations and offer accessible assistance upon request.
City Council likewise continues to provide online agendas, legislation and streamed meetings. Closed-captioning records may be requested separately, but the meetings have not been removed from public view.
If decades of financial reports can remain online in an archive, it is reasonable to ask why the record of the City’s principal ethics body cannot receive similar treatment.
From George H.W. Bush to the Biden administration
The federal requirement begins with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, signed the ADA after it passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. Title II prohibits state and local governments from excluding people with disabilities from public services, programs and activities.
The law predated the modern internet. By 1996, however, the Justice Department had concluded that the ADA applied to covered entities’ websites.
Efforts to establish specific technical standards began under President Barack Obama. In 2010, the Obama Justice Department asked what web-accessibility requirements governments should meet, how much compliance would cost and whether smaller entities needed additional time. The department revisited the issue in 2016 with proposed rulemaking focused on state and local governments.
In 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first administration, DOJ withdrew the pending rulemakings as part of a broader regulatory review.
The effort resumed under President Joe Biden.
In August 2023, the Biden Justice Department formally proposed a Title II web-accessibility rule. Attorney General Merrick Garland signed the final regulation in April 2024. The work was led by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, with Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer also publicly supporting it.
The regulation adopted Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, Level AA—WCAG 2.1 AA—as the technical standard for state and local governments.
It was not a new law separately passed by Congress. It was a Justice Department regulation issued under authority Congress granted the attorney general in the ADA.
What the rule requires
WCAG 2.1 AA addresses barriers that can make websites and digital documents unusable for people with visual, hearing, mobility or cognitive disabilities.
Compliance may require:
Properly tagged headings, lists and tables
Logical reading order
Alternative text for meaningful images
Sufficient color contrast
Keyboard navigation
Screen-reader-compatible PDFs
Accessible forms and links
Captions for prerecorded video
Text alternatives for prerecorded audio
Descriptions of important visual information
The need is legitimate. A blind resident should not need someone else’s help to apply for a permit or inspect a government budget. A deaf resident should not be excluded from an online public meeting.
But meeting that standard across decades of accumulated government records can be expensive.
A scanned document may require optical-character recognition and manual correction. A spreadsheet may have to be redesigned. A two-hour public meeting may require captions, transcript review and descriptions of visual exhibits.
Many municipalities do not employ dedicated accessibility teams. Individual employees may be expected to remediate thousands of documents while performing their regular duties.
That is where the incentive to remove information begins.
Trump extends the deadlines
The Biden administration originally required governments serving 50,000 or more people to comply by April 24, 2026. Smaller governments and special districts had until April 26, 2027.
In April 2026, the second Trump administration extended both deadlines by one year:
Larger governments now have until April 26, 2027.
Smaller governments and special districts have until April 26, 2028.
That nationwide extension is what Jacksonville officials discussed in August. Jacksonville did not receive a special local exemption.
The Trump Justice Department cited staffing shortages, resource limitations, inadequate technical expertise, confusion over the standards, slow development of remediation technology and potential litigation from rushed compliance.
DOJ said it had overestimated the advancement and availability of accessibility technology when the original deadlines were established.
The department still says it expects to implement the regulation at the new deadlines. But it has indicated that future substantive revisions may be considered. Additional changes or extensions are possible, although none are guaranteed.
Older records may qualify for exceptions
One frequently overlooked part of the regulation concerns historical material.
The rule includes an archived-content exception. Older content does not have to satisfy WCAG 2.1 AA when all four conditions are met:
It was created before the government’s compliance date.
It is retained only for reference, research or recordkeeping.
It is kept in a designated archive area.
It has not been changed since being archived.
The rule also includes an exception for many preexisting Word, PDF, PowerPoint and spreadsheet files already online before the compliance date, unless they remain necessary to apply for or participate in a current government program.
For Jacksonville, the compliance date is now April 26, 2027.
That does not automatically exempt every pre-2027 record. Current forms and active government materials may still require remediation. Governments also retain an obligation to provide effective communication when a person with a disability requests archived information.
But the exceptions mean many older minutes, reports and historical records may remain in a properly designated online archive without either immediately remediating every file or removing it from public view.
The national document purge begins
Jacksonville is not alone.
Axios reported in January that multiple governments around Des Moines, Iowa, were reviewing or removing online records in preparation for the federal rule.
Urbandale expected to remove a significant number of approximately 3,000 documents and budgeted $40,000 for accessibility work.
Ankeny was removing older, little-used files so it could concentrate on information residents use most. Johnston directed staff to remove rarely accessed records. Des Moines said it expected to remove less material.
Potential removals included budget documents more than a decade old. The records generally would remain obtainable through public-records requests.
Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, warned that taking information offline contradicted the purpose of a regulation intended to expand access.
Daniel Van Sant, director of disability policy at the Harkin Institute, cautioned that older records may be removed unnecessarily. He urged governments to examine the federal exceptions before taking documents down.
Municipalities, universities and school systems in North Dakota, North Carolina, Washington and other states are now confronting similar questions involving meeting packets, ordinances, planning records, budgets, audio, video and PDFs that were never created for modern accessibility standards.
The national scale of the reduction cannot yet be measured. With the deadlines moved to 2027 and 2028, many governments are still conducting inventories.
But the problem is no longer hypothetical.
When posting is voluntary, removal becomes the safest option
Public-records laws generally require governments to retain records and produce them for inspection. They do not require every public record to remain proactively available online.
Florida law provides broad access to public records, but it does not impose a universal requirement that every historical minute, recording, report or disclosure remain searchable on a government website indefinitely.
Once government voluntarily posts a record, however, federal accessibility requirements may apply.
That creates a powerful incentive:
If government must retain a record but does not have to publish it, removing it may be cheaper and legally safer than making it accessible.
Yet request-only access is not equivalent to online access.
A citizen must know that a record exists, find the proper custodian, describe the material, wait for a response and potentially pay search or review costs. The request also tells government who is examining its actions and what that person is investigating.
An online archive allows citizens, journalists and researchers to examine public business immediately, anonymously and without asking government to retrieve it.
That difference is especially important when the records involve ethics complaints, lobbying, financial disclosures, conflicts of interest and public officials.
Accessibility and transparency should reinforce each other
Jacksonville’s Ethics Office deserves credit for identifying genuine accessibility problems and beginning the difficult work of correcting them. Accessibility is not bureaucratic box-checking. It is a requirement of equal government.
But accessibility and transparency should not be treated as opposing values.
The Ethics Commission should adopt a written policy that:
Defines what must remain directly available online
Creates a designated archive for qualifying historical records
Prioritizes complaints, dispositions, annual reports, lobbying records and financial disclosures
Establishes deadlines for restoring remediated documents
Provides accessible versions without unnecessary cost
Applies a uniform standard to minutes, audio and video
Identifies who can authorize removal
Publicly inventories what has been taken down
Applies consistently across City departments
Oliver and Nooney raised the defining question:
When government responds to an accessibility mandate by taking public information offline, who is responsible for protecting the public’s ability to see what government is doing?
The federal rule was intended to open government’s digital front door to everyone.
Without adequate resources, consistent standards and a firm commitment to proactive transparency, it may instead place more of the public record behind a request form. In Jacksonville, the city’s Technology Solutions Division should be tasked with identifying cost-effective, citywide tools that save staff time, eliminate duplicated effort and improve accessibility for everyone.