Real. Relevant. Required.: A Practitioner's Guide to ADA Title II Digital Accessibility for State and Local Government

On April 24, 2024, the Department of Justice published a final rule requiring every state and local government entity to meet a specific digital accessibility standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA. After extending the original deadlines by one year in April 2026, the current compliance dates are April 26, 2027, for entities serving populations of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028, for smaller entities and special districts.The rule is real. The deadlines are approaching. And most of the people responsible for making it happen — the communications leads, planners, project managers, procurement officers, and consultants who produce public-facing content every day — have not had a clear, plain-language guide to what the rule requires and how to meet it.This book is that guide.Written for practitioners in the transportation, infrastructure, and architecture-engineering-construction (AEC) sector, Real. Relevant. Required. covers:- What the April 2024 final rule actually says, in plain language- What WCAG 2.1 Level AA means in practice, with public-sector examples- Who is covered, including the myth of "we're too small"- Why PDFs are the largest compliance gap in most public-sector inventories- How to shift from accommodation-on-request to access-by-design- A five-stage compliance workflow: inventory, assessment, prioritization, remediation, and governance- What accessibility language in procurement scopes should look like- How to evaluate a vendor's accessibility claims- How to sustain the work beyond the initial deadlineThe principles and frameworks apply to any Title II entity — school districts, transit agencies, municipalities, special districts — but the examples, the patterns, and the voice come from the AEC and transportation sector.Dr. Becky Rehorn is a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) and a strategic communications practitioner with more than 25 years of experience, including a decade inside the AEC industry producing and reviewing public-facing content for transportation projects. She uses assistive technology daily and writes from both sides of the accessibility equation — as the practitioner building the program and as the person the program is built to serve.Companion resources — including a digital content inventory template, sample procurement clauses, a public engagement accessibility checklist, a VPAT evaluation guide, a conformance statement template, and a deliverable acceptance checklist — are available on the book's landing page - https://www.aogaccess.com/book. Read more