On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice published an interim final rule pushing back the compliance deadline for the 2024 ADA Title II web and mobile accessibility regulations. Public colleges and universities now have until April 2027. The original date, April 24, 2026, is no longer in force.
At UAMS, that changes the calendar. It changes nothing else.
What the rule actually says
The Title II rule is intact. The DOJ did not touch the technical standard, narrow the scope, or soften a single requirement. Every public-facing web page and mobile application UAMS operates still has to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
The day-to-day obligations are exactly what they were last month. Every PDF served to the public has to be readable by a screen reader. Every video needs captions and audio descriptions. Every image needs meaningful alternative text. Every audio clip needs a transcript. Every third-party platform wired into a UAMS site has to meet the same bar.
The DOJ gave two reasons for the extension: the administrative and technical burden that covered entities reported, and the case for giving institutions room to reach genuine compliance instead of pouring effort into litigation defenses. Neither reason is an argument for doing less. Both are arguments for doing it properly.
Why the UAMS plan holds
The accessibility work across the UAMS digital ecosystem was never really about April 24. It was about the people who use our sites every day.
A patient searching for a clinic location through voice or an AI assistant gets an answer only if our underlying data is clean enough to surface one. A medical student opening a curriculum PDF can follow it only if the document’s tag structure feeds it to assistive technology in the right order. A research participant completing a consent form by keyboard alone can finish without calling for help only if the focus order and ARIA labeling hold up. A deadline moving twelve months does not make any of that matter less.
Accessibility is the standard of care for public digital communication. It was true before the 2024 Title II update. It is true now. It will be true in April 2027, and it will be true after that.
What continues without pause
UAMS Web Services, working with accessibility stakeholders across the institution, is carrying on with what is already in motion.
The WCAG 2.1 Level AA audit and remediation program continues across our public-facing properties, including uams.edu, uamshealth.com, and the specialized subdomains for our colleges and institutes. PDF remediation continues, and non-accessible legacy documents continue to come down from public distribution. Accessibility review stays built into every new web project and every new content workflow. Editor support continues through the Web Services knowledge base and direct help from our team, so accessibility goes into content at the point of creation rather than getting bolted on afterward. And when Web Services is brought into third-party platform procurement, vendor and platform accessibility evaluation stays part of that review.
This is steady work, and it shows. Our audit records track it, and the properties we have already remediated show measurable improvement.
Guidance for the UAMS community
If you own content or edit a website at UAMS, the guidance is simple: keep going. The extension is not permission to slow down. Build new content accessibly. Remediate known issues on the schedule you already set with Web Services. Route anything that would publish inaccessible content, even temporarily, through the standard accessibility review.
If you are procuring a third-party platform, nothing has changed there either. Ask the vendor for a current Accessibility Conformance Report in VPAT 2.5 format, and bring Web Services in to evaluate it. Assume that anything connected to our public web presence has to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
And if you maintain a departmental page and have questions, reach out to Web Services using the form below. Questions are always welcome. Getting this right is easier with help than without it.
The longer view
Federal compliance dates come and go. Rulemaking produces drafts, revisions, extensions, the occasional reversal. What does not change is the population this work serves: the people for whom an inaccessible website is the line between reaching information on their own and not reaching it at all.
UAMS serves all of Arkansas. Our patients, students, faculty, staff, research participants, and neighbors include a great many people who depend on accessible digital communication to deal with this institution at all. That is who the work is for.
The deadline moved. The mission did not.
Use the form below for questions about UAMS web accessibility, ongoing remediation, or accessibility review for new projects.