Shockwave Digital Compliance

ADA Title II · Web and mobile accessibility

Every city website in America now has a federal deadline.

The Department of Justice set a date by which public web content and mobile apps must meet a defined accessibility standard. Most city sites will not pass it today, and most cities have never been told what passing actually means.

We do the part that gets skipped: the documents. Every agenda, every set of minutes, every public notice — and the evidence to show a court, a complainant or a grant auditor exactly what was tested and when.

Request an accessibility read

Your deadline

Compliance dates under the DOJ Title II rule, as of August 2026. Standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Public entityMust comply by
Population 50,000 or more April 26, 2027
Population under 50,000 · special districts April 26, 2028

What the rule actually requires →

The rule asks for WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

WCAG 2.2 contains every 2.1 criterion and adds more. Meeting the federal standard is our floor, not our target — and that is a claim you can check rather than take on trust.

Proof before promises

Four California city demonstration builds, produced end to end.

Selma, Firebaugh, Coalinga and Dinuba. We rebuilt real municipal pages and remediated real municipal documents — working entirely from public records — before asking anyone for a contract. Not a case study written from a template: measured before-and-after against the same tools a plaintiff’s expert would use.

How these were measured →

We do not use accessibility overlays.

An overlay does not fix a site, it sits on top of one. It cannot restructure your headings, label your form fields, or tag a single PDF — so every document obligation under the rule is untouched by it. And when defendants have told a court an overlay resolved the problem, the court has repeatedly disagreed.

  • A federal court — ruling

    The defendant argued the case was moot because it had remediated the site using accessiBe. The court refused: "Here, Defendant has not met its ‘formidable burden’ that its actions have completely and irrevocably eradicated the effects of the alleged violations." The plaintiff’s expert found that the defendant’s "implementation of the [a]ccessiBe overlay widget . . . created new accessibility barriers." The motion to dismiss was denied in its entirety.

    Martinez v. Pure Green NYC Wholesale Corp., No. 1:23-cv-04247 (E.D.N.Y. Mar. 30, 2025) — motion to dismiss DENIED

  • A federal court — ruling

    The defendant had bought a one-year partnership with accessiBe and produced three audits concluding it met WCAG 2.1. The court still denied dismissal: the defendant "fails to meet the necessary burden to demonstrate ADA mootness," because "multiple barriers still allegedly exist."

    Quezada v. U.S. Wings, Inc., No. 1:20-cv-10707 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 7, 2021) — motion to dismiss DENIED

  • Federal Trade Commission

    A $1,000,000 order against accessiBe, the largest overlay vendor, for claiming its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant. The FTC called those claims "false, misleading, or unsubstantiated," and the order bars the company from repeating them without evidence. It was also cited for passing off paid endorsements as independent reviews. This is a consent order, not a litigated ruling — and it is the only regulator action against an overlay vendor.

    In the Matter of accessiBe Inc., FTC File No. 222-3156 — final order April 2025

  • The National Federation of the Blind

    The largest organisation of blind Americans passed resolutions condemning overlay providers by name, including accessiBe, and stating that accessiBe "promotes the false claims of attaining [WCAG] compliance through the integration of one line of code." It also revoked the company’s convention sponsorship.

    NFB Resolutions 2021-04 and 2021-17

  • The accessibility profession

    More than a thousand accessibility practitioners have signed a public statement that "no overlay product on the market can cause a website to become fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard and therefore cannot eliminate legal risk." Signatories include accessibility staff at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Salesforce and Shopify, and authors of the W3C accessibility specifications themselves. No overlay-vendor employee has signed it.

    Overlay Fact Sheet — 1,000+ signatories, as of August 2026

  • The numbers

    Businesses that had an accessibility overlay live on their site and were sued anyway: 933 in 2023, and 1,023 in 2024 — roughly a quarter of all digital accessibility lawsuits that year. Installing one did not prevent the claim.

    As tracked by UsableNet’s year-end ADA digital lawsuit reports (UsableNet is a commercial accessibility vendor)

To be fair about it

Courts have accepted that a website was fixed — where the owner rebuilt it properly and had it independently audited. What they have repeatedly declined to accept is an overlay offered as the fix. The distinction is the whole point: source-level remediation is defensible, and a widget over the top of it is not.

Already have one? A lot of cities do — it was sold to them as compliance, and it typically does not measure up. We will show you exactly what yours covers and where it leaves you exposed. Then we fix the source: once, properly, and you own the code. Theirs stops working the day you stop paying. Ours cannot — there is nothing to switch off.

What we will not tell you.

No one can guarantee your site will never receive a demand letter, and any vendor who offers that guarantee is telling you they do not understand this area. What we can do is find what is actually wrong, fix it, and hand you documentation showing exactly what was tested, how, and when.

Start with a free accessibility read.

We will run your site and a sample of your documents against the same standard the rule uses, and tell you where you actually stand. No obligation, and you keep the report either way.

Request an accessibility read