If you advise a city, county, or special district, you've likely heard some version of these statements in a compliance meeting. They persist for understandable reasons. The DOJ Final Rule (2024) under ADA Title II is new, the technical standard it relies on is dense, and municipal budgets are tight. When a mandate arrives with pressure but without a funding line, people fill the gap with assumptions.
Some of those assumptions are comforting. Others are quietly dangerous. Here are five worth correcting, with a view toward what federal-local collaboration can and can't do for your entity.
Myth 1: "Federal agencies will carry the compliance burden for us."
Reality: The obligation sits with the public entity. ADA Title II applies to all state and local governments regardless of size, and the DOJ Final Rule (2024) sets technical standards, primarily based on WCAG, that your municipality must meet. Federal agencies can offer guidance, technical assistance, training, and in some cases financial grants. They don't assume your liability.
Treat federal support as an input to your program, not a substitute for it. Legal counsel should be clear on this point internally, because a council or department head who believes "the feds are handling it" will underfund the work.
Myth 2: "We're too small for this to apply to us."
Reality: Size isn't an exemption. Under Title II, every state and local government must follow the ADA. Smaller entities do face real constraints in time, money, and expertise, and that's precisely why collaboration matters. But the constraint affects how you pursue conformance, not whether you owe it.
If your jurisdiction is small, the practical move is to pool resources. Shared vendor contracts, inter-municipal training, and common remediation playbooks spread fixed costs across several entities. Counsel can help structure these arrangements so each party's responsibilities and indemnities are clear.
Myth 3: "A scanning tool will get us to conformance."
Reality: Technology can help, but it's not a complete solution. Automated checkers and modern development frameworks can find and prevent many recurring defects, and they make it far cheaper to monitor a large site continuously. But a tool is not a conformance determination.
Automated scanning cannot evaluate everything WCAG requires. Judgments about whether alt text is meaningful, whether focus order is logical, or whether a form's error handling is understandable need human review, and Screen Reader Testing with Assistive Technology remains essential. Build your program around Conformance Testing that combines automated monitoring with manual and user-based evaluation. When you assess any vendor, including accessibility platforms, ask what the product does automatically, what requires human remediation, and what your team still owns.
Myth 4: "Accessibility is a web team problem."
Reality: The rule's reach is far wider than your homepage. Local governments deliver tax payments, utility billing, public records access, and program registration online. Each of those workflows may involve third-party platforms, PDFs, forms, and mobile applications that your web team doesn't control.
This is a governance question. Accessibility Governance means assigning accountable owners, setting a conformance target, and defining how content gets reviewed before publication. It also means Accessible Procurement: requiring an Accessibility Conformance Report from vendors, and writing conformance obligations and remediation duties into contracts. Your legal team is often the only function that touches both procurement language and risk, which makes counsel a natural convener.
Myth 5: "Training can wait until the technical work is done."
Reality: Staff who publish content, manage vendors, and maintain digital services need to understand the requirements, and they need that understanding before and during remediation, not after. Without it, you'll fix a site once and reintroduce defects the next time someone uploads an untagged PDF or a video without Closed Captions.
Awareness is a durable control. Federal agencies can support training, and credentials such as the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals can give your internal champions a recognized baseline. Treat education as part of the compliance program from day one.
What to do instead
The accurate picture is more useful than the myths. Federal-local collaboration is real and valuable, but it supplements your responsibility rather than replacing it. Here is a practical sequence:
- Confirm your standard. Map your obligations to the DOJ Final Rule (2024) and the WCAG version it specifies, and document that mapping.
- Inventory your digital footprint. Include third-party services, documents, and mobile applications, not just your main site.
- Seek outside support deliberately. Ask which federal technical assistance, training programs, or grants apply to your entity, and pursue regional pooling with neighboring jurisdictions.
- Pair tools with people. Use automated monitoring for scale, and reserve manual and Screen Reader Testing for what automation can't judge.
- Write accessibility into procurement. Require conformance documentation and contractual remediation commitments.
- Assign ownership and train. Name accountable leads, and educate everyone who touches published content.
Your entity can innovate and collaborate, but only if it first accepts that the accountability is its own. Counsel who frame it that way give leadership a defensible plan instead of a hopeful one.
