5 October 2026
ADA Title II Caption Deadline Moved to 2027: Recorded Meetings
The DOJ pushed the Title II web deadline back a year, but the duty to caption recorded meetings stays. Here is how to plan for it.
A county clerk told me she had circled April 24, 2026 on her calendar. Then the date moved. She still has a shelf of meeting recordings and no clear idea which ones need captions first.
What changed
On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule. It pushed the Title II web accessibility deadlines back one year. Public entities serving 50,000 people or more have until April 26, 2027. Smaller ones have until April 26, 2028. The University of Arizona accessibility office summarizes the new dates.
The DOJ gave four reasons: resource limits, staffing limits, slower technology than expected, and litigation risk. It also named the limits of generative AI for fixing accessibility problems. Read that twice. The regulator itself says AI is not a magic fix.
What did not change
The standard is still WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The extension does not alter the other provisions of the 2024 rule. Public entities keep their duty to make digital services accessible. This law firm write-up covers the four stated reasons and the comment period. The date moved. The obligation stayed.
What it means for recorded meetings
I am not a lawyer. Ask yours about your own case. Here is how I would plan.
- Take inventory. List every meeting recording you publish or share. Board meetings, trainings, town halls, public hearings.
- Start with transcripts. A transcript is the fastest first step. It helps people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It also helps the person who cannot play audio on a train.
- Review every transcript. Machine output slips on names, acronyms, and place names. A human pass is cheap next to a complaint.
- Publish the text next to the video. Do not bury it in a folder nobody opens.
The honest part
A year sounds like a long time. It is not. Backlogs grow faster than calendars. Teams that treat April 2027 as the new someday will hit the same wall in the same panic.
I know that wall. I built this tool because I had hours of recordings and no patience for typing them out. Speech to text is good enough now to give you a solid first draft in minutes. Spend your human hours on the review, not on the typing.
Start with the meetings people ask about most. Do ten this month. Then ten more. Small, steady batches beat one frantic push in March 2027.
Transcribe-It turns an uploaded recording into a transcript, an AI summary, and action points in your inbox, and you pay per minute, so you can clear your backlog one meeting at a time.