ADA Title II Deadline Lint (WCAG 2.1 AA)

Five lines in a US county accessibility statement now fail the ADA Title II rule, and every free linter in the editor passes all five.

Here is what changed while nobody was looking. On 2026-04-16 the Department of Justice signed an interim final rule, effective on publication on 2026-04-20, that rewrote the compliance dates in 28 CFR 35.200(b). Public entities with a population of 50,000 or more moved from April 24, 2026 to April 26, 2027. Smaller entities and special districts moved from April 26, 2027 to April 26, 2028. Three weeks later, on 2026-05-07, HHS did the same to the Section 504 web rule at 45 CFR 84.84: recipients with 15 or more employees moved from May 11, 2026 to May 11, 2027, and recipients under 15 employees moved from May 10, 2027 to May 10, 2028.

Only the timing changed. The technical standard for all four is still WCAG 2.1 Level AA - not 2.0, not Level A, and not Section 508, which governs federal agencies rather than a county.

That combination is the trap. Every accessibility statement, roadmap, procurement answer and README written in 2025 names dates that are now wrong. Every model trained before May 2026 will confidently repeat them. And the tools that check your code - eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y, Lighthouse, the a11y rules in your CI - read markup semantics. They do not read regulation. A statement that promises April 24, 2026, cites Section 508 as the governing standard, and calls the site fully ADA compliant passes all of them, and those are precisely the three sentences a demand letter quotes back.

So here are the five lines, and what each one should say instead.

...will conform by April 24, 2026. becomes ...will conform by April 26, 2027. conforms to WCAG 2.0 Level AA becomes conforms to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. fully ADA compliant becomes a dated statement naming the standard you tested against and the gaps you know about. <img src="seal.png"> becomes <img src="seal.png" alt="City seal"> - SC 1.1.1, Level A. And <div onclick="pay()"> becomes <button onclick="pay()"> - SC 2.1.1 Keyboard, Level A, because a div takes no focus and announces no role.

ADA Title II Deadline Lint is a VS Code extension that runs 26 rules of exactly that kind over the file you have open: the superseded dates, the mis-cited standards, the unverifiable conformance claims, the WCAG 2.1 Level AA failures a source line can actually prove, and the two scope questions in 28 CFR 35.201 that decide whether a linked PDF or a third-party embed is even in scope. Every finding comes back with its success criterion or its CFR section attached, so you can paste it into the remediation ticket unedited.

The whole rule set is free on the file you have open, with no watermark and no usage limit. Paste a statement into the free web version and you get the same 26 rules in the browser. What a licence key adds is a different job: the whole repository instead of one file, and a dated CSV, JSON or HTML evidence file you can hand to counsel or procurement.

You have 230 days until April 26, 2027 and 245 until May 11, 2027. The stale date is a one-line fix. Finding it is the part nobody has automated.