Misty Kienzynski was born with leber congenital amaurosis, causing the cells in her eyes to degenerate over time.

She uses on a screen reader, a common tool used by people with vision problems. It reads information at a rapid pace, allowing her to quickly parse through digital texts.

Like many other Americans with disabilities, she thought by now she would be able to fully access local and state government websites.

But Kienzynski will have to wait at least another year, after the U.S. Department of Justice extended the deadline for compliance with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The act requires governments and public entities such as schools, courts and social services to make all digital information accessible.

The extension has frustrated advocates and people with disabilities. Kienzynski, the legislative director of the National Federation of the Blind of Indiana, said they have waited long enough to access basic public information.

“We as disabled people are all are far too often treated as burdens to be alleviated, as problems to be solved, as boxes to be ticked — not as people deserving of access equal to that access that everyone else has,” Kienzynski said.

The original deadline for compliance was decided by the Department of Justice in 2024.

Public entities were instructed to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, an international standard. After that, public entities worked to align their websites with those requirements by April 24.

But days before the deadline this year, the Justice Department decided state and local government entities with a total population of 50,000 or more have until April 2027. Public entities with smaller populations have until April 2028.

The Justice Department decided that it “overestimated the capabilities (whether staffing or technology)” of public organizations to meet the 2026 deadline.

K-12 and college educators were particularly worried about the deadline, according to the department.

The department heard concerns that the 2026 deadline “could cause schools to attempt rapid, procedural box-checking to begin complying with the rule rather than engaging in thoughtful and sustainable implementation efforts that would maximize the goals and benefits of the rule.”

But Kienzynski said these standards and timelines aren’t new. The Justice Department dealt with web accessibility in 2010 and 2016.

“These are basic rights that everyone should have,” Kienzynski said. “And disabled people can't wait any longer. Blind people can't wait any longer.”

The ADA was passed in 1990. Though technology was vastly different at that time, digital accessibility is still part of the act, said Dee Ann Hart, vice president of the American Council of the Blind of Indiana.

Hart said she’s worried this deadline extension will lead to another, preventing people with disabilities from living independently.

“We've already been delayed36 years,” Hart said. “Adding another year on to that might not seem like that's all that important, but every day that goes by, that technology is inaccessible to us. It makes it more difficult for us to catch up and to be at the same level as our peers.”

Mary Scores, secretary of the Indiana affiliate of the American Council of the Blind of Indiana and accessibility specialist, said making websites accessible isn’t always easy.

Retroactively making websites more accessible can take significant time and money. Stores compared it to adding a wheelchair ramp to a house for an elderly person.

“If you were to live in a house, and then your grandma, who is in a wheelchair, needed to live there, too,” Stores said. “You only have stairs. You'd have to redesign things so that you could have a ramp for her to go up and down the stairs. The same sort of principles apply.”

The undertaking can be especially tough for educators that deal with foreign languages or STEM, Stores said.

“It's a lot easier said than done,” Stores said. “They're going to have some areas where they struggle, and that will be understandable. But their philosophy 101 course — absolutely no excuse.”

Accessible websites should accommodate people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

For people who are blind or have low vision, text should be compatible with screen readers. That means web designers should add image descriptions in alternative text.

Kienzynski said often she’ll come across meaningless, unlabeled images, because of its missing alternative text.

Buttons and forms on websites should also be labeled.

“The label is for that button that just keeps saying, ‘Button, button, button,” Hart said. “That doesn't tell them what the button does. That just tells them that there's a button there.”

These can be real problems for people with disabilities, preventing them from applying to jobs, buying bus tickets or filling out government forms.

“In this day and age with us being so dependent on websites it's difficult to live your life independently without having to overcome some of these barriers,” Hart said.

Closed captioning, strong contrasts in colors, clear formatting and keyboard-only navigation are other common accessibility features.

Stores said these are tools people without disabilities could benefit from too.

“I just really hope that people understand that when they're doing it, they're doing it for themselves, as well as for those quote, unquote ‘few people,’” Stores said.