What the law actually says
HB21-1110, signed in 2021, amended the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act so that a public entity excluding people with disabilities from its online services is a discrimination violation under state law - not just a federal ADA matter. It directed the Office of Information Technology to establish the technical accessibility standards, and OIT's rules are based on WCAG 2.1 AA, the same international standard used almost everywhere accessibility is regulated.
The compliance deadline was July 1, 2024, with a 2024 follow-up bill (HB24-1454) giving entities showing good-faith progress a grace period to July 1, 2025. Both deadlines are now past: a Colorado public entity's website is expected to comply today. Consequences under CADA can include court orders and monetary relief, and separately the federal ADA Title II rule finalized in 2024 requires state and local governments nationally to meet WCAG 2.1 AA on its own timeline - so a Colorado public entity is now covered from two directions.
One thing this page is not: legal advice. We build and fix websites. For what the law means for your specific organization, that is a question for your counsel - what we can tell you precisely is what the technical standard requires of a site and what fixing it involves.
You're a private business - why should you care?
Three practical reasons. First, if you bid public-sector work in Colorado - and trades, agencies, and professional firms increasingly do - your website is part of your bid's evidence. A vendor whose own site fails the standard the entity is legally bound to is an easy cut from the shortlist, and some procurement processes now ask directly.
Second, ADA web-accessibility demand letters against private businesses are a well-established genre of litigation nationally, and while federal law sets no explicit technical standard for private sites, WCAG is what plaintiffs' experts and settlements consistently reference. Meeting it is the practical inoculation.
Third - and this is the unglamorous one that actually pays - accessible sites convert better for everyone. The same work that serves a screen reader serves a customer on a cracked phone in bright sunlight: real text instead of text baked into images, buttons big enough to tap, contrast you can read outdoors, forms that say what went wrong. Accessibility failures and conversion failures are usually the same defects wearing different names.
What WCAG 2.1 AA actually requires, translated
- Everything readable: text contrast strong enough to read, resizable without breaking, never conveyed by color alone.
- Everything operable by keyboard: every menu, form, and button usable without a mouse, with visible focus so you can see where you are.
- Images and media described: alt text that says what the image is for, captions on video.
- Forms that help: labeled fields, errors that say what is wrong and how to fix it - not a red border and silence.
- Structure a machine can navigate: real headings in order, links that say where they go, one H1 that says what the page is.
- Nothing that traps or harms: no keyboard traps, no content flashing at seizure-inducing rates, time limits that can be extended.
What remediation involves, and what it costs
An honest remediation starts with an audit against the standard - automated scanning catches maybe a third of real issues, so the audit has to include a human working through the site with a keyboard and a screen reader. What comes back is a defect list ordered by severity: blockers that stop a user cold, then friction, then technical nonconformances.
The fix effort depends entirely on how the site was built. A structurally sound site needs contrast, labeling, and focus work - often days. A site built as images-of-text on a page builder, or a legacy build with no semantic structure, can cost more to fix than to rebuild, and we will tell you which side of that line you are on before you spend anything. Our website builds include WCAG 2.1 AA from the start - partly because we sell remediation and shipping inaccessible sites would be absurd, and partly because retrofitting always costs more than building it right. Remediation itself we quote after the audit, because pretending to price it before seeing the site would be exactly the 'packages start from' behavior this site exists to oppose.
Common questions
Does HB21-1110 apply to my private business website?
No - it binds Colorado public entities: state agencies and local governments. Private businesses are outside its scope, though the federal ADA's general nondiscrimination obligations still apply to businesses open to the public, and WCAG is the standard courts and settlements reference in practice. If you sell to government, the entity's own obligations tend to flow into what vendors must demonstrate.
Is there a certification that makes a site officially compliant?
No such certificate exists - anyone selling one is selling paper. What exists is conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA, demonstrated by audit, and an accessibility statement describing your conformance status and contact route. We publish our own statement on this site, which is what one looks like.
Do accessibility overlay widgets fix this?
The one-line-of-JavaScript overlay products do not make an inaccessible site conform, and they show up on the wrong side of accessibility litigation with some regularity. The defects are in the site's structure; the fix is in the site. We do not sell or install overlays.