How to evidence ADA Title II captions

The DOJ’s Title II web rule names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for state and local government web content. Most teams reading it discover that the hard part is not captioning the videos. It is being able to show, per asset and a year later, what each one was checked against and what the result was.

The dates, and who they bind

• ADA Title II web rule — large public entities

  Takes effect 26 April 2027 — 7 months away

  US state and local government entities serving a population of 50,000 or more, including public universities and school districts.

  Standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA. 28 CFR Part 35, DOJ final rule

• ADA Title II web rule — small entities

  Takes effect 26 April 2028 — 19 months away

  US state and local government entities serving fewer than 50,000 people, and special district governments.

  Standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA. 28 CFR Part 35, DOJ final rule

The timing above is computed from the effective date each time this page renders, so it cannot go on describing a deadline as upcoming after it has passed.

Which criteria the caption question turns on

Title II points at WCAG rather than at a caption-specific regulation, so “are our captions compliant” resolves to a small number of success criteria — and to how much of each one a caption file can actually settle.

Cited from W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, Level AA (W3C Recommendation, 5 June 2018) — read the standard.

Assurance vs evidence

An assurance is a sentence: our videos are captioned. Evidence is a record that survives the person who wrote it. The difference shows up the moment somebody outside your team asks the question — a procurement reviewer, a grant condition, an auditor, or a complainant — because none of them can act on the sentence.

A per-asset record that answers them names, at minimum:

• the asset, and the exact caption file that was checked;
• the standard and its version, not just “WCAG”;
• the result per criterion, including the criteria that were not evaluated and why;
• when the check ran, and by what engine;
• something that lets a third party confirm the record has not been edited since.

That last one is what makes it evidence rather than a spreadsheet. A CaptionPass receipt is signed, and anyone can verify one without trusting whoever sent it — including us.

Rolling it up for a whole library

One receipt answers “was this delivery conformant”. Procurement usually asks the larger question — across everything you publish, which criteria do you meet? — and that is an Accessibility Conformance Report. The caption rows of a VPAT are where the same evidence lands, and a sample report over a small library shows what that looks like with its failures included.

What this is not. A conformance receipt is evidence of what was checked, by which engine, against which version of which standard, and what it found. It is not a legal opinion, an audit, or a safe harbour. CaptionPass reads the caption file and never the audio, so anything that needs the audio — above all whether the captions match what was said — is reported as not evaluated rather than assumed.