The Planning Window #1: The Title II date almost everyone gets wrong
Welcome to the first issue of The Planning Window — a short note every other week for people in higher ed who own accessibility. One observation from the field, one thing you can do in five minutes, one link worth your time. No pitch.
What I'm seeing this week
I've spent the last few weeks talking with accessibility leads across New England — community colleges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, state university offices in Connecticut and Maine. Different institutions, same conversation, almost every time.
It starts with relief. "We're fine on timing — we have until April 2027." Then I ask one question: is your institution an instrumentality of a state system or a sizable local government? And the room gets quiet, because for most public colleges the answer puts them on the earlier date — April 24, 2026 — not the later one.
This isn't a small mix-up. It's the difference between having a year to plan and having already lost it. The institutions that are calm about Title II aren't the ones with more runway. They're the ones who confirmed their actual date early and built backward from it. The ones in trouble all made the same comfortable assumption and never checked it.
The pattern is consistent enough that I'd say it plainly: if you have not personally verified which compliance date applies to your institution, assume you're guessing — and assume the guess is optimistic.
One thing you can do in five minutes
Confirm your date. It's a short exercise:
- Determine what your institution legally is — an instrumentality of a state system, or a unit of a local government.
- Find the population of that governing jurisdiction (the state system or the locality), not your enrollment.
- Population 50,000 or more → April 24, 2026. Under 50,000, or a special district → April 24, 2027.
- Write that date at the top of your plan, where everyone who opens the document sees it first.
Five minutes, and the rest of your planning is now anchored to something real instead of an assumption.
Worth your time
The WebAIM Million — WebAIM's annual accessibility analysis of the top one million website home pages. It's the cleanest reality check I know of: it shows how ordinary these failures are at scale, which is useful the next time you need to explain to leadership that this is a structural problem, not a few bad pages. Free, no signup, updated yearly.
P.S. — If you read something here you disagree with, reply and tell me. I'd rather be corrected by someone in the role than be polished and wrong. And if a colleague owns this work at your institution, forward it their way.
— Brooks Winchell. 21 years inside higher education, including a long run at Quinsigamond Community College.