Accessibility safe harbor moves to monitoring

NANA has moved Digital Accessibility Safe Harbor from active to monitoring status, Director of Public Policy Simone Radcliffe announced.

The safe harbor proposal would give small association websites a defined compliance path and a cure period before facing an accessibility lawsuit over minor, good-faith errors. NANA and Society of Accessible Design Professionals Accessibility Program Lead Esperanza Villalobos-Nye submitted joint comments backing the proposal. The rulemaking that would create the safe harbor has not advanced or been withdrawn; it has simply gone quiet, with no new docket activity for several months. Radcliffe said that pattern, not a change in policy substance, is why the file moves to monitoring: there is nothing left for members to act on until the rulemaking moves again.

"Monitoring doesn't mean we stopped caring," Radcliffe said. "It means the next move is the agency's, not ours."

Members should not read the status change as a signal that accessibility compliance is now optional or lower-risk. Absent a safe harbor, the existing legal exposure for an inaccessible website is unchanged: a small association can still be sued over a site that fails basic accessibility standards, with no formal cure period.

Villalobos-Nye, who co-authored NANA's comments, said the associations best positioned for whatever happens next are the ones that have already done the work rather than waited for a safe harbor to arrive. "A safe harbor was always going to help the associations that could already show a good-faith effort," she said. "It was never going to protect a site that's never been audited."

Radcliffe said NANA will keep filing comments on related rulemakings even while this specific file is inactive, since the agency's broader approach to digital accessibility enforcement continues to develop through other channels, including enforcement guidance and settlement patterns in existing cases.

NANA recommends every member association do the following, safe harbor or not:

• Run a self-audit of your public-facing website against WCAG 2.2 AA, at least annually

• Fix image alt text, form labels, and color-contrast issues first — they account for most complaints

• Keep dated records of audits and fixes, which matter whether or not a formal cure period ever exists

• Assign one staff member as the accessibility point of contact, even at a small organization

The Digital Accessibility Brief walks through the self-audit process in more detail. NANA will move this issue back to active if the rulemaking resumes.

Villalobos-Nye said the self-audit checklist she co-authored is deliberately ordered so a small association with no in-house developer can work through it without hiring a consultant. Alt text and form labels come first because they can usually be fixed directly in a content management system. Color contrast comes next, since it can often be corrected in a site's theme settings rather than its code. Only the last section, on keyboard navigation and screen-reader compatibility for interactive elements, typically requires a developer's help, and Villalobos-Nye said most small associations can get through the first two sections entirely on their own staff time.