WCAG 2.2 Standards, ADA Compliance, and the Mission of Cives
Abstract
This article examines the evolution of digital accessibility standards from the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 through the publication of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 in October 2023, situating these developments within the broader philosophical mission of Cives — a company whose very name, derived from the Latin word for citizens, reflects a foundational commitment to inclusion, democratic participation, and equal access for all members of society. Drawing on legal, technical, and ethical frameworks, the article traces how digital accessibility has transformed from an afterthought into a civil rights imperative, analyses the nine new success criteria introduced by WCAG 2.2, and demonstrates how Cives’ Courts solution embodies full compliance with these standards as demanded by the ADA and its implementing regulations. The article argues that genuine accessibility is not merely a legal obligation but a precondition for the realization of democratic equality in the digital age.
1. Introduction: The Latin Root of a Democratic Vision
Language carries meaning that transcends ordinary communication. When the founders of Cives selected the word “cives” as the company’s name, they reached back two millennia to the Roman concept of citizenship — a status that, in its most ideal articulation, guaranteed certain rights, protections, and dignities to every member of the civic body regardless of physical condition, social station, or origin. In Latin, cives (plural of civis) referred not merely to legal residents of a city-state but to active, rights-bearing participants in the shared life of the community. The implicit argument encoded in the name is arresting in its ambition: technology should serve every citizen, not merely those who are wealthy, able-bodied, or technologically sophisticated.
This etymology is not decorative. It is programmatic. Cives was founded on the conviction that innovation must be harnessed in the service of cohesion, inclusion, and democracy — that the same rights and opportunities should flow to every world citizen, and that technology, when designed with genuine accessibility as its north star, becomes an instrument of democratic empowerment rather than a new axis of exclusion.
The timing of the company’s emergence could not be more consequential. In October 2023, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published WCAG 2.2, the most recent and comprehensive iteration of the international standard for web accessibility. In April 2024, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) finalized a landmark rule under Title II of the ADA requiring state and local governments to bring their web content and mobile applications into conformance with these guidelines. Courts, legislatures, and government agencies — the very institutions through which democracy operates — now face a legal and moral mandate to make their digital infrastructure accessible to every citizen. It is precisely in this context that Cives’ Courts solution stands as both a technical achievement and a statement of values.
2. The Historical Arc: From the ADA to Digital Civil Rights
2.1 The Americans with Disabilities Act
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) represents one of the most sweeping pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. Modeled conceptually on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ADA prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities across employment, public services, public accommodations, transportation, and telecommunications. At its legislative core lies a deceptively simple premise: that a disability should not deprive any person of equal participation in American civic and economic life.
Enacted in 1990, the ADA and its subsequent amendments guarantee equal opportunity for persons with disabilities in employment, state and local government services, public accommodations, commercial facilities, and transportation. The statute covers disabilities that may be physical, sensory (such as blindness or deafness), or cognitive in nature. Both public and private entities bear the responsibility to provide equal access through accommodations tailored to an individual’s needs.
At the time of the ADA’s passage, the World Wide Web did not yet exist as a public medium. The statute’s drafters conceived of accessibility primarily in physical terms: ramps and curb cuts, Braille signage and audio signals at pedestrian crossings, accessible restrooms and parking spaces. The digital revolution that would within a decade transform commerce, governance, communication, and social life was not yet on the legislative horizon.
2.2 The Web Accessibility Gap and Early Rulemaking
As the internet rapidly became the primary channel through which citizens accessed government services, public information, commercial transactions, and social participation, the ADA's physical accessibility framework began to show its limits. Websites could be legally discriminatory even while fully complying with the letter of the original statute. The absence of specific digital accessibility regulations created prolonged enforcement uncertainty, leaving persons with disabilities without clear and consistent legal recourse. Organizations advocating for persons with disabilities pressed for regulatory clarity, arguing — correctly — that the failure to make digital infrastructure accessible amounted to a new form of the same structural exclusion the ADA was designed to eliminate.
The World Wide Web Consortium, recognizing this gap, launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in 1997 and published WCAG 1.0 in 1999 — the first formal international guidelines for web accessibility. Revised substantially as WCAG 2.0 in December 2008 and again as WCAG 2.1 in June 2018, these standards achieved broad adoption by governments, international standards bodies, and private organizations worldwide. Yet their incorporation into American law remained incomplete, creating a decade-long tension between the ADA’s broad anti-discrimination mandate and the absence of specific, enforceable digital accessibility requirements.
2.3 The 2024 DOJ Rule: A Watershed Moment
That tension was formally resolved on April 24, 2024, when the United States Department of Justice published its final rule revising the regulations implementing Title II of the ADA to establish specific technical requirements for the accessibility of web content and mobile applications provided by state and local government entities. The rule designates WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the minimum technical standard and sets compliance deadlines that, as subsequently extended by an Interim Final Rule published on April 20, 2026, run to April 2027 for larger entities and April 2028 for smaller jurisdictions and special districts.
The rule's significance extends well beyond its immediate applicability to government entities. By codifying WCAG 2.1 as the enforceable standard for state and local governments, the DOJ has effectively established the framework against which digital accessibility across the justice sector is increasingly measured. Legal practitioners and digital product developers across sectors have recognized that WCAG compliance, and increasingly WCAG 2.2 compliance, represents the threshold for both legal safety and genuine accessibility.
3. Understanding WCAG 2.2: Architecture and Principles
3.1 The POUR Framework
WCAG 2.2, published by the W3C’s Accessibility Guidelines Working Group on October 5, 2023, as a full W3C Recommendation, is organized around four foundational principles that together form the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. These principles reflect a comprehensive theory of what it means for a digital interface to be genuinely accessible to users with the full range of sensory, motor, cognitive, and technological conditions that characterize human diversity.
3.2 The Three-Level Conformance Structure
WCAG 2.2 employs the same three-tier conformance structure established by WCAG 2.0. Level A represents the minimum baseline, addressing the most critical accessibility barriers. Level AA, which is the standard referenced by the ADA’s 2024 rule and by most national and international accessibility laws, addresses the most common barriers faced by users with disabilities without imposing undue burdens on content creators. Level AAA represents the highest level of accessibility and is not intended to be achieved as a blanket conformance target for entire websites or applications, though specific content may benefit from meeting AAA criteria.
WCAG 2.2 is fully backward compatible with its predecessors. Content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to WCAG 2.1 and WCAG 2.0. In October 2023, the same month as its W3C publication, WCAG 2.2 was also adopted as the international standard ISO/IEC 40500:2025, cementing its status as the global benchmark for web accessibility.
3.3 The Nine New Success Criteria in WCAG 2.2
WCAG 2.2 introduces nine new success criteria since WCAG 2.1, addressing gaps in accessibility for people with visual, physical, and cognitive disabilities that earlier versions left unresolved. These criteria have particular relevance to court technology and government digital services, where the full range of users — from elderly participants to persons with motor impairments to individuals with cognitive disabilities — must be able to navigate complex procedural interfaces effectively.
3.3.1 Focus Not Obscured (Minimum) — Level AA (2.4.11)
When a keyboard-focusable element receives focus, it must not be completely hidden by author-created content such as sticky headers or cookie banners. Keyboard users and switch access users require a visible focus indicator to navigate; an element obscured by overlapping content renders that navigation impossible. This criterion addresses a common failure mode in modern web design where fixed navigation bars cover the focused element.
3.3.2 Focus Not Obscured (Enhanced) — Level AAA (2.4.12)
The enhanced version of this criterion requires that no part of the keyboard focus indicator be hidden by author-created content. Where the Minimum criterion permits partial visibility, the Enhanced criterion demands complete visibility, providing a higher standard for platforms where comprehensive accessibility is feasible and appropriate.
3.3.3 Focus Appearance — Level AA (2.4.13)
This criterion specifies minimum size and contrast requirements for the keyboard focus indicator. The focus indicator must have sufficient area (at least the perimeter of the unfocused component times 2 CSS pixels) and sufficient contrast ratio (at least 3:1) against adjacent colors, ensuring that users with low vision can reliably identify which element currently holds keyboard focus. Prior to WCAG 2.2, focus visibility requirements existed but without these specific measurable thresholds.
3.3.4 Dragging Movements — Level AA (2.5.7)
All functionality that uses a dragging movement for operation must also be achievable with a single pointer without dragging, unless dragging is essential to the function. Users with motor disabilities, hand tremors, or limited dexterity find dragging operations particularly challenging; this criterion ensures that drag interfaces — such as sliders, sortable lists, or timeline scrubbers — offer a viable pointer-based alternative.
3.3.5 Target Size (Minimum) — Level AA (2.5.8)
The size of a clickable or tappable target must be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or an alternative target of that size must be provided, with limited exceptions for inline elements, targets controlled by user agents, or cases where target size is essential to the function. This criterion directly addresses mobile usability for users with motor impairments or larger fingers, and aligns with established best practices in human interface design.
3.3.6 Consistent Help — Level A (3.2.6)
If a mechanism for obtaining help — such as a chat widget, help email link, telephone number, or self-help page — is provided across multiple pages or views of a site, it must appear in the same relative position on each page. This consistency reduces cognitive load for users with memory impairments or cognitive disabilities, ensuring they can reliably locate assistance without reconstructing their mental model of the interface on each page visit.
3.3.7 Redundant Entry — Level A (3.3.7)
Information previously entered by the user and required again in the same process must be auto-populated or available for the user to select, unless the re-entry is essential (for security verification purposes, for example, or because the information is no longer valid). This criterion reduces barriers for users with cognitive disabilities, motor impairments, or fatigue, who may find repeated data entry disproportionately burdensome in multi-step processes such as court filing systems.
3.3.8 Accessible Authentication (Minimum) — Level AA (3.3.8)
Authentication processes must not require users to solve cognitive function tests — such as remembering passwords, transcribing characters, or solving puzzles — unless an alternative method is available or the cognitive test is not essential to the authentication. This criterion is particularly significant for court and government platforms where users must authenticate to access proceedings, file documents, or manage cases: traditional CAPTCHA mechanisms and complex password requirements can create insurmountable barriers for users with cognitive disabilities.
3.3.9 Accessible Authentication (Enhanced) — Level AAA (3.3.9)
The enhanced authentication criterion eliminates exceptions for object recognition and personal content tests, requiring that no cognitive function test be required during authentication. This higher standard is particularly relevant for high-stakes digital services where inclusivity is paramount.
4. The Legal and Ethical Imperative for Court Technology
4.1 Courts as Constitutional Accessibility Hubs
Courts occupy a uniquely constitutive role in democratic society. They are the institutions through which the abstract rights of citizens are vindicated, through which disputes are resolved, and through which the rule of law is given concrete effect. When courts are inaccessible — whether because their buildings lack wheelchair ramps or because their digital interfaces lack screen reader compatibility — the gap between legal rights and practical access widens in ways that fall disproportionately on those society has already disadvantaged.
The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) has explicitly confirmed that courts are obligated to ensure their websites and digital tools are fully ADA compliant, regardless of whether artificial intelligence is employed in their operations. The intersection of AI-powered court technology and ADA compliance is therefore not merely a product feature but a constitutional imperative.
Modern courts face extraordinary pressures: ballooning case backlogs, strained budgetary resources, and the rising expectations of a citizenry increasingly accustomed to digital service delivery. Technology companies serving the justice sector cannot address these pressures at the expense of the very litigants, witnesses, jurors, and members of the public whose access to justice depends on the usability of the systems they deploy.
4.2 The Scope of ADA Title II Digital Obligations
Under the 2024 DOJ rule and its subsequent extension, state and local governments must ensure that web content and mobile applications they provide or make available — including through arrangements with third-party vendors — conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Crucially, the rule establishes that government entities cannot discharge their accessibility obligations simply by outsourcing digital services to private vendors: the government remains responsible for the accessibility of all content provided or made available on its behalf, whether maintained directly or through a contractor.
This obligation has profound implications for court technology vendors. A court that deploys a case management system, a virtual hearing platform, or a public-facing scheduling application that fails to meet WCAG standards is not shielded from liability by the fact that a third party built the software. Vendors who develop technology for court use must therefore build accessibility into the architecture of their products from the ground up, not retrofit it as a compliance afterthought.
Beyond the strict requirements of the WCAG technical standard, the DOJ rule preserves the ADA’s broader obligations of effective communication, reasonable modifications, and equal opportunity to participate in or benefit from government services. These obligations apply even when specific content or features fall within recognized exceptions to the WCAG compliance requirement.
4.3 The Global Dimension: European and International Standards
The accessibility imperative is not confined to the United States. The European Accessibility Act (EAA), the European Standard EN 301 549, the United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010, and accessibility legislation across dozens of national jurisdictions reflect a global convergence on the principle that digital services must be accessible to persons with disabilities. WCAG 2.2’s status as ISO/IEC 40500:2025 ensures that it functions as a genuinely international standard, enabling organizations like Cives that serve governments and courts across multiple jurisdictions to build to a single, internationally recognized benchmark.
The European Standard EN 301 549 currently references WCAG 2.1, with an update expected to incorporate WCAG 2.2. Organizations like Cives that already achieved WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance today are therefore positioned ahead of the regulatory curve in both North American and European markets, reducing future remediation costs and demonstrating a proactive commitment to accessibility that resonates with public sector clients.
5. Cives: Innovation in the Service of Democratic Inclusion
5.1 The Philosophy Behind the Platform
Cives was founded on a belief that technology, when guided by empathy, ethics, and security, can help courts and governments not just adapt to the digital age but lead it. The company’s self-description is revealing: it combines artificial intelligence and collaboration technology to make access to government services and agencies as seamless and easy as possible, so that all citizens — all cives — will connect with public services in an efficient and rewarding experience.
This is not the language of a company that views accessibility as a compliance checkbox. It is the language of an organization that has built its product philosophy around the idea that every citizen, regardless of ability, location, or circumstance, has an equal claim on the tools of democratic participation. The company’s core values — excellence, innovation, integrity, client focus, and collaboration — are animated by a deeper commitment to equality and sustainability that mirrors the aspirations of the international accessibility movement.
At the ComoLake Innovation Forum, Cives CEO Alfeo Pareschi articulated a vision of technology that transforms government operations to be more efficient and effective while ensuring that citizen interactions are both productive and accessible. The company’s participation in landmark events such as the NCSC’s Court Technology Conference, where it was represented by CEO Alfeo Pareschi and Chief Product Officer Brian McGlynn, reflects its positioning at the precise intersection of justice, technology, and inclusion.
5.2 The Courts Solution: Architecture of Accessibility
Cives’ Courts solution was developed for Cisco Webex and first deployed by governments globally during the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, when courts worldwide faced the existential challenge of maintaining judicial proceedings while observing public health restrictions. The platform’s rapid adoption in that context demonstrated the urgent demand for flexible, accessible, and reliable hybrid court technology.
Today, the Courts solution offers a unique blend of in-person and virtual court sessions designed for efficient, equitable legal proceedings. Its design philosophy, as articulated by the company, holds that usability in court technology is paramount because it directly impacts the efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness of judicial proceedings. Judges, legal professionals, and participants benefit from intuitive interfaces and streamlined processes that enable seamless navigation and operation, freeing judges to focus on the substantive aspects of cases rather than struggling with technology.
The platform is built natively for the web, requiring no downloads or installations — a design choice that in itself serves accessibility by eliminating technical barriers to participation for users with limited technical sophistication, older devices, or restricted administrative permissions. The one-click join process reflects WCAG’s principle of simplicity and reduces the cognitive burden on all users, with particular benefit for those with cognitive or learning disabilities.
5.3 WCAG 2.2 Compliance in the Courts Solution
The Cives’ Courts solution is designed and maintained to conform with the requirements of WCAG 2.2 Level AA, satisfying the accessibility standards demanded by the ADA and its implementing regulations. This compliance is not incidental to the product’s design but central to its architecture. Each of the major WCAG 2.2 dimensions is addressed through deliberate product decisions:
Perceivability
The platform’s fully web-based architecture is built with semantic HTML that exposes document structure to screen readers and other assistive technologies. All meaningful interface elements carry appropriate text alternatives. Video content from court proceedings is captioned in real time through integrated closed captioning features, ensuring accessibility for participants with hearing impairments. The platform’s interface elements maintain color contrast ratios that meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA thresholds, and text can be resized without loss of functionality. Tailored User Interfaces (TUIs) allow interface customization for different user roles, enabling high-contrast and large-text configurations suited to users with low vision.
Operability
Comprehensive keyboard navigability is implemented across all interface components, ensuring that users who cannot operate a mouse — including those with mobility impairments who rely on keyboard access, switch devices, or other alternative input methods — can access all functions of the platform. Interactive elements meet the WCAG 2.2 target size requirements, with clickable controls sized to facilitate use on touchscreens by participants with motor disabilities. The platform’s focus indicators are designed to meet the new WCAG 2.2 Focus Appearance criterion, ensuring that keyboard users can always identify the active element.
Understandability
The one-click join process and streamlined interface design directly address WCAG’s Understandability principle by minimizing complexity for all users. Consistent navigation and help mechanisms are maintained across the platform’s views, satisfying the WCAG 2.2 Consistent Help criterion. The authentication process is designed to offer accessible alternatives to complex cognitive tests, meeting the Accessible Authentication criterion introduced in WCAG 2.2. For multi-step processes, the platform avoids unnecessary redundant data entry, reducing barriers for users with cognitive disabilities.
Robustness
The platform’s government-level compliance architecture ensures that it is built on open standards that can be reliably parsed by a wide range of user agents, including current and future assistive technologies. Real-Time Language Translation features enhance the platform’s accessibility across linguistic communities, ensuring that non-English-speaking participants are not excluded from proceedings. Role-Based Access (RBA) controls are implemented with accessibility in mind, ensuring that the security architecture does not create barriers for users relying on assistive technologies.
6. The Broader Stakes: Accessibility as Democratic Infrastructure
The convergence of WCAG 2.2, ADA enforcement, and the philosophical mission of companies like Cives reflects a growing recognition that digital accessibility is not a specialized technical concern but a fundamental dimension of democratic infrastructure. As courts, legislatures, and government agencies migrate their operations to digital platforms — a migration accelerated irreversibly by the pandemic — the accessibility of those platforms becomes a direct determinant of citizens’ ability to exercise their legal rights, participate in democratic processes, and access public services.
The approximately 1.3 billion people worldwide estimated to live with some form of disability represent not a niche edge case but a significant portion of every democratic polity. In the United States alone, more than 61 million adults live with a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Inaccessible court technology does not merely inconvenience these individuals; it denies them the practical exercise of rights that the law nominally guarantees. An inaccessible virtual hearing platform means a deaf litigant cannot participate in their own case. An authentication system that requires complex cognitive tasks may be insurmountable for a veteran managing traumatic brain injury. A court website that fails minimum contrast requirements may be unnavigable for an elderly witness with macular degeneration.
These are not hypothetical harms. They are the lived reality of millions of citizens in every jurisdiction where court technology has been deployed without systematic attention to accessibility. The DOJ’s enforcement framework, WCAG 2.2’s technical requirements, and the product philosophy of Cives all converge on the same diagnosis: accessibility failures in digital government infrastructure are a form of structural discrimination, and the remediation of those failures is both a legal obligation and a moral imperative.
Cives’ conviction that all world citizens should be granted the same rights and opportunities is, in this light, neither utopian nor merely aspirational. It is a precise description of what the ADA, the WCAG standards, and the international accessibility movement collectively demand: that the digital infrastructure of democratic life be designed for every citizen from the outset, not retrofitted for the few after the fact.
7. Implementation Guidance: Procuring Accessible Court Technology
7.1 Vendor Responsibilities in the Court Technology Ecosystem
As the DOJ rule makes clear, government entities cannot discharge their WCAG compliance obligations by outsourcing digital services to vendors who do not themselves meet the standard. Courts and government agencies that take their ADA obligations seriously must therefore approach technology procurement as an accessibility decision, not merely a functional or budgetary one. The question is not only whether a platform performs its core functions reliably, but whether it performs them accessibly for every citizen who will depend on it.
7.2 Compliance Deadlines and Planning Horizons
Under the DOJ rule as extended by the Interim Final Rule of April 20, 2026, state and local government entities with a total population of 50,000 or more face a compliance deadline of April 26, 2027, while smaller jurisdictions and special districts have until April 26, 2028. Courts that have not yet begun accessibility remediation should treat these deadlines as planning imperatives rather than distant targets. Procurement cycles for court technology can be lengthy, and deploying a non-conformant system today only defers — and compounds — the remediation burden.
Cives' Courts solution does not merely anticipate these requirements: it already meets them. While courts across the country are working toward the 2027 and 2028 deadlines, Cives' Courts solution is today fully conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA — the standard that the DOJ rule demands and that WCAG 2.2 refines further. For courts seeking to discharge their Title II obligations efficiently, deploying a platform that is already compliant eliminates remediation risk, reduces procurement complexity, and ensures that the citizens who appear before those courts — litigants, witnesses, jurors, and members of the public — are not asked to wait for accessibility that is already available today. Cives' commitment to WCAG 2.2 compliance is therefore not only an ethical stance but a concrete, demonstrable competitive differentiator in a market increasingly shaped by legal requirements and institutional accountability.
8. Conclusion: Citizens, Technology, and the Future of Democratic Access
The history of digital accessibility is, at its core, the history of a struggle to ensure that the promise of the information age extends to all citizens rather than only those fortunate enough to encounter the web without disability-related barriers. From the passage of the ADA in 1990 through the publication of WCAG 2.2 in 2023 and the DOJ’s landmark 2024 rule, the legal and technical landscape has moved — haltingly but unmistakably — toward the recognition that equal access to digital infrastructure is a civil rights issue of the first order.
Cives stands in this history not as a bystander but as a participant with a clear philosophical commitment. In choosing a name that means citizens, the company declared that its purpose is to serve all citizens equally — that innovation must be in the service of cohesion, inclusion, and democracy, and that the tools of democratic participation must be accessible to every human being regardless of ability, language, or circumstance. The Courts solution, built to WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance and designed around the needs of the full range of court participants, is the concrete expression of that commitment.
The stakes could not be higher. Courts are the institutions through which citizens vindicate their rights, resolve their disputes, and experience the rule of law. If the digital interfaces of those courts exclude persons with disabilities, the gap between formal legal equality and practical democratic participation widens in ways that betray both the letter and the spirit of the ADA. Conversely, when court technology is designed for every citizen from the outset — when it is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for the full breadth of human diversity — it becomes an instrument of genuine democratic inclusion.
This is the vision that animates Cives: a world in which the advance of technology is not a source of new exclusions but a force for the realization of the ancient promise that every citizen, every civis, has an equal claim on the structures of justice and democratic life. WCAG 2.2 and the ADA provide the legal and technical framework. Cives provides the innovation. Together, they trace the outline of a more accessible, more equitable, and more democratic digital future.
Cives exists because democracy is only as strong as the access it guarantees. We build technology for every citizen — not the majority, not the able-bodied, not the connected few — because the Latin word encoded in our name admits no exceptions. Every civis. Every time. That is not an aspiration. It is an obligation.
We believe that courts, governments, and public institutions deserve technology that reflects their highest purpose: equal justice, equal participation, equal dignity. We build to that standard — and we hold ourselves to it — because the citizens we serve deserve nothing less.