Join us for a live presentation and interactive discussion
September 2026 Special Session

A repeal draws comments. A rescinded guidance document draws none. That difference explains most of what has happened to disability rights this year. Agencies now work in three patterns. The Justice Department withdrew its Olmstead guidance in July. The Energy Department has moved the deadline on its Section 504 new-construction rescission five times. The Transportation Department announced in August that it will not enforce five provisions of the air travel wheelchair rules. Each statute and each regulation survives, and nothing remains to make either one operate.

The rollback rests on a misreading of the case law, and Ken walks through it in plain English. The Supreme Court has held for fifty years that Section 504 reaches discrimination by effect as well as by design, and it has upheld the forward-looking requirements the administration now calls unlawful. State and local governments have a direct stake, because Title II borrows its enforcement scheme from Section 504. The Small Business Administration has already asked the Justice Department to revise the 2024 Title II web rule, on a theory that would take the whole rule down rather than carve out small governments.

The session closes on what attendees can do. The administration counts on advocates missing these changes under the avalanche of Federal Register notices, and some changes never reach the Federal Register at all, surfacing only in OMB's Unified Agenda. Ken shows how to set up prompts and alerts in AI systems like Claude that watch both sources, and how advocacy organizations can help their members file comments that reflect each member's own circumstances and oppose the rulemaking directly

Takeaways:

Ken Nakata Principal, Converge Accessibility

Ken Nakata is a former Senior Trial Attorney with the U.S. Justice Department's Disability Rights Section. He developed nationwide ADA policies for the internet, was awarded the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Information Technology by Attorney General Janet Reno, served as lead counsel for the interagency working group making the Federal government's information technology accessible to people with disabilities (pursuant to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act), and represented the United States many times in litigation in Federal courts.

Ken is a frequent lecturer and he is sought after by major international accessibility conferences separately for his knowledge of law and technology. He has trained teams on the proper coding in HTML for accessibility as well as led continuing legal education (CLE) courses for attorneys on legal defenses in web accessibility cases under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California's Unruh Act.