language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Rehabilitation Act — Section 504 (29 U.S.C. §794) and Section 508 (29 U.S.C. §794d)

The two Rehabilitation Act accessibility provisions US school districts cite alongside the ADA Title II web rule. Section 504 prohibits disability discrimination in "any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance" (§794(a)) — which includes essentially every public school district, and "program or activity" expressly covers "a local educational agency […], system of career and technical education, or other school system" (§794(b)(2)(B)). Section 508 requires Federal agencies' electronic and information technology to give individuals with disabilities access comparable to others' (§794d(a)(1)(A)); it binds Federal agencies, not districts, but its Access Board standards (36 CFR Part 1194, which incorporate WCAG) are the accessibility yardstick US procurement language borrows.

Applicability to EdTech

• Section 504 is why districts must not procure inaccessible technology: a district that offers a program through software only some students can use risks excluding students with disabilities from participation (§794(a)). ED's implementing regulations — now in this folder in full — say so in terms, and the words that matter to a vendor are in §104.4(b)(1): a recipient may not, "directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements", deny a qualified person the opportunity to participate in or benefit from an aid, benefit or service, afford one that "is not equal to that afforded others", or provide one "that is not as effective as that provided to others". A licensed product is a contractual arrangement; the district's duty reaches through it.
• "Equally effective" has a defined meaning, and it is not "identical": §104.4(b)(2) requires equal opportunity to obtain the same result, gain the same benefit or reach the same level of achievement, "in the most integrated setting appropriate to the person's needs". A separate accessible version of a product is measured against that integration requirement, not just against feature parity — and §104.4(b)(3) adds that offering a separate version never permits excluding someone from the mainstream one.
• Criteria and methods of administration count too: §104.4(b)(4) reaches methods that merely "have the effect of" subjecting qualified persons to discrimination — again expressly "directly or through contractual or other arrangements". This is an effects test, not an intent test.
• A 504 plan is the district's obligation, and the product has to be able to carry it: Subpart D requires a free appropriate public education (§104.33) — "regular or special education and related aids and services" designed to meet the individual's needs as adequately as others' are met — education in the regular setting with supplementary aids unless that cannot be achieved satisfactorily (§104.34), evaluation and placement procedures (§104.35), procedural safeguards including an impartial hearing (§104.36), and equal opportunity in nonacademic and extracurricular services (§104.37). Note that an IEP under IDEA is only "one means" of meeting the appropriate-education standard (§104.33(b)(2)) — a student can have a 504 plan without an IEP, which is why 504 catches products IDEA's assistive-technology framing does not.
• "Section 508 compliant" in a K-12 RFP is shorthand, not a direct legal duty on the district or vendor: the statute's duty holds for Federal departments and agencies (§794d(a)(1)(A)). What travels is the standard — the Access Board's ICT rules, now in this folder — usually evidenced by an ACR/VPAT.
• The standard those RFPs point at is WCAG 2.0 AA, not 2.1. E205.4 requires electronic content to conform to "Level A and Level AA Success Criteria and Conformance Requirements in WCAG 2.0", and E207.2 applies the same to software user interfaces. The ADA Title II web rule requires WCAG 2.1 AA of public entities. A product that is "508 compliant" is therefore not automatically compliant with what a US school district itself must now meet — which is the single most useful thing to know when reading a procurement questionnaire that cites both.
• E205.3 is the list to read when scoping "public facing". Content that is not public facing still has to conform where it is official business communicated as an emergency notification, an adjudication, a programme or policy announcement, a notice of benefits or employment, a formal acknowledgement of receipt, a survey questionnaire, a template or form, educational or training materials, or intranet content designed as a web page (E205.3).
• A legacy product may be measured against the 2000 standards, not the revised ones. E202.2 exempts any component of existing ICT that complied with the original standards (reproduced as Appendix D) and has not been altered on or after 18 January 2018. So the question for a long-lived system is not "does it meet WCAG 2.0 AA" but "was it altered after that date" — and if it was, the safe harbour is gone for the altered portion. The pre-WCAG checklist an old VPAT was written against is §1194.22(a)–(p), and the appendix prints the Board's own mapping of (a)–(k) onto WCAG 1.0 checkpoints.
• Section 255 is a different standard binding different people, and lives in the same CFR part, which is where the confusion starts. The Section 255 guidelines bind manufacturers of telecommunications and customer premises equipment, require accessibility only where readily achievable, and have nothing to say to a school district or its software vendor unless the product is telecommunications equipment.
• Together with the ADA Title II web rule (WCAG 2.1 AA with hard dates), these are the trio behind US district accessibility contract clauses.

Contents

Key obligations at a glance

• No exclusion from, denial of benefits of, or discrimination under a federally assisted program or activity solely by reason of disability (§794(a)).
• Federal agencies' EIT: comparable access for Federal employees and members of the public with disabilities, unless an undue burden (§794d(a)(1)).
• No denial of, unequal, or less effective aids, benefits or services — including through contractual or licensing arrangements (34 CFR §104.4(b)(1)), and no methods of administration that merely have that effect (§104.4(b)(4)).
• A designated responsible employee and grievance procedures at every recipient with fifteen or more employees (§104.7), and notice of non-discrimination (§104.8).
• Free appropriate public education including related aids and services (§104.33), in the regular setting with supplementary aids where achievable (§104.34).

Enforcement

Section 504: the remedies, procedures and rights of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act apply ([§794a — not extracted]); in schools, ED's Office for Civil Rights investigates and enforces, and private actions lie. Section 508: administrative complaints to the funding agency and Title VI-style remedies for Federal procurement (§794d(f)).

Licence

The corpus reproduces 29 U.S.C. §§ 794 and 794d verbatim from the govinfo.gov United States Code, 2024 edition, and 34 CFR Part 104 (Department of Education) and 36 CFR Part 1194 (US Access Board) verbatim from the eCFR. It is a work of the United States Government. 17 U.S.C. § 105(a) (govinfo, United States Code 2024 edition, title 17 § 105, read 2026-10-01) provides: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."

The Government Publishing Office's Public Domain & Copyright Notice (govinfo.gov/about/policies, read 2026-10-01) adds: "By virtue of the foregoing, public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction. However, Government publications may contain copyrighted material which was used with permission of the copyright owner." It also says that "whenever a work is published consisting predominantly of work of the U.S. Government, the copyright notice (if any) must identify those parts of the work in which copyright is claimed per 17 U.S.C. § 403." The standards that 36 CFR Part 1194 incorporates by reference, WCAG 2.0 (W3C) and ANSI/HFES 200.2 among them, are under their owners' terms; the corpus reproduces only the regulation's list of them (Appendix C, section 702), not their text.

Conditions: none attach to the text itself. The one formal point is § 403: if the public pages ever carry a copyright notice, it must identify the parts in which copyright is claimed (the corpus's own curation) and not cover the reproduced federal text. The corpus names the source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Related

• ADA Title II web rule — the DOJ rule that turned the general duties into WCAG 2.1 AA with dates
• WCAG — WCAG 2.0 (11 December 2008), the version E205.4 and E207.2 incorporate, reproduced in WCAG-2-0.md
• EN 301 549 — the European ICT accessibility standard, structured like the 508 Standards (functional performance criteria, then hardware, web, documents, software)
• FERPA — the other standing federal schoolhouse statute in vendor contracts

Sources

• eCFR — 34 CFR Part 104 (ED's Section 504 regulations), current text
• eCFR — 36 CFR Part 1194 (Access Board ICT standards and guidelines), current text
• govinfo — 29 U.S.C. §794 (2024 edition)
• govinfo — 29 U.S.C. §794d (2024 edition)
• 34 CFR Part 104 — ED §504 regulations
• US Access Board — Section 508 standards