What the Date Stamps on ADA.gov and Section508.gov Actually Mean

Short answer: there is no single “last updated” convention across these federal accessibility sites. Knowing which convention you’re looking at tells you what the date can — and can’t — tell you.

This original record-reading guide is a general reading aid, not cited evidence. It does not depict a source record; the article text and source links provide the facts.

Key points

• The ADA.gov ticket-sales page stamps both an “Originally issued” date and a separate “Last updated” date (ada.gov/resources/ticket-sales).
• ADA.gov’s live design-standards page carries no date stamp of its own, and links out to an archived 2011 guide for compliance-date questions (ada.gov/law-and-regs/design-standards).
• Two of Section508.gov’s content pages use a single “Reviewed/Updated” month — that’s a review timestamp, not a change log for the standard itself (laws and policies; ICT testing baseline portfolio).
• archive.ADA.gov states directly in its banner that the site covers 1990–2022 and that its general information is not updated (only its Technical Assistance content is described as current) (archive.ada.gov).

Two dates on the ticket page

ADA.gov’s ticket-sales guidance page carries two distinct date lines. The page states: “Originally issued: July 01, 2011” and, separately, “Last updated: February 28, 2020” (ada.gov/resources/ticket-sales). The first date marks when the guidance was first published; the second marks the most recent revision. Together they tell a reader how long the guidance has existed and how recently it was touched — nothing more.

No stamp on the regs page

Not every ADA.gov page carries this two-date convention. The live design-standards page, ada.gov/law-and-regs/design-standards, has no “issued” or “updated” date of its own. Instead, for readers asking when a given design requirement became effective or compliance-mandatory, that page links out to a guide titled “ADA Requirements: Effective Date and Compliance Date.” That guide does not live on the current ADA.gov site — it lives on archive.ADA.gov, and it carries its own, much older date stamp (covered below). A reader following that link from the live standards page lands on a document dated years before the page that pointed them there.

archive.ADA.gov’s own limits

archive.ADA.gov is explicit about what it is and is not, right in its banner. The site is labeled “archive.ADA.gov (1990-2022)” (archive.ada.gov), giving readers a coverage window up front. The same banner adds a direct currency disclosure: “Information on this site is not updated. (Technical Assistance on this site is current and usable.)” (archive.ada.gov). That is the site telling readers, in its own words, that most of its content is frozen — with one carved-out exception for its Technical Assistance material.

This is where the dating trap from the design-standards section resolves. The “ADA Requirements: Effective Date and Compliance Date” guide that the live ada.gov standards page links to lives at archive.ada.gov/revised_effective_dates-2010.htm. That page carries two of its own date markers: “Duplication of this document is encouraged. February 2011” and “last updated: February 16, 2011” (archive.ada.gov/revised_effective_dates-2010.htm). So a reader clicking from the live, undated design-standards page arrives at a document last touched in February 2011 — on a site whose own banner says its information is not updated.

Section508.gov review month

Two of Section508.gov’s content pages use a different single-date convention. The laws-and-policies page states: “Reviewed/Updated: July 2026” (section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies). That single month marks when someone reviewed or touched the page — it is not a claim that the underlying law or standard changed in that month. The same page separately displays another dated line of text: “The final rule went into effect on January 18, 2018.” (section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies) This article does not verify that date; it only notes that the sentence is text the page displays about the ICT Final Rule, distinct from the “Reviewed/Updated” line above it, which is about the page itself.

The same one-date convention appears on a second page. The ICT testing baseline portfolio page states: “Reviewed/Updated: July 2025” (section508.gov/test/ict-testing-baseline-portfolio). As with the laws-and-policies page, this month records a review of that page, not a revision date for the testing baseline content it describes.

This article compares only the date-stamp conventions these pages display and what those specific stamps state about themselves; it does not assess whether the substantive content on any of them — the ticket-sales guidance, the design standards, the Section508.gov policy pages, or the 2011 effective-dates guide — is currently accurate or complete, and it does not describe what changed at any particular review, including the July 2026 or July 2025 Section508.gov review months. Readers who need to know whether a specific requirement is currently in effect should read the linked page itself rather than rely on any date stamp alone.

Source links

https://www.ada.gov/resources/ticket-sales/ https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/design-standards/ https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/ https://www.section508.gov/test/ict-testing-baseline-portfolio/ https://archive.ada.gov/ https://archive.ada.gov/revised_effective_dates-2010.htm