Colleges Are Running Out of Time on Digital Accessibility
By the spring of next year, public colleges and universities will be required to make sure all their webpages, online course content and anything in a mobile app is accessible to people with disabilities. Compliance will require serious time and investment, making it prohibitive for many institutions. But the consequences of doing nothing are too serious to ignore.
By the time the April 2026 deadline arrives, institutions will have had nearly two years to update their digital media—the Department of Justice finalized its regulations for Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act in April 2024. The new rules require publicly funded entities to ensure that all web and media content adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which means every PDF file must be accessible, every video accompanied by captions and audio descriptions, every sound clip paired with a transcript. Any third-party platform has to meet the guidelines, too.
This mammoth task requires that institutions ensure thousands of webpages meet the guidelines, train faculty to make course materials accessible and verify the tech platforms from vendors are compliant. Some colleges started this work years ago. Others are woefully behind: A recent survey by Anthology found that fewer than a quarter of faculty said they considered accessibility when designing course materials, and an Educause poll shows that 40 percent of institutions have just one or two staff members on campus dedicated to technology accessibility.
Given the scale of the challenge and the widespread lack of preparation, the compliance deadline poses serious risks to institutions—not to mention disabled students. Phil Hill of On EdTech recently called the situation a “regulatory time bomb,” warning that the Trump administration could use the new rules in its negotiations with—and actions against—higher ed institutions.
He’s not wrong. The DOJ has taken a larger role in enforcing civil rights laws in higher ed under the second Trump administration. It’s easy to imagine that ADA violations would become part of the DOJ dragnet. Noncompliant institutions could also face even more litigation from legal and activist groups; a survey of Educause’s IT Accessibility Community Group showed that nearly 65 percent of respondents had faced threats of legal action or actual lawsuits related to technology accessibility.
Institutions may have gotten by with a patchwork of websites, handwritten and scanned math notes, or dodgy audio files—until now. But with the Title II ADA deadline looming, colleges can’t afford to stay flatfooted.
