Here Comes the Web Accessibility Deadline—Are Colleges Ready?

College course materials will likely appear very different within the next few months if they’re available online as web or mobile application content. That’s because of new federal regulations requiring public colleges nationwide to make such content accessible to all students.

But it’s not only the course materials. Any digital document or media file a college currently provides students could face review, and the school might need to redesign or remediate that content to comply with these sweeping new accessibility standards for the first time.

And it’s not only public colleges and universities. Newly changed regulations impose the same accessibility mandate on private colleges that accept funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

And there’s very little time. As we go to press during January 2025, most colleges are under pressure to finish their accessibility review and revisions before a hard deadline only 16 months away.

How did we get here? How did thousands of U.S. colleges and universities end up needing to review and potentially revise or replace millions of digital resources under the pressure of such a tight federal deadline?

In mid-2024, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in the Biden Administration updated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Passed by the first Bush Administration, the ADA is the 1990 law originally mandating that services provided by state and local government entities must provide equal opportunities for folks with disabilities. Those entities include public colleges and universities.

The ADA was last updated 15 years ago, in 2009. But in 2024 the Civil Rights Division wanted a sweeping new regulatory update—under development since 2021—to expand Americans’ equal access to information on the World Wide Web.

As we pointed out in our January 2023 OnlineEducation.com feature article “How Online Education Helps Marginalized University Students,” many of us aren’t aware of the huge number of students at colleges and universities who carry at least one disability. In fact, one-fifth of American college students live with disabilities, equivalent to about 3.24 million students in 2022.

President Biden’s Civil Rights Division especially wanted to expand equal access to information among students in this group who were living with vision, hearing, manual dexterity, cognitive and other disabilities. Such challenges can prevent these students from learning any time they attempt to use a standard computer or a mobile device for educational purposes. In December 2024, the former president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, Jamie Axelrod, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that such students “have never really had an equitable experience in the digital space. This is crucial.”

Accordingly, this third ADA update specifies much more than a set of accessibility guidelines that state and local government entities should follow. Instead, this new regulation details a specific set of all-new technical standards and metrics that government entities must comply with for the first time, along with a timetable and a deadline for providing digital information in accessible formats.

The new regulation also recognizes certain principles intended to ensure equal access to information. For example, it acknowledges that accessible digital spaces benefit everyone and that accessibility barriers can pose challenges to individuals, such as a lack of independence and privacy. This new rule’s main objective is to apply a single, consistent standard to web content and mobile applications—including social media platforms—that ensures clarity and reduces confusion.

But because voluntary compliance didn’t result in equal access for disabled individuals, interest groups and organizations concerned about discrimination asked Biden’s Justice Department to ensure accessibility to web and mobile application content by taking regulatory action. The action taken by the department also signals a subtle but significant shift that puts colleges in a proactive role for the first time with respect to student disabilities. Instead of simply granting reactive accommodations on an individual, one-time basis that a student must request, the regulation requires colleges for the first time to provide a consistent set of proactive accommodations that benefit all the disabled users within the larger student population.

We should point out that all this new accessibility will come at a substantial cost. The Justice Department estimated that the new regulation would cost colleges and universities across America at least $7 billion just to pay for review, testing, and remediation. And like some of the other educational technology regulations we’ve reviewed here recently, this estimate likely underestimates the true magnitude of the costs to colleges.

It might be true that a new administration in Washington might not enforce these new accessibility regulations. But disability advocates argue that if colleges fail to comply with these new rules, the schools risk becoming defendants in expensive lawsuits.

For example, here’s a case where a group of blind students won a $240,000 jury verdict. They sued the Los Angeles Community College District for discrimination.

And here’s another case where the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) had filed a federal class action lawsuit against Harvard University for not adding captions to video programming used for educational purposes. After four years of litigation, in 2019 Harvard settled out-of-court with the plaintiffs by agreeing to a consent decree. However, the plaintiff’s legal fees alone cost Harvard more than $1.6 million.

So what will be subject to the new regulation? Digital text, documents, audio, images, videos, animations and controls will all be subject to web content accessibility requirements, known as “success criteria” under an internationally recognized accessibility standard adopted by the Justice Department.

This standard was originally published in 2018 by W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, and is known as the WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria and conformance requirements. From now on, this is the specific, technical definition of what “accessibility” actually means under the new ADA.

The WCAG 2.1 Level AA standard encompasses 50 of these success criteria, of which Community College Daily published the following six examples:

• Content should not be limited to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape.
• Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media.
• Captions are provided for all pre-recorded audio content in synchronized media.
• Audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media.
• Non-text content should have an equivalent text alternative.
• Colors used are bold enough to be seen on the screen.

The standard expressly forbids certain types of content under any circumstances. For example, § 2.3.1 prohibits any content in a web page or mobile app that’s designed in such a way that’s known to cause physical reactions or seizures—such as a display object that flashes more than three times during any one-second interval.

In general, educational institutions are responsible for websites, apps, and edtech tools used for educational purposes. That means any digital software component a school buys from a vendor from now on must conform to the success criteria, or the school can’t make it available to students incorporated as part of a web page or a mobile application.

However, according to WCET, five very limited compliance exceptions exist:

1. Archived web content not currently in use, subject to certain conditions.
2. Pre-existing, conventional electronic documents, so long as those documents aren’t used to “apply for, gain access to, or participate in the public entity’s services, programs, or activities.”
3. Content posted by a third party not acting for the public entity, or under its control.
4. Individualized password-protected content about a specific individual, their property, or their account. This does not include password-protected content, like instructional content within the framework of a learning management system (LMS).
5. Preexisting social media posts made by an institution prior to that school’s compliance deadline.

So, speaking of the compliance deadline, what date must institutions comply with the new rule? That depends on the population that the public entity serves.

Large entities serving a population of 50,000 or more must comply by April 24, 2026. But the population is for the area that the institution serves.

For example, the total population for a state university would be the total population of the state, and the population for a community college would be the total population of the district. This means all public four-year and two-year institutions would need to comply by April 24, 2026.

Sixteen months is not a lot of time for many institutions that will need to act quickly; think of the massive World Wide Web infrastructure at the University of California, with ten campuses and 300,000 students. And even more concerning are the results from a surprising WCET survey of campus leaders in late August 2024.

The poll found that one-fifth of 205 leaders at U.S. colleges and universities across the nation were “not familiar” with this new ADA regulation. And when asked if their institution had taken any action to begin addressing this regulation’s compliance, 39 percent of the respondents said their college had not taken any action or they didn’t know.

Jarret Cummings, a senior advisor for policy and government relations at Educause, told EdSurge that most institutions would have to “quickly engage their corporate providers” to figure out how they could possibly meet this new standard on time.