donbosco
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Prefacing this with the fact that for years I have worked with disabilities programs and students -- and I believe in making all things accessible to all people. I imagine only a few (any?) folks will have interest in this issue but I'm going to post a significant portion of his article in full here in case someone does (it is behind a firewall so let me know if you want to read it all and I will send it to you via PM).
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By Taylor Swaak December 6, 2024
Public colleges nationwide will enter 2025 with a pressing mandate to make their web and mobile-app content accessible for all students.
The U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year formally added new language to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that — for the first time — lays out specific technical standards for web content that public colleges and other government entities need to meet. That means colleges must remediate existing digital content, which includes course materials, to meet those standards, and will also need to apply the standards to any new content they create or use.
And many have just under a year and a half to do it.
Private colleges that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should also pay attention, accessibility advocates said, because of separate regulatory changes that recently imposed the same standards under a similar deadline.
This update is long overdue, advocates and web-accessibility experts say. Some 21 percent of higher-ed students report having a disability, including visual, hearing, cognitive, and manual-dexterity impairments. Every day, many come across images and videos they can’t see, documents that their screen readers can’t interpret, audio they can’t hear, and sites that they can’t navigate effectively without a computer mouse.
These students “have never really had an equitable experience in the digital space,” said Jamie Axelrod, former president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability. “This is crucial.”
Still, the coming months will test colleges — especially those that haven’t historically made web accessibility a priority. Many have a digital footprint made up of hundreds, even thousands, of websites, and potentially millions of web pages. Their learning-management systems are chock full of PDFs and other frequently inaccessible file formats. They’ve also increasingly relied on content and software from third-party providers that must also meet the new standards.
And while institutions have been required to accommodate students with disabilities for decades, having defined standards will force a substantial culture shift: a move from being reactive to being proactive. Instead of primarily responding to individual students’ accommodation requests, colleges will need to make content accessible from the outset.
Judith Risch, the Title IX and equity-access-services special adviser at Grand River Solutions, a higher-ed consulting firm, didn’t mince words about the work ahead.
The sector as a whole is “not in good shape,” she said. “This is going to be painful.”
The deadline to comply is April 2026 or April 2027, depending on the population of the state or local jurisdiction where a college resides. A community college, for example, would base its deadline on the population of the local community or county; universities would base theirs on the state population. Most colleges will fall under the April 2026 deadline.
Between now and then, compliance will require investment in testing, infrastructure, and training. The DOJ’s final rule estimated a cost of more than $7 billion to the higher-ed sector for testing and remediation costs alone. (Sources note that these projections routinely underestimate the actual cost.)
While some are questioning whether the new rules will be enforced under the incoming Trump administration, advocates point out that colleges risk other costs — time-consuming and expensive legal complaints — if they don’t make meaningful progress. Past settlements in web-accessibility cases have cost colleges hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars.
Colleges can’t be “wringing their hands” on this, Risch said. “Doing nothing isn’t an option.”
Making websites and other digital content accessible is not a new concept, to be sure.
Since 1996 — the early days of the internet — the DOJ has repeatedly maintained that “services, programs, and activities” that public entities offer online are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the law never included a technical definition of what “accessible” meant.
Now, there is one: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA.
These standards, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, are internationally recognized, and should be familiar to colleges, accessibility experts said. The 2.1 version came out years ago, in 2018, and is a common remediation requirement for colleges in ADA-related legal settlements.
Nonetheless, that hasn’t historically resulted in proactive implementation of these standards at colleges. The annual “Million” project from WebAIM, a nonprofit based at Utah State University, found an average of 26 errors on home pages with “edu” domains in 2024 through automated testing. Pope Tech, an IT services and consulting company, conducted its own WebAIM-inspired automated analysis, but extended the scope to up to 20 university-affiliated pages for more than 3,600 colleges. That analysis found an average of 16 errors per page.
So what are the kinds of errors a college might need to fix?
According to the technical standards, an error could be a video that does not include audio descriptions, which allow blind students to visualize what’s happening; or low-color contrast between text and background colors that makes it difficult for someone with low vision to decipher words on a page. It could be an audio file, like a podcast episode, that does not include captions and/or a transcript, for deaf or hard-of-hearing students. Or it could be or a lack of keyboard shortcuts for mouse commands — like using arrow keys to move up, down, left, or right — which help people with limited manual dexterity navigate a site.
The amount of work to be done does vary widely across colleges.
States have developed their own patchwork of legislation on digital accessibility. Many already cite WCAG as the state standard (in most cases, the older 2.0 version, which, among other things, doesn’t address mobile applications). A number of colleges have also had to improve web accessibility through audits, new hires, and training as part of legal settlements.
But web-accessibility experts said there are several shared challenges when it comes to remediation. And they have to do with higher ed’s propensity for content generation and knowledge-sharing, its decentralized nature, and its increasing reliance on third-party partners and tools.
For one, a college’s digital reach — especially if it’s a larger state institution with a growing catalog of online courses and programs — can include thousands of university-affiliated websites and a litany of site owners. Different administrative teams may be in charge of running different sites. Faculty members and researchers may create their own sites for courses and academic projects, often without clear directives or savvy about how to make those sites fully accessible.
The result can be a “wild, wild west” environment, said Mark Pope, a web-accessibility specialist at Pope Tech.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
The Department of Justice (“Department”) issues its final rule revising the regulation implementing title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) to establish specific requirements, including the adoption of specific technical standards, for making accessible the services, programs, and activities offered by State and local government entities to the public through the web and mobile applications (“apps”). Federal Register :: Request Access
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Colleges Must Revise Millions of Web Pages. It Will Be ‘Painful.’
The task means making a major culture shift — on deadline.By Taylor Swaak December 6, 2024
Public colleges nationwide will enter 2025 with a pressing mandate to make their web and mobile-app content accessible for all students.
The U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year formally added new language to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that — for the first time — lays out specific technical standards for web content that public colleges and other government entities need to meet. That means colleges must remediate existing digital content, which includes course materials, to meet those standards, and will also need to apply the standards to any new content they create or use.
And many have just under a year and a half to do it.
Private colleges that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should also pay attention, accessibility advocates said, because of separate regulatory changes that recently imposed the same standards under a similar deadline.
This update is long overdue, advocates and web-accessibility experts say. Some 21 percent of higher-ed students report having a disability, including visual, hearing, cognitive, and manual-dexterity impairments. Every day, many come across images and videos they can’t see, documents that their screen readers can’t interpret, audio they can’t hear, and sites that they can’t navigate effectively without a computer mouse.
These students “have never really had an equitable experience in the digital space,” said Jamie Axelrod, former president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability. “This is crucial.”
Still, the coming months will test colleges — especially those that haven’t historically made web accessibility a priority. Many have a digital footprint made up of hundreds, even thousands, of websites, and potentially millions of web pages. Their learning-management systems are chock full of PDFs and other frequently inaccessible file formats. They’ve also increasingly relied on content and software from third-party providers that must also meet the new standards.
And while institutions have been required to accommodate students with disabilities for decades, having defined standards will force a substantial culture shift: a move from being reactive to being proactive. Instead of primarily responding to individual students’ accommodation requests, colleges will need to make content accessible from the outset.
Judith Risch, the Title IX and equity-access-services special adviser at Grand River Solutions, a higher-ed consulting firm, didn’t mince words about the work ahead.
The sector as a whole is “not in good shape,” she said. “This is going to be painful.”
The deadline to comply is April 2026 or April 2027, depending on the population of the state or local jurisdiction where a college resides. A community college, for example, would base its deadline on the population of the local community or county; universities would base theirs on the state population. Most colleges will fall under the April 2026 deadline.
Between now and then, compliance will require investment in testing, infrastructure, and training. The DOJ’s final rule estimated a cost of more than $7 billion to the higher-ed sector for testing and remediation costs alone. (Sources note that these projections routinely underestimate the actual cost.)
While some are questioning whether the new rules will be enforced under the incoming Trump administration, advocates point out that colleges risk other costs — time-consuming and expensive legal complaints — if they don’t make meaningful progress. Past settlements in web-accessibility cases have cost colleges hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars.
Colleges can’t be “wringing their hands” on this, Risch said. “Doing nothing isn’t an option.”
Making websites and other digital content accessible is not a new concept, to be sure.
Since 1996 — the early days of the internet — the DOJ has repeatedly maintained that “services, programs, and activities” that public entities offer online are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the law never included a technical definition of what “accessible” meant.
Now, there is one: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA.
These standards, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, are internationally recognized, and should be familiar to colleges, accessibility experts said. The 2.1 version came out years ago, in 2018, and is a common remediation requirement for colleges in ADA-related legal settlements.
Nonetheless, that hasn’t historically resulted in proactive implementation of these standards at colleges. The annual “Million” project from WebAIM, a nonprofit based at Utah State University, found an average of 26 errors on home pages with “edu” domains in 2024 through automated testing. Pope Tech, an IT services and consulting company, conducted its own WebAIM-inspired automated analysis, but extended the scope to up to 20 university-affiliated pages for more than 3,600 colleges. That analysis found an average of 16 errors per page.
So what are the kinds of errors a college might need to fix?
According to the technical standards, an error could be a video that does not include audio descriptions, which allow blind students to visualize what’s happening; or low-color contrast between text and background colors that makes it difficult for someone with low vision to decipher words on a page. It could be an audio file, like a podcast episode, that does not include captions and/or a transcript, for deaf or hard-of-hearing students. Or it could be or a lack of keyboard shortcuts for mouse commands — like using arrow keys to move up, down, left, or right — which help people with limited manual dexterity navigate a site.
The amount of work to be done does vary widely across colleges.
States have developed their own patchwork of legislation on digital accessibility. Many already cite WCAG as the state standard (in most cases, the older 2.0 version, which, among other things, doesn’t address mobile applications). A number of colleges have also had to improve web accessibility through audits, new hires, and training as part of legal settlements.
But web-accessibility experts said there are several shared challenges when it comes to remediation. And they have to do with higher ed’s propensity for content generation and knowledge-sharing, its decentralized nature, and its increasing reliance on third-party partners and tools.
For one, a college’s digital reach — especially if it’s a larger state institution with a growing catalog of online courses and programs — can include thousands of university-affiliated websites and a litany of site owners. Different administrative teams may be in charge of running different sites. Faculty members and researchers may create their own sites for courses and academic projects, often without clear directives or savvy about how to make those sites fully accessible.
The result can be a “wild, wild west” environment, said Mark Pope, a web-accessibility specialist at Pope Tech.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
The Department of Justice (“Department”) issues its final rule revising the regulation implementing title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) to establish specific requirements, including the adoption of specific technical standards, for making accessible the services, programs, and activities offered by State and local government entities to the public through the web and mobile applications (“apps”). Federal Register :: Request Access
