If your institution has been putting off digital accessibility work, that window is officially closed. The U.S. Department of Justice finalized a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2024 that sets clear, enforceable standards for web content and mobile applications at public colleges and universities. Large institutions serving populations of 50,000 or more must comply by April 24, 2026. Smaller public entities have until April 26, 2027.¹ For many schools, that is not a lot of runway.
The rule requires conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the internationally recognized benchmark for digital accessibility.² That covers a wide range of organizational considerations. For example, your learning management systems, course and program materials, videos, PDFs, student portals, and anything else a student, employee, or visitor might need to access online. It can be easy to over look that videos need accurate captions, documents need to work with screen readers, and color contrast needs to meet minimum thresholds. If it lives online and someone has to interact with it, it needs to meet the new standard.
The Gap Is Real
Here is the uncomfortable part. From our lens, the sector is largely not ready. A 2023 Educause survey found that nearly half of U.S. universities have just one or two staff members dedicated to technology accessibility.³ The same survey found that only 22 percent of instructors factor accessibility into their course design, and one-third of respondents said they were not aware of the new federal requirements at all.³ That is not a minor gap at a moment when the legal risks are significant. A survey of Educause’s IT Accessibility Community Group found that nearly 65 percent of respondents had faced threats of legal action or actual lawsuits related to technology accessibility.³ Between 2017 and 2022, approximately 14,000 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in the United States, with more than 3,000 of those coming in 2022 alone.⁴ Higher education institutions are frequent targets. Harvard and MIT learned this the hard way when they faced federal lawsuits over inaccessible online courses.⁵ The legal exposure was serious, but the deeper question those cases raised was whether these institutions’ promises of expanded access through technology were actually being kept.
This Is About People
It is easy to get lost in compliance deadlines and technical standards. But about 20 percent of students in higher education live with some form of disability,⁶ and for many of them, inaccessible content is not a minor inconvenience. It is a wall that prevents them from learning effectively. Think about the student using a screen reader to navigate a learning platform, or the prospective student on a mobile device trying to figure out if your school is worth applying to, or the alumna trying to download a transcript only to find a PDF that her assistive technology cannot read. These are real situations, and the technical fixes for most of them are not
complicated.
What Good Practice Looks Like
Building accessible content does not require starting from scratch. It requires making accessibility part of the process from the beginning rather than a patch applied at the end. Video captions are one of the fastest wins. Auto-generated captions are better than nothing, but they consistently make errors on subject-specific terminology and proper nouns. Every video in your LMS or embedded in a course should have reviewed, corrected captions before it goes live.
Documents and PDFs need to be structured so assistive technologies can actually read them. Headings, alternative text for images, and properly tagged content are not optional extras. A beautifully formatted PDF that cannot be read aloud is, for some learners, completely unusable. Color contrast is another area where small changes make a big difference. WCAG 2.1 AA requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for body text, and free tools like WebAIM’s Contrast Checker make it simple to verify before anything gets published.² Keyboard navigation matters as well. Not every user interacts with content using a mouse, and every interactive element,
including buttons, links, and form fields, should be fully operable without one. The broader design philosophy behind all of this is Universal Design for Learning, a framework that treats learner diversity as the baseline rather than an exception.⁷ When accessibility is built into a course from the first draft, the result is genuinely better for every student in the room.
Plaid’s Commitment
All this to say, this is one area I love incorporating into the education we design at Plaid. Every deliverable we produce is evaluated against accessibility standards. Our custom courses are designed with accessibility as part of the design process from day one. We stay current with evolving regulations so our clients in higher education and corporate sectors do not have to figure it out on their own.
As an Instructional Designer here, I use WCAG auditing tools, color contrast checkers, screen reader testing, and closed captioning review on every project. Research consistently shows that instructional designers play a critical role in advocating for accessible and inclusive online learning,⁸ and it is a responsibility our team takes seriously.
The April 2026 deadline is not a finish line. It is a floor. The real goal is a culture where accessibility is the default, not the exception, and where every learner gets a fair shot at engaging with your content.
Have questions about ADA compliance in your eLearning courses? Reach out to the Plaid LLC
team. We would be glad to help.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice. (2024). Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile
Applications Provided by State and Local Government Entities. Federal Register, 89 FR - https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-accessibility-rule/
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ - Educause. (2023). ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology,
- https://www.educause.edu/ecar
- UsableNet. (2023). 2022 ADA Web Accessibility Lawsuit Report.
https://usablenet.com/reports - National Association of the Deaf v. Harvard University, 377 F. Supp. 3d 49 (D. Mass.
2019); National Association of the Deaf v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1:15-
cv-30023 (D. Mass. 2015). - National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Students with Disabilities.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=60 - CAST. (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, Version 2.2.
https://udlguidelines.cast.org - Burgstahler, S. (Ed.). (2020). Universal Design in Higher Education: From Principles to
Practice (2nd ed.). Harvard Education Press.