If you’re a professor, lecturer or instructional designer at a public college or university, you may have heard about the April 24, 2026 ADA Title II compliance deadline. You may have even gotten an email from your IT department or provost’s office about it.
What you probably haven’t gotten is a clear answer to the question that actually matters to you: What does this mean for my course materials, and what support do I have to fix them?
For most faculty, that answer is: not much. And that’s a problem. When the deadline hits, the responsibility doesn’t land on IT. It doesn’t land on the provost. In large part, it lands on you.
What the Law Actually Requires
In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice finalized new rules under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, establishing enforceable digital accessibility standards for public colleges and universities. The standard required is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. This standard applies not just to your institution’s website, but to the digital content faculty create and distribute as part of academic programs.
The impacted learning tools include:
- PDFs: syllabi, readings, handouts, problem sets
- Slide decks: PowerPoint and Google Slides you upload to your learning managament system (LMS)
- Videos: recorded lectures and other content
- Audio: podcasts, recorded discussions, audio supplements
- Forms: intake forms, quizzes, feedback forms
- Any other digital content your students use to access your course
If it’s in your LMS and students need it to participate in your class, it’s within the scope of WCAG requirements.
The Gap No One Is Talking About
Here’s what’s happening on most campuses right now: Administrators are focused on auditing websites and institutional portals. IT departments are updating infrastructure. Disability services offices are doing their best with limited staff.
And faculty are largely on their own.
Consider a professor who has taught the same course for 10 years. Their LMS contains hundreds of documents, most of them created before accessibility was part of anyone’s workflow. They very likely have scanned PDFs without machine-readable text, as well as slide decks with images and no alt text. Their lecture recordings might have auto-generated captions that mangle technical terminology, or YouTube embeds with no captions at all.
Remediating all of that takes time, expertise and tools that most faculty simply don’t have. And because institutions have been slow to build out faculty-facing support, many professors are discovering this problem on their own, right before the April 2026 deadline.
What “Accessible” Actually Looks Like in Practice
For faculty, WCAG 2.1 compliance means your course materials need to meet these practical criteria:
Documents and PDFs
- Text must be selectable (not scanned images of text)
- Headings must be properly tagged for screen reader navigation
- Images must include meaningful alt text
- Tables must be structured with proper headers
- Reading order must be logical for assistive technology
Slide Decks
- Images need descriptive alt text
- Text on slides must have sufficient color contrast (at least 4.5:1 ratio)
- Presentations must be navigable by keyboard
- Slide titles must be unique and descriptive
Video and Audio
- All video content needs synchronized and accurate captions, not just auto-generated ones
- Audio content requires full transcripts
- Video descriptions may be needed for visual-only content
LMS Content
- Links must be descriptive (not “click here” or a bare URL)
- Forms must have properly labeled fields
- Navigation must be consistent and predictable
None of these are insurmountable. But none of them are quick, either, especially when you’re working with years of existing content at scale.
The Third-Party Problem
Here’s something that surprises many faculty: Your institution is responsible for the accessibility of third-party content you use in your courses. If you’re embedding a YouTube video that has no captions, linking to a publisher’s inaccessible PDF or using a third-party quiz tool that doesn’t meet WCAG standards, those are compliance gaps even if they weren’t created by you or your institution.
This doesn’t mean you need to personally caption every video you’ve ever shown in class. It does mean that your institution needs a clear policy on third-party content, and that faculty need guidance on how to evaluate and substitute inaccessible materials.
Why Human Review Is Non-Negotiable
Many institutions have turned to automated accessibility checkers as a first pass. These tools are useful (as we examined in this guide), but they catch only a fraction of accessibility issues. Research consistently shows that automated tools identify approximately 30% of accessibility errors. The rest require human evaluation.
This matters for faculty because it means there’s no quick technical fix.
You can’t run a script over your course materials and declare them compliant. Remediation requires a human to look at your content, understand its purpose, and make informed judgments about how to make it accessible.
For complex academic content — such as mathematical formulas, scientific diagrams, STEM notation and dense tables of data — that human judgment requires both accessibility expertise and subject-matter awareness. This is not a task that can be crowdsourced to a general-purpose AI tool.
What You Can Do Right Now
If you’re a faculty member trying to get ahead of this, here’s a practical starting point:
- Audit your current LMS content. Run an automated checker on your course pages (many LMS platforms have one built in) to get a sense of the scope of issues. Treat this as a diagnostic step, not a solution.
- Prioritize high-traffic, high-impact content. Start with your syllabus, most-used readings and lecture recordings. Not everything needs to be fixed at once. It’s okay to triage at this phase.
- Stop creating new inaccessible content. Going forward, build accessibility into your workflow. Use heading styles in Word. Add alt text when you insert images. Request captions from your media services team for new recordings.
- Ask your institution what support is available. Push for clarity on what your disability services, instructional design or IT teams can actually help you with. Advocate for better accessibility practices if too many gaps appear.
- Don’t rely on auto-generated captions alone. Tools like YouTube’s auto-captions and Zoom’s live transcription have improved, but they are not compliant substitutes for reviewed, accurate captions, especially for technical or specialized topics.
The Bigger Picture
Accessibility compliance can feel like one more unfunded mandate landing on faculty who are already stretched thin. That frustration is real and understandable.
But it’s also worth remembering what’s at stake on the other side of this: Students with visual impairments who can’t read a scanned PDF. Students who are deaf or hard of hearing who get nothing from a lecture recording without captions. Students with cognitive or learning disabilities who rely on well-structured documents to parse dense academic content.
These students are in your classes now. The deadline might be forcing digital inclusion, but the problems it is meant to correct have existed for a very long time.
The institutions that use this moment to build lasting accessibility infrastructure will come out of it with more equitable learning environments. Faculty members who understand what accessible content actually looks like will be better positioned to create it, regardless of what regulations require.
How Aspiritech Can Help
Aspiritech specializes in accessibility testing and remediation for higher education institutions. Our team is led by autistic tech professionals with deep expertise in WCAG standards, and is ready to work with universities and faculty to audit course content, remediate existing materials and build sustainable accessibility workflows.
Whether your institution needs assistance with auditing and remediating the accessibility of its digital, or with building publishing workflows with accessibility best practices baked in, we’re ready to help.
Learn more about our accessibility services or schedule a free strategy session with our team to get started.
