The Deadline Is Here. Are Institutions Ready? Why Digital Accessibility Policies Keep Failing
Updated March 2026 | Originally based on research by Ella Epshteyn, EdD (Northeastern University, 2019), updated with current sources
April 24, 2026 is seven weeks away. On that date, the Department of Justice’s final rule underTitle II of the Americans with Disabilities Act takes effect, requiring every public college anduniversity serving a population of more than 50,000 to bring all web content, mobile apps, digitalcourse materials, and third-party platforms into compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA.
The rule has been on the books since April 2024. Institutions have had two years to prepare.
Most of them are not ready.
A Regulatory Time Bomb
That is not editorializing — it is the language higher education’s own analysts are using. Phil Hill, a widely respected education technology analyst, has publicly called the compliance situation “a regulatory time bomb.” In January 2026, Inside Higher Ed reported that institutions across the country are “scrambling to meet the April deadline,” with experts describing compliance as “all over the map.” Jonathan Thurston, a fellow at the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies, was blunt: “Full compliance by all institutions in the next three months is just not going to happen” (Inside Higher Ed, January 2026).
The stakes are real. A survey of Educause’s IT Accessibility Community Group found that nearly 65 percent of respondents had already faced threats of legal action or actual lawsuits related totechnology accessibility — and that was before a binding federal deadline existed. Noncompliant institutions could face litigation from legal and activist groups, and the DOJ has taken a larger role in enforcing civil rights laws in higher education under the current administration.
For private institutions not directly covered by Title II, the exposure is different but no less real: private colleges and universities face immediate lawsuit risk, with courts using WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard, and active litigation is already underway.
What the Law Actually Requires
The DOJ’s final rule marks a clear departure from prior “accommodation on request” standards toward comprehensive, proactive digital accessibility. The old model — in which a student with a disability would flag an inaccessible document and wait for it to be remediated — is no longer sufficient. Everything must be accessible from the start.
In practice, this means every PDF file must be accessible to a screen reader, every video accompanied by captions and audio descriptions, every photograph coded with alternate text, every sound clip paired with a transcript — and all third-party platforms must meet the guidelines too.
The DOJ has officially adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the compliance benchmark. At a practical level, this means web content and digital materials must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
The scope is broader than many institutions initially assumed. The challenge for postsecondary institutions is that almost everything lives in a digital environment now — from applying, to enrolling, to paying bills, to registering for courses, to accessing instructional and library materials.
There is one important caveat to monitor: in September 2025, the DOJ under the Trump administration issued a notice that may indicate intent to relax some of the final rule’s accessibility requirements. The anticipated Notice of Proposed Rule making had not been published as of early 2026, and it remains to be seen whether any changes would take effect before the April compliance date. Legal experts continue to advise institutions to proceed with compliance regardless — both because private litigation risk is independent of federal enforcement posture, and because demonstrating good-faith effort matters in any future legal proceeding.
What Has Changed Since 2019 — And What Hasn't
When Ella Epshteyn completed her doctoral research at Northeastern University in 2019, she found that digital accessibility was a growing priority for most US higher education institutions, but that implementation lagged badly — particularly among faculty. Most institutions were in the early stages of developing policies, and those policies were failing to drive real behavioral change.
Seven years later, the policy landscape has changed dramatically. The DOJ’s 2024 rule has converted what was previously a legal grey area into a binding federal mandate with specific technical standards and a hard deadline. The stakes are higher. The legal exposure is clearer. The tools available for compliance have improved considerably.
The faculty readiness gap, however, has barely moved.
A 2025 survey by Anthology of 2,508 actively teaching faculty across the US found stark disconnects that will be immediately familiar to anyone who read Epshteyn’s 2019 findings. While 76% of faculty agree that accessible content positively impacts student outcomes, only 22% consistently consider accessibility when designing course materials, and just 11% said they had the right tools and training to create accessible content.
On awareness specifically: 81% of faculty said they need more information on the ADA Title II requirement regarding conformance to WCAG 2.1. Of those, 36% said they were not aware of the requirement at all, and a further 45% said they were aware but unclear on the details.
This is the same awareness gap Epshteyn documented in 2019. The policy environment has been transformed; the faculty knowledge environment has not.
The Implementation Gap Is Still Structural
The problem is not, and has never been, that faculty oppose accessible education. The Anthology data show the opposite — most faculty genuinely care about student outcomes and acknowledge the value of accessible content. The problem is structural: institutions are failing to bridge the gap between policy intent and individual action.
For most of higher education, mapping a central mandate to do things a certain way in a primarily decentralized system is always a challenge. It requires lots of training, culture shifts, and messaging, as Ohio State University ADA Coordinator L. Scott Lissner told Inside Higher Ed in January 2026.
That decentralization problem was a central finding in Epshteyn’s 2019 research, and it remains the central implementation challenge today. Faculty cited lack of training (29%), lack of time(28%), and limited knowledge of available tools (27%) as their top barriers in the 2025 Anthology survey — figures that mirror the barriers Epshteyn’s respondents described half a decade earlier. The tools and the legal urgency have both increased; the support infrastructure for faculty has not kept pace.
Nearly half of US universities have just one or two staff members dedicated to technology accessibility, according to a 2023 Educause survey. That institutional resource constraint directly limits what can be accomplished at the faculty level, regardless of how strong the policy language is.
What "Not Ready" Looks Like on the Ground
The scale of the challenge is most visceral when you look at what individual institutions are dealing with. At Ohio State University’s libraries alone, more than 110,000 PDFs and three times as many digital images did not meet technical accessibility standards when the rule was announced in 2024. A third-party vendor estimated the cost of remediating those PDFs at $5 per page — roughly $20 million.
Ohio State is a well-resourced institution that has been working on accessibility for years and has dedicated staff. For community colleges, small public universities, and Minority-Serving Institutions — which face the same legal requirements without the same resources — the picture is considerably more difficult. The rule requires significant operational and financial attention, particularly for smaller colleges and universities with fewer resources.
Only 5% of all websites currently meet WCAG guidelines, according to EAB — a figure that underscores just how widespread the compliance gap is, and how much remediation remains to be done across higher education.
AI Is Changing What Is Possible — But Not Replacing the Hard Work
One genuine development since Epshteyn’s 2019 research is the emergence of AI-assisted remediation tools. Ohio State’s libraries have used AI developed in partnership with AmazonWeb Services and Arizona State University to build an automated PDF remediation process that brings costs down from $5 per page to roughly six cents — and reduces processing time from days to minutes.
But AI is not a silver bullet. Institutions should exercise caution with automated accessibility overlay tools such as accessiBe and UserWay. Although these products are heavily marketed asquick fixes for compliance, they often do not satisfy WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards and should not be treated as a substitute for genuine remediation efforts. Such tools have been subject to recent FTC scrutiny and may increase rather than reduce legal exposure.
The difference between AI-assisted remediation that works and overlay tools that don’t comes down to whether the underlying content is actually transformed or merely cosmetically modified. Authentic compliance requires authentic change to the content — and that still requires informed human decision-making, trained faculty, and genuine institutional commitment.
What Effective Implementation Requires
The April 2026 deadline has created urgency that Epshteyn’s 2019 research could not. But urgency alone does not produce compliance, and institutions that respond to the deadline with a burst of panicked activity risk producing shallow compliance that fails the next legal challenge.
What the research — from 2019 through 2026 — consistently identifies as necessary is a different kind of institutional response:
Move from accommodation to universal design. The shift in the law from “accessible on request” to proactive compliance reflects a broader conceptual shift: accessibility as an institutional design principle rather than an individual accommodation. As Epshteyn found in 2019, and the Anthology survey confirms in 2025, this shift has not yet fully penetrated faculty culture. Building accessible content from the start — not retrofitting it after a complaint — is both the legal standard and the more efficient practice.
Centralize accountability. The decentralization problem that Epshteyn identified in 2019 has been amplified by the scale of the current compliance challenge. Institutions should develop policies that assign responsibility for accessibility compliance, create processes for testing and maintaining accessible content, and establish mechanisms for responding to accessibility requests. That requires a named office and named people with real authority.
Treat faculty development as an ongoing investment, not a one-time training. Raising awareness, providing the right resources, and building confidence creates a self-reinforcing cycle in which accessibility is not only possible, but expected, supported, and celebrated. One workshop does not create a culture of accessible content creation; embedded, sustained professional development does.
Audit continuously, not just at deadline. April 24, 2026, is a compliance deadline, but it is also a cultural marker for digital accessibility in higher education. When digital experiences are designed to work for everyone from the start, the benefits extend well beyond legal compliance. Institutions that treat the deadline as a finish line rather than a starting point will find themselves back in the same position next time the law advances.
The Stakes Have Always Been Human
Behind every statistic in this story — every percentage point of faculty non-awareness, every PDF that cannot be read by a screen reader, every uncaptioned video — is a student trying to learn and finding the door closed.
Eleven percent of undergraduate students in the US have some form of disability. They are not a rounding error. They are in every classroom, every online course, every institutional community. The persistent gap in academic success and degree completion for students with disabilities is partly a digital accessibility problem — one that better-designed policies, better-supported faculty, and genuinely committed institutions can meaningfully address.
The April deadline is a legal moment. But the need it is responding to has been here all along.
References
Anthology. (2025, May 15). Accessibility knowledge gaps persist among higher ed faculty, Anthology survey reveals. https://www.anthology.com/news/accessibility-knowledge-gaps-persist-among-higher-ed-faculty-anthology-survey-reveals
Anthology. (2025). The accessibility gap: Why faculty struggle and how institutions can help [White paper]. https://backstage.anthology.com/sites/default/files/2025-10/Accessibility_Gap_WhitePaper_v2.pdf
Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. (2025, August 15). AGB policy alert: ADA digital accessibility rule requires full compliance by April 2026. https://agb.org/news/agb-alerts/agb-policy-alert-ada-digital-accessibility-rule-requires-full-compliance-by-april-2026/
Carnegie Higher Education. (2026, February 11). ADA Title II final rule for higher education. https://www.carnegiehighered.com/ada-title-ii-final-rule-higher-education/
EAB. (2025, June 10). The 2026 .edu accessibility mandate is coming—is your site content ready? https://eab.com/resources/blog/enrollment-blog/2026-edu-accessibility-mandate-ready/
Educause. (2023). Educause QuickPoll results: Risks and opportunities in higher education accessibility. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2023/8/educause-quickpoll-results-risks-and-opportunities-in-higher-education-accessibility
Epshteyn, E. (2019). From policy to compliance: US higher education faculty concerns overinstitutional digital content accessibility policies [Doctoral dissertation, NortheasternUniversity].
Guida, A. J., Knisely, J. C., & Steinway, M. (2026, March). Preparing for April 2026 – New digital accessibility standards for public institutions of higher education. Duane Morris LLP.
Palmer, K. (2026, January 21). Higher ed prepares for new era of accessibility. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/colleges-localities/2026/01/21/higher-ed-prepares-new-era-ada
Rosenthal, E. (2026, January 14). Understanding the new ADA web accessibility requirements for state and local governments. Coates’ Canons: NC Local Government Law. https://canons.sog.unc.edu/blog/2026/01/14/understanding-the-new-ada-web-accessibility-requirements-for-state-and-local-governments/
U.S. Department of Justice. (2024, April 24). Nondiscrimination on the basis of disability; accessibility of web information and services of state and local government entities [Final rule].Federal Register, 89(80). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/24/2024-07758/nondiscrimination-on-the-basis-of-disability-accessibility-of-web-information-and-services-of-state
