An Accessibility Odyssey: Preparing Faculty for WCAG Compliance Before 2026

In 2024, the Department of Justice passed a ruling updating Title II and the ADA. With it, it brought on new mandate that all digital materials must meet WCAG compliance setting a course for higher education, public institutions, and federal agencies, making accessibility a legal requirement by April 2026.

Yes, you read right, all digital materials, and that means even those not publicly available, say, course materials and Canvas courses.

This means that universities, state and local governments, and public agencies must ensure their websites, mobile apps, digital documents, and online course content, yes that including everything in Canvas, must meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standards.

For institutions like WWU, this ruling is a critical mission directive to ensure all students, regardless of ability, have equal access to education. And the countdown has begun, and ensuring your Canvas courses are mission-ready is critical.

🛰️ Understanding the DOJ Ruling: What’s Changing?

The Final Rule on Web Accessibility sets clear legal requirements for how digital content must be structured to support users with disabilities. Here’s the TL;DR for public universities like WWU and what they must now comply with:

• WCAG 2.1 AA Standards – All websites, online course content, mobile apps, and digital documents must be accessible.
• Universally Applied – This applies to faculty, staff, and students creating or managing digital content in an official university capacity. This goes for Canvas, digital materials, videos, presentation materials. This is separate from, and NOT just for students with a DAC accommodation within a course.
• Content Coverage – Any material shared through Canvas, course pages, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, Google Docs, videos, and online tools must meet these standards.
  • There are exceptions (outlined in the Final Rule Fact Sheet), but for most faculty, this means making all course materials fully accessible by April 2026.

References

• DOJ Fact Sheet
• DOJ Ruling | Blog Post
• DOJ Ruling | Federal Register | PDF Link
• ADA

🌌 The Compliance Timeline: Ground Control, Will We Be Ready For Launch?

As it relates to WWU and higher education as a whole, public entities with populations of 50,000 or more have a compliance date of April 24, 2026. I know that for many of us, this might feel like navigating a sudden vast expanse of space, but WWU’s ATUS and others have been reviewing the guidelines and systems that would help meet the 2026 guideline.

However, charting a clear course towards this will require helping faculty reevaluate their courses and materials, as well as think both inclusivity and universally with their course materials. There is NOT a magic technology that will convert everything to make things “accessible.” It does take good design habits, thoughtful pedagogy, as well as access to tools along the way.

🚀 Mission Control: Tools for Digital Accessibility

Just like an astronaut wouldn’t launch without the right gear or training, faculty are in the same boat (or rocket in this case). Luckily, a lot of the learning systems in place, such as Canvas and Panopto, already have a lot of the required technologies to meet the demand of this mandate.

• Canvas’ Built-in Accessibility Checker – Flags common accessibility issues within Canvas pages and documents.
• WWU DATG – An WWU home grown Descriptive Alt Text Generator that leverages two different AI’s to help make images accessible in Canvas or anywhere on the web.
• PopeTech Accessibility Guide – built into every course, this is similar to the Canvas Accessibility Checker, but has a lot deeper tool set as well as a guided section as to the “why” behind what needs to be changed.
• Panopto – Supports auto-captioning, Audio Descriptions, and other video accessibility features for lectures, presentations, and recordings.
• Microsoft Accessibility Tools – Start with where you create your presentation and course materials. Built-in tools and accessibility checks are available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to help structure accessible documents.
• SensusAccess – Available through WWU Disability Access Center, it is a document conversion service that allows faculty to turn inaccessible PDFs (for example) into screen-reader-friendly formats, audio formats, and more.

But, just like an astronaut, those tools are nothing without good training…

References

📌 WWU’s Accessibility Guide – Digital Accessibility at Western

📌 ATUS – Digital Accessibility at WWU

🛰️ LLATCH: The Accessibility Pre-Flight Checklist for Faculty

Again, there is no such thing as a magical platform that will take everything and make it “accessibile.” Some might say that AI is that killer-app to do this, however, as many may know as they read my blog; it can help, but only if we check it. And at times, it can only fix what it can access, and wouldn’t it just be eaiser, and take less time in the long run, if the creator of the digital materails just started off with accessibility and universal desing from the start?

We all have worflows, or habits, we carry with us when we create content. And for many of us, it is hard to acknoldege them as it is practically muscel memory most of the time. But in there lays part of the issue. For some, it is those habits that will have to change, as course design habits have to be shifted to think about accessibility from the start. And, as it is most often, change is either scary or seen as hard. Getting started thinking in terms of digital accessibility is neither, also, it is NOT reserved for highly geeky. That’s why Justina Brown and I created LLATCH, a simple yet powerful checklist that helps faculty create accessible content from the start.

• 🔗 Links – Use descriptive hyperlinks instead of vague text like “click here” (e.g., Learn more about WCAG compliance).
• 📋 Lists – Properly format bullets and numbered lists so they are accessible to screen readers.
• 🖼️ Alt Text/Images – Ensure every meaningful image has alternative text describing its content. (WWU DATG can help in starting that process)
• 📊 Tables – Use headers and structured layouts instead of merged or blank cells.
• 🎨 Color – Ensure high contrast and avoid relying solely on color to convey meaning.
• 🔠 Headings – Use structured heading levels (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to improve navigation.

By keeping in mind LLATCH when creating or going back and evaluating your course pages or materials, faculty can embed accessibility into their teaching at the start, without requiring deep technical expertise. Doing it repeatly, becomes habit, and in a short time it many might just ask themselves why they didn’t always prepare their materials this way? A common thought I hear on this though is that people still feel that “it takes so much longer.” It may feel like that at the start, again for some it is about changing a creator’s habit, but I equate it to keyboarding. Yes, you read right keyboarding. It doesn’t matter if you started on a typewriter, or on a green-screen Mac back in the day, so many of us started our computing learning through a keyboarding class. And if you were like me, absolutely hated it at the start. “Why do we have to learn home row, its so much harder….” Ring any bells? It does for me, and now I can’t imagine not touch typing (and trust me, it througs me off when I visit my colleagues in France where they type via a AZERTY and not QWERTY

References

• TLT ProDev – Canvas Course (self enroll) look for “The Final Countdown” Winter 2024 presentation
• “Final Countdown Presentation” (Google Doc, that is also embedded above)
• CAST UDL Guidelines – UDL Resources

🚀 The Final Countdown: Preparing for Launch

The DOJ’s ruling has set a clear course, and April 2026 will arrive faster than we think. The good news? Honestly, the tools, resources, and frameworks to make Canvas courses accessible already exist. And there is time to start evaluating our materials and build new ones with accessibility in mind. But we, as educators, need to recognize we need to start practicing now.

HAL has no reason to deny access to anyone in 2026. And only we can ensure that every student can fully engage with learning from the materials we create for courses.