ADA Compliance for University and College Websites
Few organisations have a harder web accessibility problem than a university. The obligation is unusually clear, the surface area is enormous, and almost nobody publishing content on the domain reports to the people responsible for compliance.
Which law applies to you
- Public institutions — state universities and community colleges are covered by ADA Title II, which now carries an explicit WCAG 2.1 Level AA technical standard.
- Private institutions — covered by ADA Title III as places of public accommodation. No codified technical standard, but courts routinely treat WCAG 2.1 AA as the benchmark.
- Anyone taking federal funding — which is effectively every accredited institution — is additionally covered by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Federal student aid counts.
The practical upshot: whether you are public or private, WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard you will be measured against, and a complaint can be routed to the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights rather than a court. OCR complaints are free to file, which changes the volume considerably.
Why campus websites are uniquely difficult
A university web presence is not one website. It is typically:
- A marketing site maintained by a central web team
- Several hundred departmental sites maintained by faculty and administrators
- A learning management system, usually third-party
- A student information and registration system, usually third-party
- Library catalogues and research databases, mostly licensed
- Course content authored by thousands of individual instructors
- Decades of PDFs, slide decks and lecture recordings
Central IT usually controls the first item and is held responsible for all of them.
Where complaints actually come from
OCR resolutions in higher education cluster around a small number of recurring problems:
- Uncaptioned lecture video. The most common single issue. Auto-captions that were never corrected generally do not satisfy the requirement.
- Inaccessible course materials. Scanned readings, image-based problem sets, untagged PDFs.
- Registration and financial aid flows. High-stakes, time-limited, often the oldest software on campus.
- Departmental sites. Built by a graduate student in 2014 and never touched since.
- Event and athletics pages. Frequently outsourced, frequently the worst-performing.
A strategy that survives contact with a campus
- Fix the templates first. If most departmental sites run on a shared CMS theme, one fix propagates across hundreds of sites. This is by far the highest-leverage work available to a central team.
- Rank by consequence, not traffic. A page nobody visits that blocks a student from registering matters more than a popular news article.
- Procurement is policy. Require a current VPAT or ACR before purchase and put remediation commitments in the contract. Most of your worst surfaces are things you bought.
- Make captioning a funded service, not an instruction. Telling faculty to caption their videos does not produce captioned videos. A central budget and a workflow does.
- Monitor continuously across many pages. A one-off audit of a 50,000-page domain is obsolete before the report is delivered. Regular automated scanning across representative templates is the only thing that scales.
- Keep the paper trail. OCR resolutions frequently turn on whether an institution had a plan, followed it and documented it.
What automated scanning can and cannot do here
Automated testing will find the mechanical failures at scale — contrast, missing labels, heading structure, link text, alt attributes — across as many pages as you can point it at. That is exactly what you need when the problem is breadth.
It will not tell you whether a lecture's captions are accurate, whether a chemistry diagram's alt text conveys the chemistry, or whether your registration flow can be completed by keyboard. Budget human review for the paths where a failure stops a student from enrolling, paying or graduating.
Start with your templates
Scan a departmental page, your registration entry point and your main site — free, no account.
Run a free scan