By April 24, 2026, most larger public colleges and universities in the United States will need to meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II Final Rule. Digital accessibility will no longer be optional and the technical benchmark is clear.
But is ADA Title II just a box-ticking exercise?
What’s less clear (and far less discussed) is what good looks like beyond compliance. Accessibility is a core part of how institutions deliver credible, usable, and trustworthy digital experiences.
We want to discuss how accessibility can form a core part of your digital strategy.
Get ADA Title II compliant. But don’t make a huge strategic mistake.
Guidance around ADA Title II has finally become clearer: The Department of Justice (DoJ) has formally adopted Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA as the enforceable standard for public entities, including colleges and universities.
Good news – but it has also created a familiar pattern in higher education:
- Audits that surface hundreds (or thousands) of issues
- A growing sense of anxiety about scale, cost, and ownership
- A list of compliance issues that seems to be growing by the day
It’s enough to keep even the most stoic Provost up and texting the CTO at night.
“U up?”
Worse, from our perspective, accessibility risks becoming just another compliance programme. If ADA Title II is just something to be got through before the deadline, you’re making a mistake.
Accessibility is now an enrolment and experience issue
For prospective students, parents, and guardians, your institution is a digital experience. Admissions journeys, programme discovery, financial aid information, virtual tours, inquiry forms and even social media channels are your campus tour before anyone ever sets foot on your grounds.
If those journeys are hard to navigate, unpredictable, or inaccessible, you get:
- Lost trust or disappointment and frustration
- Drop-off in enquiry and application funnels
- Confusion around requirements, deadlines, or eligibility
- Quiet erosion of confidence in the institution itself
Accessibility improvements are not for the few – they benefit everyone. Clearer structure, better contrast, more predictable interactions, simpler language serve a wider population of brilliant future students.
Why accessibility goes wrong
One of the most common pitfalls is that accessibility is declared to be everyone’s responsibility. That sounds lovely, but in practice, it leads to diffusion and dilution of responsibility:
- Marketing assumes IT owns it
- IT assumes faculties own their content
- Faculties assume central teams will catch issues later
You get inconsistency, duplication of effort and total non-compliance in some cases. And no one becomes an expert.
Accessibility needs governance, not just guidelines. That means you need clear ownership of standards and decision-making. Part of this is defined publishing rules and escalation paths as well as a shared understanding of where marketing leads, where IT supports, and where faculties are accountable.
Come on, it’s 2026. It’s time to move beyond ADA Title II compliance
Institutions that treat accessibility as a baseline for all digital delivery and infrastructure start measuring different things:
- Reduction in accessibility complaints and workarounds
- Improved completion of key journeys
- Less remediation work over time
- Greater confidence across teams creating digital content
Get these things right and compliance becomes a walk in the park. Or as you guys say, for some reason, a cake walk.
Getting your priorities right
The institutions best positioned for April 2026 are not scrambling to fix everything at once. They are prioritising high-impact journeys, clarifying ownership and governance, embedding accessibility into how work is briefed and delivered and treating accessibility as a long-term strategic advantage.
Forget the deadline for a moment: accessibility should lead to a permanent shift in expectations from students, regulators, and the public.
Will you be ticking boxes or connecting with students who can’t wait to step into your lecture halls?
Some useful official reading:
1. ADA Title II Final Rule — DoJ Fact Sheet (official overview)
2. Web Accessibility and the ADA (DoJ guidance)
3. First Steps Toward Complying with the Title II Web & Mobile Accessibility Rule
4. Federal Register: ADA Title II Final Rule original text
5. U.S. Department of Education Disability Discrimination & Technology Accessibility
