The United States Department of Justice’s deadline for public colleges and universities to strictly use accessible digital content is almost here. Starting April 24 of this year (institutions serving smaller communities have another year), WCAG 2.1, Level AA are the digital content standards.
This means that spaces and resources like websites, apps, service portals, and course content are expected to have components including clear heading structures in documents, alternative text for images, captioning and transcripts for multimedia, clear color contrast, and more. These features allow people to perceive and operate these digital resources, and it’s worth remembering that everyone benefits. As one example, someone using a screen-reader can better understand what an image is conveying through alt-text, as can a fully-sighted individual with an unreliable internet connection.
Good News, Bad News
Some good news: lots of colleges and universities, throughout the country and of varying size and missions, are offering guidance to their faculty and staff. A quick internet search of “university digital accessibility guide” produces countless web pages with best practices. Tools to help identify and try to remediate digital barriers are readily available.
Some bad news: remediating courses and courses of all of their digital content still takes significant time and energy. Additionally, faculty – even though they recognize the importance of digital accessibility – don’t necessarily feel prepared. Or even if they do feel prepared, they lack the time. According to Anthology’s 2025 Faculty Survey, “just 11% of U.S. faculty say they have the right tools and training to create accessible course content” (2025). In OLC’s recent Snap Survey, only 38% of respondents reported regular (at least annual) training, and only 16% of respondents reported extreme or high confidence in their institution meeting accessibility standards across learning environments (Miller, 2026). For faculty, this can be just another significant disruption to navigate after pivoting to (and from) emergency remote online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of generative AI’s ability to complete college-level assessments.
A Different Approach
Remediating resources takes time. What if we used some of that time to focus less on resources and more on building skills and incorporating active learning strategies? Catherine Denial shares the following in A Pedagogy of Kindness: “When I began to reflect on the direction my course might take, I realized skills were at least as important, if not more important, than content. If a student learned the right skills, they’d be able to track down the answers to their questions for the rest of their lives.” (2024)
Less Is More
In the spirit of less resources, various institutions are encouraging instructors to go through their digital documents and delete what’s outdated, with tools like TidyUp and Cascade’s Review to clean up the piles of resources. If you’ve identified something that’s not worth keeping, you certainly don’t need to spend time digitally remediating it. When it comes to videos, the literature has been encouraging for some time to try for shorter rather than longer videos. Again, it takes less time to confirm caption accuracy in shorter videos compared to longer.
The question arises: what are students doing if they aren’t taking in assigned videos and readings? First, consider that more content doesn’t necessarily mean more learning. And, as experts in a field, we can overestimate how much content a student can realistically take in. If readings and watching resources are essential to student learning, consider providing a limited number of exemplary resources (perhaps one that you’ve confirmed is digitally accessible), and empower students to find quality content independently. Maybe this involves directing students to quality databases in the school library system. Maybe it’s teaching students methods like the CRAAP (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose) Test and SIFT (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to original context) to evaluate sources.
Learning By Doing
Or, you could replace lectures with independent activities. That’s where active learning can come in. With active learning, students participate to build their own knowledge, in contrast to passive learning like watching lecture videos. Students work to creatively solve complex problems, and this can include critical thinking and collaboration. Generally, students learn content more with active learning compared to passive. If active learning is part of a long-term project with repeated opportunities for practice, new skills can have a better chance of sticking. Active learning can take on lots of forms: writing activities like minute papers, think-paper-share, peer review, peer learning, case studies, role playing, experiential learning, and much, much more.
Next Steps
As the United States Department of Justice’s digital accessibility standards start towards the end of this semester, overhauling the remainder of a current course would certainly have some difficult-to-navigate complexities. But what about Fall 2026 courses? What learning resources could possibly be replaced with student activity, in contrast to remediating resources to be passively consumed? Maybe, instead of dusting off and fixing a 100-slide lecture, different students or groups research and share-out key takeaways about that lecture’s topic. The people doing the work are the people doing the learning, so let’s empower students to take more ownership of how they’re learning. Have them rely more upon their own abilities to discover and evaluate the credibility of learning resources, with more learning by doing.
References
ADEIL Professional Development. (2025, June 10). UDL at scale 2026 Thomas Tobin ADEIL 1 The people doing the work are the people doing the learning [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GccVq2pYfXE
Blackboard. (2025, May 15). Accessibility knowledge gaps persist among higher ed faculty, Anthology survey reveals. https://www.blackboard.com/news/accessibility-knowledge-gaps-persist-among-higher-ed-facult y-anthology-survey-reveals
Brame C. J. (2016). Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content. CBE life sciences education, 15(4), es6. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125
Caulfield, M. (2019, June 19). SIFT (The four moves). Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/
Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. (n.d.). Active learning continuum. University of Michigan. https://crlt.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Active_Learning_Continuum_CRLT.pdf
Cordova, B. (2025, February 24). Make sure to review and delete outdated documents. FIU Core Resource Hub. https://core.fiu.edu/blog/2025/review-and-delete-old-documents.html
Denial, C. J. (2024). A pedagogy of kindness. University of Oklahoma Press.
Garrett, K. (2025, September 25). New federal digital accessibility requirements: What higher ed needs to know and do now. Online Learning Consortium. https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/olc-insights/2025/09/federal-digital-a11y-requirements/
Guiffrida, D. (2021, July 6). The good enough professor. Insider Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/07/07/faculty-member-considers-why-different-prof essors-succeeded-or-struggled-during
MacPhail, T. (2019, January 27). Are you assigning too much reading? Or just too much boring reading? The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/are-you-assigning-too-much-reading-or-just-too-much-boring-r eading/
Meriam Library. (2010, September 17). Evaluating information – Applying the CRAAP test.
California State University, Chico. https://library.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/craap-test.pdf
Miller, C. (2026, January 7). November 2025 snap survey results – WCAG and accessibility compliance. Online Learning Consortium. https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/olc-insights/2026/01/november25-snap-survey/
Nelson, C. E. (2010). 10: Dysfunctional illusions of rigor. To Improve the Academy, 28. https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.17063888.0028.014
Ram, I., Rosenberg-Kima, R., Lewin, D. R., Barzilai, A., Chuntonov, O., & Roll, I. (2025). Active learning and the development of 21st century skills in online STEM education – a large scale survey. Online Learning, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v29i1.3533
J. Richard Freese has been educating people of all ages, interests, and backgrounds in a variety of settings since 2004: face-to-face and online college courses, consultations, workshops and lecture recitals, one-on-one lessons. As an instructional designer with the Center for Teaching, Learning & Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Rich enjoys learning more about instructors’ courses and brainstorming ideas to advance the craft of teaching. Rich is passionate about finding and creating freely available educational resources, creating efficient-to-make and engaging instructional media, using low-stakes assessments to give students freedom to explore, scaffolding high-stakes assessments, and balancing course time between core material and students’ personal and scholarly interests.
