Higher education doesn’t have an accessibility problem.
That sentence probably sounds strange coming from someone who spends much of her professional life helping my college prepare for the April 2027 ADA Title II compliance enforcement deadline. Yet after working with faculty, instructional designers, administrators, and accessibility specialists across my institution, I’ve become convinced that accessibility itself isn’t what most institutions are struggling with.
We’re struggling with organizational change.
We continue to treat accessibility as something that happens after a course is designed instead of something that shapes design from the beginning. We call in specialists to fix content that faculty built in good faith, using tools and workflows that never asked: is this accessible? We build half-measures instead of habits, projects instead of practices, and compliance plans instead of cultures. The result? Institutions are investing significant time and resources and making measurable progress. Yet many still feel they cannot cross the finish line. As they address one set of accessibility challenges, new ones emerge, making compliance seem perpetually just out of reach.
Why Institutions Keep Falling Behind
Somewhere on your campus right now, a student with a disability is downloading a PDF they cannot read, watching a video with no captions, or navigating a course that was never designed with them in mind. They may not file a formal accommodation request. Disability disclosure in higher education remains persistently low, meaning the gap between who is affected and who is visible in our data is far wider than most institutions realize.
Neurodiverse learners, students managing chronic illness, and those navigating language and cognitive differences all encounter barriers quietly, every day.
Awareness isn’t the problem. With the April 2027 ADA Title II enforcement deadline approaching, nearly everyone in digital learning knows the clock is running. Yet progress has lagged well behind awareness.
Why? Because most institutions have positioned accessibility as a downstream activity rather than an integral part of course design.
Too often, accessibility lives in a specialist’s office, a compliance team, or a ticket queue instead of being embedded in the processes that shape course design from the outset. As a result, accessibility enters the conversation after the fact during the remediation phase rather than at the beginning, during the design phase. When a course launches with inaccessible documents, uncaptioned videos, or insufficient color contrast, institutions must spend valuable time and resources fixing problems that could have been prevented from the beginning.
A Better Way to Think About It
Perhaps the better question isn’t, “How do we make this course accessible?” It’s, “How do we design it so accessibility is not an afterthought?”
When accessibility becomes part of the design conversation, everything else begins to change. It influences how courses are built, how technologies are selected, how faculty are supported, and how quality is measured. Accessibility is no longer a separate compliance activity and becomes one of the defining characteristics of a well-designed learning experience.
This shift becomes more urgent and more complex as AI-generated content enters the picture. Generative AI is reshaping how course materials are created at scale, and the default output of most AI tools is not inherently accessible. Institutions that haven’t embedded accessibility into their design and review processes may find that AI accelerates the creation of accessibility barriers.
Three Questions Every Institution Should Ask
Rather than offering another checklist, I want to invite reflection on three questions that tend to surface the deepest institutional gaps.
Where does accessibility enter your design process? If the honest answer is “after the course is finished” or “when someone needs an accommodation,” that’s not an accessibility problem. It’s a solvable process design problem.
Who owns accessibility after launch? Compliance reviews and remediations are point-in-time. If no one is accountable for ongoing accessibility as content evolves, new barriers will outpace your remediation work. Sustainable accessibility requires ownership that outlasts any single course or deadline.
What does accessibility look like at your institution on April 27, 2027? The day after the enforcement deadline. That question matters because deadlines can create urgency, but organizational change requires something more enduring. The institutions best positioned to meet the April 2027 deadline are those that have already embedded accessibility into the workflows, conversations, and decisions that shape how digital learning is designed and delivered. By then, accessibility is no longer a project. It is simply how the institution works.
Continuing the Conversation
These questions don’t have simple answers, and they’re not meant to. Too often, we’re encouraged to look for the next tool, platform, or automated solution that will finally make accessibility manageable. Those tools can be valuable, but they cannot replace well-designed processes, shared ownership, and a culture that embeds accessibility into the way learning is designed from the start.
If you’re ready for a deeper look, I’ll be leading a three-hour immersion session at OLC Accelerate 2026 titled Five Months Left: Moving from Accessibility Compliance to an Inclusive Culture in Digital Higher Education. The session is designed for practitioners who are ready to move from awareness to action—faculty, instructional designers, accessibility specialists, educational technologists, and administrators—whatever your role in how digital learning is built at your institution.
We’ll work through a curated accessibility audit framework, apply ready-to-use templates across documents, multimedia, and assessment design, and address the real constraints directly: limited time, limited staff, and the paralysis that sets in when everything feels too big to tackle at once. Each participant will leave with a completed 30/60/90-day action plan they can begin implementing the week they return.
The goal isn’t a perfect accessibility program by April. The goal is a foundation that keeps growing after the deadline passes.
Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. The work is building what comes next.
Dr. Renee Ford is the Senior Instructional Designer at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, where she leads college-wide accessibility initiatives within the eLearning Design and Innovation Group. She serves as a web liaison to the larger University and leads the Smeal Accessibility Working Group, developing resources, training, and implementation roadmaps that support large-scale course remediation and sustainable instructional practices. She earned her Ph.D. in Workforce Education and Development from Penn State, specializing in Training, Human Resource Development and Organization Development.
