From Compliance to Core Operations: Building Accessibility As Shared Infrastructure

Immediate Actions and Long-Term Strategies for Higher Ed Institutions

Once treated as a course-level concern, accessibility has become one of the most consequential infrastructure challenges facing higher education today. As compliance deadlines approach, institutions are discovering that the real cost of accessibility gaps is no longer measured in formal complaints, but surfaces in operational strain, student exclusion, and systems failing the very people they were built to serve.

“Technology now touches every single phase of the student experience, from recruitment and enrollment to advising, financial aid, and the learning environment itself,” says Dr. Laura Romeo, Director of Digital Learning Innovation, Scholarship, and Educational Services at Edge. “When decisions about those systems are made without accessibility in mind, the impact scales very quickly. A single inaccessible form or portal can quietly affect thousands of students before anyone raises a concern.”

The regulatory landscape has made the urgency impossible to ignore. The ADA Title II Final Rule has established WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the federal standard for public institutions, with compliance deadlines tiered by population served: April 2026 for institutions serving 50,000 or more, and April 2027 for those under 50,000. For private institutions, Sections 504 and 508 and the Americans with Disabilities Act continue to apply, with the Department of Justice actively enforcing standards across all institution types.

“Wherever you are with your specific deadline, the question is really about how you are strategically approaching it, and that starts with how you define accessibility in the first place,” says Romeo. “When accessibility is defined narrowly as a compliance checkbox, institutions tend to find themselves in a reactive cycle. They scramble before a deadline, run some scans, fix the most visible issues, and move on. But the same problems keep coming back because nothing structural has changed.”

“A more effective framework positions accessibility at the intersection of three distinct but interconnected principles,” continues Romeo. “Compliance is the floor—meeting the legal standards is where it starts, but it cannot be where it ends. The second dimension is usability: can people actually use these systems in real conditions, on a mobile device, with slow internet, using a screen reader, under time pressure? And the third is equity: is the experience consistent across your institution, or does it depend on which department built the form or which faculty member set up the course? When you consider all three together, it fundamentally changes how you approach accessibility, and it makes clear that this cannot be one office’s responsibility.”

Removing Barriers to Student Success

“Students don’t see departments, they see their institution,” explains Romeo. “They visit the website, apply, register for classes, navigate their LMS, interact with financial aid, and use advising tools. To them, it is a single, continuous experience. If one of those touchpoints creates a barrier, it doesn’t matter how smooth everything else is. That barrier is what shapes their frustration, and ultimately, whether or not they decide to stay.”

Federal compliance standards reflect this reality. Institutions are evaluated as a whole, not department by department. A student who can access a website but cannot complete registration has not been given equal access, and that is precisely why accessibility cannot live in one office or belong to one team.

“Most accessibility barriers are not created by people who don’t care,” says Romeo. “They are created by people who are busy, doing their best, and who simply don’t have accessibility built into how they currently work. A new student-facing tool gets selected based on features, cost, and integration capabilities, but nobody asks for a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) or tests it with a screen reader. None of it is intentional, but the result is the same: barriers accumulate across systems and across semesters.” Continues Romeo, “Many institutions are addressing symptoms without ever resolving the underlying cause. They are operating in triage mode—scanning, finding problems, fixing them one at a time. The more strategic question is: what in your process is producing these barriers, and what would it take to change that?”

Accessibility failures surface differently across operations, IT, communications, academic affairs, and student services. “On the operational side, they show up as strain,” explains Romeo. “The help desk fielding the same questions about a portal that doesn’t work with assistive technology. The staff member manually processes requests that should be self-service. Nobody is tracking the total staff hours spent working around an inaccessible registration workflow, or putting a number on the student who left because the financial aid portal was too frustrating to navigate. But those costs exist, and they add up.”

Looking Through an Accessibility Lens

For technology teams, accessibility risk is often hiding in plain sight. “A scenario that plays out more often than people realize: a student tries to complete a financial aid verification form, but the dropdown menus don’t work with keyboard navigation and field labels are disconnected from their text boxes,” shares Romeo. “The student calls the office, a staff member completes it through a different pathway, and now there is a data integrity question, and potentially a FERPA question. From the IT side, it looks like a data anomaly. The root cause is accessibility.”

“One of the most useful things an IT team can do right now is review support tickets through an accessibility lens,” continues Romeo. “Before concluding that something is user error, ask one additional question: could this be about how the system was designed? That shift alone can surface patterns that have been easy to overlook.”

For communications and marketing teams, the stakes are equally significant and more publicly visible. “Your website is the first place a prospective student or family will encounter your institution,” says Romeo. “If it is not keyboard navigable, if PDFs are not tagged, if videos don’t have accurate captions, that communicates something about your institution’s values, whether it was intended or not.”

Accessible communication practices serve every audience well. Plain language helps all readers. Captions help people in noisy environments and those watching content in a second language, not only those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Good web structure supports search engine optimization.

Faculty face a parallel challenge. “Consider the volume of content inside your LMS,” says Romeo. “Documents, slides, videos, assignments, and discussion boards running across every section, every department, every semester. Most of it was created without accessibility in mind—not because faculty are being careless, but because most faculty were never taught what accessible content looks like. A screen reader cannot navigate an untagged PDF. Bold text does not create heading structure. There is a knowledge gap that institutions now have a responsibility to close.”