College of Arts and Sciences

Guidance on Digital Accessibility and Syllabus Templates

April 2025

Background

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) updated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 2024. Title II affects public universities who receive federal funds such as Pell Grants and Education Loans. The regulation ensures that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participating in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of the university. The final ruling has specific requirements for ensuring that as much digital content as possible is accessible to people with disabilities without need for special accommodation (though there will still be circumstances in which accommodation is required). All public universities must follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 24, 2026 for all digital content, whether in online or in-person classes. WCAG is an internationally recognized accessibility standard for web access.

University Planning

The university is developing a plan to ensure all content for both online and in-person courses comply with accessibility standards by the end of fall 2025 semester. They will be providing software and other resources to help with this project.

What to do now

While faculty members have academic freedom over course content, the DOJ ruling mandates adherence to accessible design and presentation standards. Making content readable and predictable, with consistent navigation and identification of components is a crucial aspect of digital course design. Documents, presentations, and spreadsheets designed in an accessible format with appropriate heading levels will improve understanding of course content. Immediate work should focus on the following areas:

  • Evaluate the accessibility of PDFs included in course content. Review Making PDFs Accessible with Word (2:29) for guidance.
    • Confirm the text in PDFs can be recognized as digital characters so that screen readers recognize text.
    • If readings were scanned from a copier and saved as an image instead of text, the content cannot be read aloud with text-to-speech software.
  • Learn how to use tools available in Microsoft Word to format text elements in documents including fonts, headings, lists and hyperlinks: Focus 1 – Formatting and Headings
  • Ensure that syllabi are accessible for all Fall 2025 courses. Templates are available to help with this process:

Further steps towards remediation

Many design deficiencies can be remediated by providing alternatives for non-text media such as images, graphs, video, and audio. This includes providing closed captioning of all videos and audio descriptions for key visual content which was not captioned so that individuals with different abilities can access the content in a format that suits their needs. Start by reviewing your videos to ensure quality instruction.

Once you have developed the skills to make your text and syllabi accessible, you can consider the next steps.

  • Employing best practices to develop accessible course content: 25 Inclusive Design Tips
  • Consider completing the 55-minute course, Fundamentals of Accessible Digital Content in Canvas
  • Determine how you can split videos into shorter segments of 5-10 minutes.
    • Presenting videos with concise information reduces cognitive overload, leading to greater student success.
    • Recording videos in segments of less than 15 minutes makes them more manageable and eases the video-captioning process.
  • Closed captions of audio and descriptive text for non-verbal information can be added later. The university will be providing software to help with the process.
  • Keep an eye out for resources and training from both the Center of Academic Innovation and Deborah Goins, the college's instructional designer.

Resources