Higher Education Accessibility Checker

Accessibility Requirements for Higher Education

Higher education has two overlapping obligations. Section 504 covers essentially every institution because of federal student aid. Public colleges and universities, as government entities, are also covered by the DOJ’s Title II rule, which sets WCAG 2.1 AA compliance deadlines of April 2027 or 2028 depending on the entity.

Scope goes well beyond the marketing website: course content and your learning management system, admissions and financial aid portals, campus event and dining systems, and faculty and department pages are all in scope.

Section 504 applies to virtually every accredited college and university, public or private, because of federal student aid. HHS’s 2024 rule harmonizes Section 504 with WCAG 2.1 AA; after a one-year extension, institutions with 15 or more employees must comply by May 11, 2027, and smaller institutions by May 10, 2028. (opens in a new tab, source: federal digital accessibility requirements for higher ed)

Common Issues on Higher Education Sites

• PDF syllabi and course materials

  Scanned or poorly tagged PDFs distributed through the LMS are one of the most common and highest-impact accessibility failures in higher ed, since they block a student’s coursework directly.

• Admissions and financial aid forms

  Multi-step application and aid forms frequently have missing labels and unclear error messages, at exactly the point a prospective student cannot afford to get stuck.

• Video lectures without captions

  Recorded lectures and course videos hosted outside the LMS often ship without captions or a transcript.

• Department and faculty pages

  Individually maintained department sites, often outside central IT’s control, are a common source of missing alt text, poor heading structure and low contrast.

• Campus map and event tools

  Interactive campus maps and event calendars built with custom widgets often fail basic keyboard and screen reader support.

How to Fix What the Scan Finds

1. Start with anything in the enrollment funnel and current coursework: admissions forms, financial aid, and LMS content, since these carry the most direct impact on students and the most legal exposure.
2. Give department-level site owners a simple way to check their own pages; centrally-run scans often miss the long tail of individually maintained content.
3. Run a free scan above on your homepage and a few key pages, fix issues starting with critical and serious, then rescan to confirm.
4. For ongoing protection, AccessBell Pro monitors up to 500 URLs per domain every day and alerts you when something regresses.

Related Guides

• ADA Website Compliance: What Businesses Need to KnowHow the ADA applies to websites, which WCAG level courts and regulators reference, the Title II rule for public entities, and practical steps to reduce risk.
• WCAG 2.2 Checklist: What Changed and How to Test Each CriterionA practical WCAG 2.2 AA checklist: the nine new success criteria, the one that was removed, and how to test your website against each requirement.
• ADA Lawsuit Process: Stages, Timeline and What to ExpectThe ADA lawsuit process step by step: service, the 21-day answer deadline, mediation, discovery, settlement and appeal, plus what to do if you are sued.
• WCAG Success Criteria LibraryLook up any success criterion the scan flags, in plain language.
• Free Accessibility Statement GeneratorPublish a statement once your known issues are fixed.

Higher Education Accessibility Questions