The compliance trap waiting on the other side of Title II

Key points:

• Accessibility is the floor UDL stands on, not the ceiling
• Next gen learning spaces: UDL in action
• Leveraging collaborative e-learning to support UDL
• For more news on UDL and accessibility, visit eSN’s Innovative Teaching hub

Every few years, something shifts how schools think about accessibility. A law changes, a new technology arrives, or a group of advocates succeeds in bringing attention to the topic. Right now, it’s Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Department of Justice has updated Title II to require compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, for all public school digital content: curriculum platforms, grading systems, parent communication tools, online assessments, third-party instructional materials. Larger districts have until April 2027. Smaller ones get until April 2028.

Here’s what worries me about that deadline. I’ve watched districts treat requirements like this one as a finish line before, and I’ve watched a vendor run a scan, a box get marked complete, and the work quietly stop right when it should be starting.

I’ve been at CAST for nearly nine years. Before that, I was a graduate student who almost didn’t finish his degree. I was identified with a visual impairment after starting a program in instructional technology, and I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get through a field that relies so heavily on vision. Eventually I transferred into a special education program, not because I gave up, but because that department was practicing Universal Design for Learning (UDL). My professors offered content in multiple formats. Assessments could be completed in different ways. I could access what I needed to actually learn, not just survive.

That flexibility wasn’t a workaround. It was good teaching, by design and for everyone, and it’s exactly what every district in the country is now legally required to build.

The mistake I see coming

The instinct, understandably, is to hand Title II to one department: Someone audits the website, a vendor runs a scan, and compliance turns into a technical problem with a technical fix.

That instinct will leave districts exposed. Accessibility doesn’t live in one department. It shows up in procurement decisions and in the documents a teacher creates. A district that buys a learning management system for 50,000 students just made an accessibility decision that touches every one of them, whether anyone framed it that way or not. Compliance isn’t something that happens once at the top of an organization. It happens every day, at every level, which means leadership has to set the vision while the work lands in classrooms, procurement offices, and curriculum committees. Everyone needs to actually be talking to each other. I call this leading from the middle, where leadership and the grassroots meet in the same conversation.

What to ask your vendors now

This is where districts have real leverage they aren’t using. Accessibility requirements belong in every RFP a district issues. Make them a condition of the contract, not a line item buried in it. Ask vendors for their Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) and ask how recently it was updated. Ask whether the tool was tested with actual disabled users, not just run through an automated checker. And ask what happens when the next version launches, because software updates constantly, and a tool that passed an audit in January can fail one in June. If a vendor can’t answer those questions, that’s information too.

Why WCAG alone isn’t enough

We draw a line between technical accessibility and what we call practical accessibility. A site can meet every criterion in WCAG 2.1 AA and still be genuinely hard to use if the people building it never designed alongside the people who’d rely on it. We don’t design for people with disabilities. We co-design with them, because that’s the only way to catch the assumptions we didn’t know we were making and end up with something people actually want to use, not just something that scores well on a checklist.

What this looks like for students and teachers

Teachers do not need to become accessibility specialists. I hold a professional certification in accessibility, and it took real time and training to earn. That’s not what I’m asking of educators who already have so many demands on their time.

What I am asking is that teachers learn five or six foundational practices: proper heading structure, descriptive link text instead of “click here,” and image descriptions on any visual in a handout or worksheet.

The first few times may feel unfamiliar. By the tenth time, it’s a habit.

For students, the stakes are simpler than any of this. If you can’t perceive the content, you can’t make meaning from it. Accessibility is the floor UDL stands on, not the ceiling. It’s the difference between a student who can access material and one who can actually engage with it and understand and be understood.

But those habits won’t take root if the district isn’t modeling them. A school system asking teachers to build accessible materials while running an inaccessible website is sending a contradictory message. You can’t ask for something you’re not demonstrating yourself.

What three decades have taught us

We built one of the first web accessibility checkers back in the 1990s. We called it Bobby, after the unarmed policemen in the UK whose job is to help people, not catch them. That’s still how we think about this work: support, not a gotcha. Title II has created real momentum. Administrators who never thought seriously about accessibility are in the conversation now, and that’s genuinely good. But accessibility never really finishes. It becomes a set of systems and habits that keep moving as the tools change underneath them.

The deadline is real. What districts build between now and April 2027 will decide whether Title II becomes a turning point or a temporary fix.