Thousands of visually impaired college students rely on screen readers to complete their coursework and participate in other campus activities. But they regularly encounter content on apps and web pages that screen readers don’t translate well.

“There are things in PDFs that I can’t see as a visually enabled person that they hear in the screen reader,” said Cory Tressler, assistant dean for technology and digital programs at Ohio State University libraries, which houses hundreds of thousands of documents that don’t translate well to screen readers. “You can hear the screen reader saying something like ‘header, header, header,’ because it sees all this data in the margins that shouldn’t be there. It can be a jumbled mess.”

And just getting that version can be a challenge; sometimes a visually impaired student has to ask their institution to produce accessible materials in the first place—an often time-consuming and isolating process.

Although people who use screen readers “get used to it and develop skills to avoid these issues,” Tressler said, “they shouldn’t have to.”

Mitigating those and other digital accessibility disparities is also the spirit behind looming new federal regulations, which aim to reduce the hurdles students with disabilities face in accessing increasingly complex information on web pages and mobile apps. But many colleges and universities are scrambling to meet the April deadline, creating a situation one higher ed analyst described as a “regulatory time bomb.”

‘Time and Resource Constraints’

“Every public college is dealing with time and resource constraints,” said L. Scott Lissner, Americans With Disabilities Act coordinator for Ohio State University and chair of the public policy committee for the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD). “For most of higher education, mapping a central mandate to do things a certain way in a primarily decentralized system is always a challenge. It requires lots of training, culture shifts and messaging.”

In 2024, the Department of Justice added new requirements to Title II of the ADA, the 1990 law that requires state and local governments to make sure that their services, programs and activities are accessible to people with disabilities. The new rule acknowledges that in the intervening decades, the public information ecosystem has gone digital, and it requires all publicly funded entities—including colleges and universities—to adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Though there are some exceptions for “archived” content, compliance with these regulations means that every PDF file must be accessible to a screen reader, every video accompanied by captions and audio descriptions, every photograph coded with alternate text, every sound clip paired with a transcript. All third-party platforms have to meet the guidelines, too.

“Just as stairs can exclude people who use wheelchairs from accessing government buildings, inaccessible web content and mobile apps can exclude people with a range of disabilities from accessing government services,” the rule reads. “By allowing individuals with disabilities to engage more fully with their governments, accessible web content and mobile apps also promote the equal enjoyment of fundamental constitutional rights, such as rights with respect to speech, assembly, association, petitioning, voting, and due process of law.”

Most organizations have until April 24, 2026, to comply, though single-function special government districts and state and local governments with fewer than 50,000 people have until April 26, 2027. Entities found noncompliant run the risk of being sued by the government and slapped with hefty fines.

However, the government hasn’t provided any money to help federally funded public entities comply. And though some higher education institutions—especially those with access to researchers and librarians who are digital accessibility experts—may be in a better position to comply than local governments and school districts, the regulations have charged them all with the same mammoth undertaking.

“The challenge for postsecondary institutions is that almost everything lives in a digital environment now when it comes to transactions, from applying, to enrolling to paying your bills, to [registering for] courses, to accessing instructional and library materials,” said Jamie Axelrod, director of disability resources at Northern Arizona University and past president of AHEAD. “That’s a lot of historical content, documents and materials that need to be addressed.”

Compliance ‘All Over the Map’

Some universities—including Colorado State University, the University of North Dakota, the State University of New York system, the University of Iowa, William & Mary and Northern Arizona—have already made headway toward complying with the new regulations.

“Luckily, NAU has had systems and structures in place for years trying to address digital accessibility,” Axelrod said, adding that the university has a handful of staff who are focused on improving digital accessibility. “The bigger question for us at this point has been how to design structures and frameworks and provide tools around campus for the instructional materials so we can ramp up our ability to make sure those meet the technical standard [of the new regulations] … We’ve had to stand up resources for faculty so they can identify their content that doesn’t meet those standards.”

But other institutions aren’t as well positioned to comply.

Nearly half of U.S. universities have just one or two staff members who work on technology accessibility, according to a 2023 survey from Educause. Another survey from Anthology showed that only 22 percent of instructors consider accessibility when designing course materials. Meanwhile, one-third said they were “not at all” aware of the new federal requirements, and 45 percent said they were aware but “unclear on the details.”

“Colleges and universities across the country are all over the map in terms of where they are with compliance and getting into compliance by the due date,” Axelrod said. “Some are going to be very well situated … Then there will be other colleges and universities that don’t have any plan, don’t have resources or qualified personnel, and are struggling to get this done.”

The challenge of achieving compliance also varies by discipline, with STEM materials written in specialized code requiring more resources to make them digitally accessible than disciplines that engage more basic text. Earlier this month, the American Mathematical Society, the European Mathematical Society, the London Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics drafted accessibility guidelines for authors to help them comply with the new federal regulations and similar regulations the European Union implemented last year.

Axelrod added that those new regulations may also finally push more third-party educational technology vendors to design their products with digital accessibility in mind.

“There have been many efforts to create market pressure in this environment to enhance … accessibility, but over time those approaches haven’t been super successful,” he said. “But with these new regulations, that market pressure is starting to impact the types of software and instructional materials available to institutions.”

Harnessing the Power of AI

In addition to educating faculty and staff about making sure all the material they create for courses, programs and services complies with the accessibility guidelines, universities are also navigating the logistics of updating enormous tranches of existing digital content.

At Ohio State’s libraries, for example, more than 110,000 PDFs and three times as many digital images didn’t meet the technical accessibility standards when the rule was announced in 2024. In practice, it meant that patrons who rely on screen readers and alt-text to read or interpret those documents had an inferior experience compared to those who can read those same documents without assistance.

“If there’s a picture of Mount Everest in a journal article, the screen reader will read what’s under the caption of the mountain, but it can’t read the mountain,” said Tressler, the tech administrator for OSU’s libraries. “An able-sighted person could see that it’s a mountain on a sunny day, but a person using a screen reader just hears ‘Mount Everest‘ and whatever else the captions says.”

But updating all that data isn’t cheap, and the library didn’t have a dedicated budget for it, either.

When Tressler asked a third-party vendor how much it would cost to remediate all of the library’s noncompliant PDFs, the estimate came out to $5 per page—or roughly $20 million. That was until he connected with Amazon Web Services’ AI Cloud Innovation Center at Arizona State University.

With the help of about 20 ASU students who work at the center, Tressler and his team used generative AI to design an automated remediation process in line with the new federal standards. In contrast to the traditional services, it costs about 6 cents per page and takes minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.

“What we’ve been doing thus far is testing it to make sure the output is at a standard we’re comfortable with. AI isn’t perfect every single time, so we wanted to work on our prompts for the alt-text to make sure we’re getting good, consistent output,” Tressler said. “We’re now at the point where we’re getting prepared over the next two months to run it against everything we have.”

The rapid advancement of AI-powered tools has sped up the process; he said they’ve become noticeably more efficient and sophisticated since his team started the project a year and a half ago. As the technology keeps progressing, he expects that making web content more accessible to people with disabilities will become even easier.

“It’s only going to get better,” Tressler said. “Ultimately, the solution we’re co-developing isn’t the endgame. It’s a solution for right now. In two to three years from now, it won’t be needed. There will be something else that blows away every current screen reader.”

For now, though, all colleges and universities that accept federal funding need to find a way to align with the regulations by the April deadline to avoid breaking the law. It won’t be easy. Full compliance by all institutions in the next three months is “just not going to happen,” said Jonathan Thurston, a fellow at the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies.

“The best thing [higher education institutions] can do is get a plan and start the plan now,” he said. “If they don’t, they risk litigation and damaging their brand severely.”

But putting a good-faith effort into expanding the accessibility of web content and mobile apps isn’t just about avoiding the wrath of the federal government or protecting a brand.

“Title II is about growth and opportunity. And when you implement accessibility and disability for people with disabilities, it improves everyone’s lives,” Thurston said. “And if colleges implement it, they’ll also make more money, because [strong accessibility standards] often lead to higher enrollment and retention.”