The digital accessibility landscape is undergoing rapid change and improvement. Following the April 2024 ruling by the U.S. Department of Justice, all academic institutions are required to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards for all course content and institutional web materials by April 2026 as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act Digital Accessibility Rule. In a similar vein, Canadian federal organizations are also being required to comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards for all digital content, and information and communications technology (ICT).
The weight and importance of digital accessibility continues to rise as people shift their understanding of disabilities, accommodations, and accessibility. With not only a cultural shift towards increasing digital accessibility, but also a legal shift towards mandating compliance with accessibility standards, it is a critical moment in time for those of us producing digital content. The bottom line? Digital accessibility is not an option.
What Should We Focus On?
Starting the journey to becoming digitally accessible may seem overwhelming at first for large organizations. Keeping a specific and narrowed checklist of what to focus on can help institutions stay on track. Some key considerations to keep in mind when becoming WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliant are:
- Providing alt text to non-text content
- Providing captions for all videos and transcripts for all audio content
- Ensuring content is in an adaptable layout that doesn’t lose information or structure
- Ensuring content is visually legible
- Ensuring audios have control mechanisms (like pause buttons and volume bars)
- Ensuring content can be accessed through keyboard navigation
- Designing content in a way that does not trigger seizures or physical reactions
- Ensuring content can be processed by assistive technologies without losing information or structure
For a comprehensive list of all the guidelines required to be WCAG 2.1 compliant, you can find an updated list on the World Wide Web Consortium website. Next to each guideline, you can find “Understand [requirement]” and “How to Meet [requirement]” links that further explain the scope and intent behind each guideline.
Assessing Digital Accessibility in 2026
Once we know what to focus on and begin implementing changes, where do we go from there? It’s important to assess how impactful our changes are and how close we are to compliance. As teachers often tell students, reflection is critical to improvement. Some best practices for assessing digital accessibility in 2026 are:
- Performing regular accessibility audits: Performing frequent automated checking can help catch common accessibility issues and is an excellent first step. Products like YuJa Panorama and YuJa EqualGround can help with this. But, having external audits may help give organizations a more holistic view on their digital accessibility and provide further insight into where efforts should be placed.
- Combining automated checking with human expertise: As far as AI has come in recent years, it’s not a perfect solution. Automated accessibility checking can falsely tag issues and may miss other issues. Involving people with disabilities and accessibility specialists in your testing can help catch errors that might otherwise go unnoticed.
- Creating sustainable accessibility practices to check content against: Having clear policies for your organization’s digital accessibility goals can help guide content creators and keep digital content consistent. Organizational guidelines can also help prevent future accessibility issues and point towards where retroactive issues can be found.
- Asking if your content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR): WCAG standards operate off four main principles called POUR. Whenever we’re unsure about how accessible content is, we can ask ourselves if our content reflects the POUR principles. To read more about POUR, click here.
With the legal shift towards digital accessibility compliance, the path towards a more accessible digital landscape is being paved. At its core, digital accessibility is about ensuring equal access to content for all users because we all have the right to access the same content. Witnessing legal systems reflect this basic belief signals toward a future where digital accessibility will only continue to strengthen.
