Let me paint a picture: One day, you woke up with an inherited CMS, a few thousand pages, enough PDFs to jam every printer in the world, and a backlog that quietly resets itself every time someone in a department hits “publish.”
A backlog that got longer in the few brief moments you took to read this paragraph. There are issues everywhere, and never enough time, money, or people to handle them. And yes, many of those issues are accessibility issues.
That’s not a dig. It’s the job. There are accessibility issues on every university website.
We should know— we checked. Accessibility isn’t a thing you finish, it’s a moving target you chase while doing nine other things. The standards get stricter, the site keeps growing, and “we’ll fix it next sprint” becomes next quarter becomes next year. Nobody’s caught up. You’re not behind; you’re normal.
But the people who can’t use your site aren’t a rounding error: they’re people. A student using a screen reader to fill in a financial aid form, someone navigating with a keyboard, a parent zooming in on their phone. When the site fails them, it’s not a glitch. It’s the inability to access what they need. A poor experience that can quickly turn into more than just a scathing review. The Department of Justice’s updated Title II rule makes WCAG 2.1 AA the legal standard for public colleges and universities, and even though that timeline has been extended, your website is still being used by people who need it to be accessible. Chances are, I didn’t have to paint the picture. It’s one you’re already all too familiar with.