Your college website could get you sued.

Your university website is the backbone of most schools. It’s where students sign up for classes, submit homework, and manage their registration. But if those critical functions are inaccessible, you’re not just failing to meet the needs of your students—you’re opening yourself up to legal liability. Join us as we talk about 5 real-life college website lawsuits from the last two years. What went wrong, what they could do to fix it, and most importantly for you, how shockingly common those same issues are on many college websites.

Thursday, August 20, 2026 8:00 AM PT to 9:00 AM PT (11:00am ET)

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Zachary Boyd VP of Marketing

Zach is the VP of Marketing at Silktide. He's a former ecommerce founder, lifetime obsessive marketer, and on a mission to help make the internet accessible to everyone. He enjoys writing about himself in the third person.

Jessica Chambers, CPWA Accessibility Evangelist

Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), with 12+ years in accessibility and a lot longer building for the web. My specialty is making accessibility make sense – connecting how people think, what they notice, and what they can actually use into something practical. I spend most of my time helping other people make sense of it, too.

11:00 The five cases, and how common each mistake is right now
11:45 The one that got dismissed
11:50 Q&A. Bring the page you're worried about.

"It is challenging to keep track of everything under our university's web domain. The web umbrella contains tens of thousands of pages, certainly over 100,000 web pages. Silktide gives us a central location where we can keep an eye on what's going on the web."

Christy Grant,
The University of Texas at Dallas

Don’t Learn These Lessons the Hard Way

35%

of college PDFs share the accessibility issue that went to trial.

Most accessibility suits settle quietly. This one didn’t: a community college fought it all the way to trial, lost on 14 separate ADA violations, and had a six-figure award reinstated on appeal, with years of legal fees stacked on top. The PDFs at the centre of it were ordinary course materials: untitled, untagged, published the way almost everyone publishes them.

WCAG 2.4.2 Page Titled (A) and 1.3.1 Info & Relationships (A). Untitled on ~35% of sites, untagged on ~21%.

59%

of higher-ed sites share a failure linked to class-action lawsuits.

Universities have faced class actions claiming their websites couldn’t be used at all without a mouse. Tab through most college sites and you’ll see why: the focus indicator disappears, so a keyboard user is navigating blind, guessing where the cursor landed. Someone trying to register for classes has no way to tell which button they’re about to press.

WCAG 2.4.7 Focus Visible (AA) and 2.4.4 Link Purpose (A). We find it on ~59% of higher-ed sites — the sector’s most common failure.

$100,000+

The form problem that cost one institution a six-figure settlement

An institution got sued because applicants couldn’t complete the forms at the centre of its own admissions process. Unlabelled fields, contrast too low to read the borders, controls that a keyboard can’t reach — each one small, all of them together a wall. The people who hit that wall weren’t browsing. They were trying to apply.

WCAG 1.3.1, 1.4.11 Non-text Contrast (AA) and 1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose (AA). On ~8% to ~14% of sites.

About Silktide

Silktide is a complete web quality assurance platform with best-in-class automated accessibility testing, plus manual auditing, training, and consultancy. We help universities find every accessibility issue, fix what matters, and prove it.

We also run the Silktide Index: one of the world’s largest public accessibility benchmarks, scoring thousands of organizations against WCAG to help keep track of and measure accessibility on the web.