One week to go: ISU prioritizes action as accessibility mandate arrives

Editor's note: A federal update on Monday, April 20 announced an extended deadline for digital accessibility compliance with the Department of Justice ruling. The deadline for compliance has been extended by one year to April 26, 2027.

The April 24 deadline for compliance with federal digital accessibility mandates is just over a week away. What if your college, unit or department hasn't reached 100% accessibility on all of its digital content?

"Don't panic," said Rich Tener, ISU's chief information security officer. "We have an enormous amount of data out there and we will not get it all remediated in time. We have primary goals that we are focusing on."

Iowa State's goals for digital accessibility are to:

• Achieve legal compliance
• Reduce ISU's risk
• Create a welcoming digital environment for all learners

Tener said digital accessibility is important for individuals who need it, but also there are many who use it without having a formal accommodation.

Where to start

Employees should use the following prioritization list to focus their efforts this spring on what matters most:

• Publicly accessible and high-traffic websites (for example, ISU homepage, admissions, university human resources) 
• Course materials for students 
• University communications 
• Internal materials (for example, documents, presentations, apps, newsletters)

For each category, Tener provided a risk lens:

• Websites: Consider the audience size and the frequency with which pages are accessed.

"A website for a single professor that gets few hits is not as important as Iowa State's main website," he said. "Do that for the materials that are shared as well. If it's a PDF that is rarely accessed, it shouldn't be ahead of one that is frequently accessed."

• Learning tools: Consider course enrollment size and how critical the material is to instruction.
• University communication: Consider the email distribution size, social media followers and impressions.
• Internal materials: Consider how critical it is to someone's job.

"Anything that is critical to someone's job has to be accessible," he said.

Tener said ITS is developing a dashboard to provide an overall institutional snapshot of digital accessibility compliance that can be broken down to college and department levels.

What about PDFs?

Tener said Iowa State websites contain about half a million PDFs that must be made accessible, but there currently is not a great solution. IT is working on it.

"The best tool right now is to use Adobe Acrobat Pro to check for accessibility," he said, but acknowledged the user experience with this tool isn't easy."

Tener said IT is testing an automated remediation tool developed by Arizona State University. It checks the document and automatically adds headers. It also extracts all images and sends them to an Amazon image recognition service that creates alternative ("alt") text automatically. Finally, it puts the PDF back together in an accessible form.

User-specific license tools are another option ITS staff are investigating, Tener said.

What comes after April 24?

ITS has a form that anyone can use to report a digital accessibility barrier.

"April 24 is just another day, but what changes is that there is a legal right for people to report barriers," Tener said. "We will continue to disseminate information and provide tools to address issues that come up."

All barrier reports submitted will go to the IT team, which then will work with the content owner directly. Tener said this will allow for consistency, centralize solutions that could be used across campus and help maintain a level of privacy. Any barriers reported directly to a content owner should be forwarded to IT at digitalaccess@iastate.edu. Information that's not accessible doesn’t need to be removed immediately, but it must be fixed in a timely manner.

"When a barrier report is submitted, the best thing we can do is be responsive," he said. "Not responding in a timely manner is where we get in trouble."

Fixes will be communicated in several ways, including through the digital accessibility at ISU Team group on Microsoft Teams. Important information also will be shared through ITS' biweekly email newsletters to faculty and staff.

Tener said communities of practice, containing IT specialists and faculty experts, will be organized in departments and colleges to tackle some of the discipline-specific challenges and share the solutions they develop.