Universities Deflecting ADA Title II Responsibility to Professors (Digital Content Accessibility)

A Reddit thread from /r/Professors reveals that universities are redirecting their new responsibilities under the new ADA Title II rule to professors. Kris explains why this is unfair to professors and a more balanced approach to accessibility work delegation needs to take place.
Read the Reddit thread:
/ title_ii_update_of_ada...
To learn about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), take our WCAG Course:
adacompliance....
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#eLearning #Professors #Universities

[@angemcauslan2551]

Thank you for talking about this. In image heavy fields accessibility adds a huge amount of work. My employer has encouraged us to start using powerBI for reports and I calculated one report would need 700 different alt text to capture all possible filter states. We were told to do it with no added resources and it delayed the report by nearly a month.

[@adabook]

Absolutely - if this practice of deflecting ADA Title II responsibilities is widespread, it's a real problem. Universities need to support and work with professors on content accessibility. There must be significant funding allocated for this because accessibility is not simply something that can be absorbed, especially when starting a project.
Ultimately, ADA Title II compliance is the universities' responsibility, and if redirecting the responsibility is the universities' approach, it will lead to compromised content and non-compliance, which means not only unequal access but a host of other problems universities want no part of.

[@MichaelThomasDev]

Oh my, what a nightmare for these professors. Making digital assets truly accessible is difficult even for someone like me with 10+ years of professional web development experience.

[@adabook]

I agree, accessibility requires significant resources - especially at the start of a project.
This is representative of an ongoing problem within digital accessibility: many people who delegate responsibilities either disregard or underestimate the substantial investment required.

[@tsti1es]

it's remediation work, the university is responsible for the cost.

[@davidlloyd1526]

You'd think that "professors" would be smart enough to know how to use computers. There's a standard format for academic papers too, I wonder if that's a problem for them as well?

[@adabook]

Are you implying that making content accessible is a matter of knowing how to use computers?