Digital accessibility initiative ensures compliance with federal and state mandates

Following a federal and state mandate, which required compliance with a specific set of standards for digital accessibility, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Office of Distance Learning rolled out their digital accessibility initiative toward the end of the Fall 2025 semester. This included a series of measures and resources to aid faculty members in ensuring all online course materials are in compliance.  

In 1990, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to protect people with disabilities from discrimination. In 2010, the ADA was updated to cover digital accessibility with the rise of the internet. In 2024, the DOJ ruled that digital accessibility would be determined by compliance with a specific set of standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. 

The Louisiana Office of the Governor passed the Policy and Procedure Memorandum Number 74, “Web Accessibility Compliance,” which was revised effective June 9, 2025. This memorandum mandated WCAG 2.1 as the minimum web accessibility standard. Both the federal and state governments require compliance with WCAG 2.1 by April 24, 2026.

WCAG 2.1 “covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible…Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities.”

Dr. Francesco Crocco, assistant director for instructional support at UL Lafayette’s Office of Distance Learning, said that in the past, accessibility was commonly treated as an accommodation, where a student with a disability would need to make an accommodation request based on their needs. Now, accessibility has been made an expectation. 

Crocco said, “What the law says now is that accessibility is not something that’s done by request, accessibility is now something, at least in the digital sphere, it is something that is expected, it’s required, you have to proactively make your content accessible without any request from the student whatsoever.”

In terms of the impact of the mandates on teaching, Crocco said that faculty who use any kind of digital communication in their courses, regardless of whether it is an in-person or online course, as long as they are sending documents by email or are using Moodle for sharing of resources and information, all of those materials need to comply with WCAG 2.1.

As part of their digital accessibility initiative, Crocco shared that the Office of Distance Learning worked together with the UL System to secure a contract for Panorama, a Moodle-integrated tool. According to the Office of Distance Learning, for faculty, the tool provides accessibility indicators, smiley or frowny face icons, that rank the accessibility of course content. 

For students, it provides a menu of alternative formats, such as podcasts, e-reader files, and immersive readers, for course documents without requiring instructor intervention. This is indicated by a generic accessibility icon, and the smiley or frowny faces are not visible to students. 

Ensuring course materials are in compliance with WCAG 2.1 require faculty members to be educated on the requirements of the guidelines, which may take some time. However, there are resources available for faculty to understand the new mandates and to learn how exactly they may need to revise their course materials to comply with the guidelines.

Besides “How-To Guides,” a knowledge base of articles on how to fix accessibility issues, and the implementation of Panorama, the instructional support team within the Office of Distance Learning hosts a weekly “10-Minute Tech Talk” through Microsoft Teams. These talks cover relevant online course design approaches, tools and technology. They have also held webinars over Zoom to provide accessibility information and guidance.

Crocco said, “We mainly do these 10-minute tech talks because that’s what the faculty seem to gravitate towards… short, punchy, low-commitment professional development opportunities.”

The UL System is also hosting webinars throughout this semester as part of a series called “Accessible by Design.” According to the UL System, this series is a set of short, focused sprints designed to support practical approaches to accessibility in digital learning. 

Some of the topics covered include color contrast and visual design basics, Microsoft accessibility tools and accessibility in announcements and email communication.

Dr. Carol Landry, director of the University’s Office of Disability Services, shared that the Office of Distance Learning has been working closely with her office to ensure that their digital accessibility initiative takes into consideration a range of disabilities to be as inclusive as possible.

She said, “They wanted me to connect them with students who have different types of disabilities, so that they could work one-on-one with those students in terms of maybe testing out some features of different programs or measures that they put in place to make things accessible.”

Overall, the federal and state mandates that require compliance with WCAG 2.1 aim to improve digital accessibility, especially in a digital age, to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. While changes may have to be made to course materials, this would make instructional environments as inclusive as possible.