When the U.S. Department of Justice issued a new rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring public colleges and universities to ensure that all web content, mobile applications and other digital technologies are usable by people with disabilities, everyone in higher education knew it was going to be a big undertaking. The new guidelines, which take effect on April 24, require all websites, documents (like PDFs and Word docs), university communications (including emails) and digital tools to be reviewed and to meet the new standards. In addition to the federal guidelines, the university has enacted a Standard Practice Guide requiring accessibility for digital information. For the past year-plus, faculty have been busy updating their digital course materials and, in some cases, redesigning their teaching modalities with accessibility in mind. The Office of Digital Education, the Hub for Learning and Teaching Resources and the Provost’s Office have been supporting the transition with trainings, workshops and resources to help faculty get up to speed on the new guidelines.
The requirements also apply to most digital output by staff. Accordingly, all UM-Dearborn staff were required to complete training by the end of 2025 so they could incorporate digital accessibility standards into emails, documents and other aspects of their day-to-day work. On the staff side, one of the biggest lifts has been making sure the thousands of pages and documents on the university’s website meet all the new guidelines. John Powell, assistant director of web strategy and services, says that when he started thinking through how his team would approach this project, he actually wasn’t all that worried about the web pages, as the web team and web editors across the university have long been working with accessibility in mind. “Our biggest concern on the website was all the documents that are linked from the website — like things in Google Drive or Dropbox — but don’t actually live on our website,” Powell explains. “In many cases, we had no way of identifying what those documents are, and we may not have access to them. But per the requirements, those things have to be accessible and remain accessible.”
Powell and the web team determined that there were about 3,000 such linked documents in need of review, and they started by simply assessing whether these documents were still needed. If a unit or department didn’t need the document anymore, the web team simply got rid of it. If a document was still needed, Powell proposed converting the information into a web page, which is inherently more accessible and easier for the web team to monitor. Using these two approaches, Powell says they cut the scope of their task in half. For the remaining 1,500 or so documents, the team has been going through them one by one — assessing them with remediation tools, making the necessary changes, and then saving and uploading documents in the most accessible format possible. They’ve also triaged the work, focusing on high-traffic information that’s student facing over, say, a report that only impacts a few staff members. Using this approach, Powell says they’ve made a huge dent: At the end of 2025, they had around 200 documents to go.
Another major part of this effort has been working with vendors that provide software used by faculty, staff and students, as these, too, must meet digital accessibility standards. Carrie Shumaker, vice chancellor for information technology and chief strategy officer, says the challenges are very vendor specific. For software that was already compliant with WCAG 2.1AA guidelines, a set of international accessibility standards, the university might not need the vendor to do much, if anything. But for older software, Shumaker says they often had to make requests for modifications. “We probably have something like 80 software contracts, and so we ranked them by priority,” Shumaker explains. “So the software that runs reports for our help desk — unless we knew somebody on staff was having an issue with it — that wouldn't be as urgent as, say, sunapsis, which is a little bit of an older technology that all our international students use.”
Bailey Ayers-Korpal, director of marketing and digital strategy, says it’s hard not to be pleased with the effort everyone is putting in. For sure, there still aren’t too many days that go by where she’s not politely bugging someone to remedy an accessibility issue. But she doesn’t feel like it’s been pulling teeth. “I think people are open and receptive,” she says. “The web team has really done a massive amount of work to get our website up to the new standards. And I think people, on the whole, seem willing to get behind this and are happy to do it once they have the resources.” She also notes that, come April, the work won’t stop. This is a real culture shift — one in which staff and faculty will need continued support until the changes become routine.
Ayers-Korpal and Shumaker also want to ensure that the post-April vibe is constructive — not punitive. To that end, the university plans to create an easy way for people who are struggling with digital accessibility issues to report them, so problems can be fixed. “There’s a little bit of a mindset shift,” Shumaker says. "We want to communicate to people that, if you are having challenges, it’s not, like, ‘You’re broken and you need special help.’ It’s that this is a big — but very important — effort and we are here to help you get there.”
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Want to learn more about digital accessibility at UM-Dearborn? You can find all kinds of useful resources on the Digital Accessibility webpage. Story by Lou Blouin
