There’s never been any doubt that accessibility matters in teaching and learning. Accessibility at its core is about students being able to participate fully in learning. It is about whether students can perceive the information we share, navigate our course spaces, understand what we are asking them to do, and use the tools and materials we assign. It is about fairness, equity, and belonging. And in practice, it is a critical aspect of good teaching.

The Department of Justice’s updated Title II ADA rule sets specific requirements for digital materials, and it identifies WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for accessibility — the deadline for which is April 24, 2026. 

It is understandable if seeing this date creates stress for already-busy faculty. If you have not yet started working on digital accessibility despite this looming deadline, you are not alone.

For some of us, delay is a very human reaction to cognitive and emotional overwhelm. The stakes feel high — we care about our students and want to give all of them access to the best educational experiences we can provide — yet our time, energy, and sense of competence feel low. Getting started under these conditions can seem impossible, a thorny knot of a problem, the untangling of which prompts us to throw our hands up in despair. 

And yet, as accessibility advocate Sheri Byrne-Haber puts it, “Accessibility is not a problem to be solved. It is a culture to be built.” What might it mean to reframe accessibility as something we create and sustain together, as the Temple community at large? 

A culture-building mindset helps us ask better questions:

● What barriers to learning might students encounter in my course right now?

● What materials do students use first and most often?

● What changes would make the biggest difference for this (or next) semester?

● How can I invite students to tell me when something is not working?

Those questions move us out of a freeze response and into action where the goal is not perfection, attained instantly. The goal is movement, habits, and trust.

The good news is that accessibility work should be additive. It is not about stripping out everything that makes your teaching rich or personal. It is about adapting what you already use so more students can access it. Captions do not remove your voice; they expand access. Clear headings do not flatten your ideas; they help students follow them. Better-organized Canvas pages do not lower rigor; they reduce unnecessary confusion.

And accessibility is not a one-time cleanup project. It is an ongoing practice. The ADA guidance itself emphasizes planning and prioritizing, and notes that creating and maintaining accessible content takes time. In its “first steps” resource, the DOJ encourages public entities to learn the updated Title II rule, identify content, determine needed fixes, and prioritize what to address first. That is a practical reminder for all of us: starting small is not failing; it is how real progress begins.

So often, when it comes to accessibility (and disability more generally), each of us faces limits on what we imagine is possible because of our own embodied experiences. If, for example, we rely on vision to navigate the world, it may be difficult to even conceive of alternative ways to experience and access the world. Indeed, accessibility failures are more often failures of imagination than of action. 

If we have never struggled to organize our ideas, or to decipher social cues, or to manage the lingering effects of our traumas, or so many other possibilities for how we, our students and our colleagues may have made our way through the world — or if we have struggled, but feel that since we managed to pull ourselves up by our metaphorical bootstraps, others should too — these failures of imagination can limit our understanding and our creativity in the pursuit of accessibility. 

This is where your colleagues, near and far, in-person and virtual, can help. The very premise of a university education is that we can learn beyond the confines of our own experiences if we allow ourselves to learn from and with others. In this way, we can together build a culture of accessibility, where more students can participate, more fully, from the start.

This is also where a culture of inclusion becomes visible in the classroom.

When we communicate clearly that we care about inclusion, students are more likely to speak up when they encounter an accessibility barrier. When we build relationships and invite feedback, students are more likely to trust that we will respond. When we make changes as we learn, we model the kind of reflective, responsive practice we hope students themselves will develop.

In other words, accessibility is not just a technical standard. It is also a teaching relationship.

If you are feeling behind, start with one course. Start with one unit. Start with the materials students need for the first week of classes. 

If spreadsheets are central to your teaching, begin there. If video is central, begin with captions and transcripts. If your Canvas site is hard to navigate, start by simplifying module organization and assignment directions. Start with what you know you can do, and let the CAT help you work towards learning the rest, one workshop, one-on-one consultation, intro video, how-to accessibility guide, or website resource at a time.