WCAG 2.1 Documents

[Stephanie]

Hi Everyone,

I am an Institutional Research Analyst at my institution.  I also manage our department's website and dashboards.  

Hopefully many of your are aware of the upcoming federal legislation that will require stricter accessibility requirements for digital media (websites, downloadable documents, etc.) mandatory over the coming year, starting in late April 2026.  I am with a large public university, so I am not familiar with the requirements for private institutions, but I'm sure this affects many of us in this group.

The new legislation means that our digital documents must be compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, which have numerous additional requirements beyond what we have been bound by for so many years.

I am wondering if the CDS Initiative is planning on providing documents that better meet these standards to reduce the burden on the institutions to fix the current form.  I'm also inquiring if anyone has found any tricks that makes this process a little easier.

[Kerri Ford]

Good afternoon, Texas Tech University is also monitoring this question.

[Christina Quinlan]

Following this as well. I have gone in circles trying to remediate the CDS documents, since we post those to our website. 

[Michael Dorsch]

Cal State Monterey Bay is also monitoring this discussion. To be able to post the CDS publicly, we need an accessible template. 

[Stephanie]

Hello Everyone,

Those of you who represent institutions serving a population that mandated your accessibility requirement due date in April of this year are likely aware of the extension that the DOJ has granted to provide sufficient time to meet these requirements.  The new deadline is now April 26, 2027.

However, this extension was only granted about a week prior to the original deadline, meaning we have been working frantically to determine how best to meet these requirements right up to the day the extension was granted.  Our institution decided that we do not want to post natively-editable documents (i.e. spreadsheet files) on our website.  This left us with only two options - PDF documents, or HTML webpages.  The guidance across our campus heavily encourages the use of HTML because when properly structured, it provides the best experience for screen readers.  Admittedly, our Office of Institutional Research agreed because PDFs are far more challenging and time consuming to remediate.  Our website editor software has strict rules built into the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tools to prevent violations in design that would otherwise break the WCAG standards.

The decision to publish the CDS in HTML presented a few challenges, since much of the design of the documents relies on visual indicators that do not provide the same context to screen readers.  A big example of this includes any table where an indicator (such as an "X") is used to mark where a indicator applies.  This means that for a visual user, the eyes go directly to anywhere an "X" might appear.  The other cells remain blank.  A screen reader may handle this in different ways, but I learned that in many cases, it will simply skip over the cell, meaning a user relying solely on this technology may not have a clear indication as to where the marks appear.  To improve this experience, it was necessary to populate every cell with Yes/No or some other binary descriptor that clarifies whether a single combination of dimensions applies.

By posting the CDS in HTML, visual users also gained a few benefits, including easier navigation and the ability to Copy/Paste the data into a spreadsheet and maintain its structure.  It took a lot of work to put this together, but now that the structure is built, we expect to only have a few changes to make in subsequent years, including any changes that are made to the CDS template and of course, the data itself.

If you would like to check it out, I am providing a link to our page where you can see the structure.  Unfortunately there is no "template" I can share as this code is generated by our CMS and the only thing that can be extracted is the HTML itself.  If your institution uses a similar platform, it likely does not have a means to import this and/or cannot apply it to any existing templates for your website.  However, whether someone on your team is responsible for modifying your website (as is our case), or you have a separate team in your marketing or I.T. departments, the roughly one-year we have remaining may help get the hard part over with by building the structure.  I am personally working with the appropriate teams within our institution to enhance our website tools to allow more customization to our tables (colors, borders, etc) so that we can improve the visual readability of the tables themselves.

Sorry for the long read, but I hope this helps you with a possible solution for this challenge.

Stephanie