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Education Accessibility Audit: Admissions, Portals, and the PDF Pile
For the university, college, or district that wants admissions, learning, and campus life working for every student, and wants a straight answer on whether DOJ's dates apply to it.
What We Keep Finding
Start with the question that decides everything else. DOJ's Title II rule names WCAG 2.1 Level AA and sets April 26, 2027 for public entities whose population is 50,000 or more, with April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and for special district governments. Title II reaches state and local government, so a public university, a community college and a school district are all inside it. A private university or an independent school is not, and no honest page hands them that deadline. The barriers on the page are identical either way, which is why we audit them the same and describe the obligation differently.
Education also carries the web's messiest content problem. Hundreds of authors, decades of legacy pages, and a semester rhythm that ships new material faster than anyone reviews it. One part of the rule takes real work off that pile and almost nobody has read it. Conventional electronic documents posted before your compliance date, meaning the word processing files, the presentations, the spreadsheets and the PDFs, are exempt. That does not make them good and it does make the archive a smaller job than your web team fears. What the exemption never touches is anything you publish from the compliance date onward, which is exactly where an audit should point.
One more thing to check with your finance office, because it catches institutions that thought they had one deadline. If HHS money reaches you, and it commonly does, you pick up a second clock under Section 504 on the same technical standard, at May 11, 2027 or May 10, 2028. It was extended within three weeks of the Title II one because the two departments coordinated on purpose. And when HHS wrote its rule it had proposed carve-outs for course content at schools and colleges, then dropped them after the comments came in. So there is no course-content exception. Your lecture videos, your slide decks and your quizzes are inside the rule the same way your admissions pages are.
What We Check
- Apply, enroll, and register end to end with a screen reader
- Work the student portal and the LMS the way students actually live in them
- Sample department pages for the template failures that repeat across the whole estate
- Audit the PDFs that carry real traffic, so syllabi, forms, and financial aid
- Mark which findings sit inside the Title II baseline and which are simply barriers
What You Get
Every service on this site runs the same three-pass engine: an automated scan, an expert review of all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a hands-on session with a professional blind screen-reader user. You get one report with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes, we verify: the re-audit is half price within 3 months.
The format is not a mystery either. Read the sample report before you spend anything.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit, and it is the one every campus asks about. A university web estate can run to hundreds of thousands of pages and no audit reads them all. We sample by template and by traffic, which finds the fixes that repair thousands of pages at once, and the report says exactly what was sampled. What it can never do is produce a conformance claim for the whole estate. W3C's own evaluation methodology says a sampled evaluation cannot support one, so nobody can sell you that, whatever the sales page says. What you can have is evidence, in order, with dates on it.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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