Digital Accessibility

Equal Access

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act focuses on the built environment—ramps, elevators, accessible restrooms. Section 508 extends the same principle to information technology and the digital environment.

The core requirement is straightforward:

Individuals with disabilities must have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access and use by individuals without disabilities.

Section 508 is a very useful accessibility heuristic. When evaluating your materials, ask: Is there equal access to this info? Equal use of this file?

A Bad Digital Environment

Technology has been racing forward for decades, prioritizing speed and profit over interoperability and access. The result is a digital environment built on proprietary formats, closed systems, and visual-first design that often excludes people with disabilities entirely.

We’re finally getting around to cleaning it up.

🔧

This is part of why open standards matter. HTML is an open standard—it’s designed to be read by machines and humans alike. Proprietary formats like .pptx or .pdf weren’t built with that flexibility in mind, which is why they require extra work to make accessible.

Updates to Title II

The accommodation model was deemed incompatible with equal access. The 2024 Update to Title II does two important things:

Requires all digital content be accessible by default
Adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA as a standard.

What WCAG Actually Is

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are essentially a catalog of situations where digital information succeeds or fails at providing equal access. Each guideline describes a specific barrier and what it takes to remove it.

2.1 is the version number
AA is a set of guidelines within the group

  flowchart TD
    subgraph AAA [Set AAA]
        AAA1[AAA is the most comprehensive]
        subgraph AA [Set AA]
            subgraph A [Set A]
            A1[A is the smallest set]
            end
        end
    end

Example: Guideline 1.1.1 — Non-text Content

The situation: An image appears on a page. A sighted user sees it. A screen reader user hears… nothing.

The barrier: The information in the image has no text equivalent.

The success criterion: Provide a text alternative that serves the same purpose.

That’s it. WCAG 1.1.1 is just a formal way of saying: if there’s information in an image, that information needs to exist as text too.

Most of WCAG follows this pattern—identify a barrier, describe what success looks like.

WCAG covers all of the web from content creation to web application development. The guidelines that instructors need to be aware of are a smaller set.

Where Existing Guidance Comes From

All of the accessibility recommendations you’ve encountered—from PCC’s Accessibility Fundamentals, from workshops, in trainings, and from colleagues—are downstream from and distillations of WCAG.

If you’ve ever noticed seemingly contradictory advice it’s almost always because software companies changed something, not because accessibility practices shifted.

POUR and What to Prioritize

WCAG organizes its guidelines into four principles—Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). There’s good stuff throughout, but for instructors creating course materials, Perceivable is where most of the focus will be.

Perceivable means: users must be able to perceive the information being presented (it can’t be invisible to all of their senses).

What makes STEM more complicated is complex images—the diagrams, graphs, equations, and visualizations we use to help students understand challenging concepts. Much of this site is dedicated to that challenge.

Digital Content Primer Complex Images