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Title II Digital Accessibility: What It Means for Our Courses

April 15, 2026 By Jason Woodall and Jacob Spradlin
Woman in her 30s listening to course content through headphones and looking at a laptop. She has a pen in her hand.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s updated ADA Title II rule clarifies that accessibility requirements apply to websites and mobile apps and adopts Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard. In practice, that means captions for prerecorded and live video and audio description where visuals convey essential information; the rule also recognizes narrow exceptions (e.g., archived content, certain preexisting documents or social posts, individualized password-protected materials, and undue burden), while still requiring accessible alternatives when exceptions apply.

Good news: Your course is highly accessible already

There is no one course that will reach 100% overnight, and there’s no single “flip the switch” moment. What matters is steady progress: continue adding accessible elements to your courses each term. We’ve been running accessibility webinars since Spring 2025, and reaching out to SHSU Online’s Instructional Design and Media Teams for help is always encouraged.

SHSU is not starting from scratch

SHSU Online has invested for more than a decade in accessible learning at scale across Blackboard, digital course content, and related academic technologies, including support extended through the Texas State University System shared services. This sustained approach means accessibility is operationalized rather than episodic.

Established working practices:

  • Anthology Ally (since 2016) in 100% of courses, with real-time feedback and on demand alternative formats - audio, HTML, ePub, electronic braille, PDF (tagged and/or OCR), BeeLine Reader, Immersive Reader, and translated versions. 
  • Captioning & transcription (since 2013) coordinated with Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD); over the last five years, 10,028 media files and 2,902 hours captioned/transcribed; live streams (e.g., Regents, commencement) include real-time captions.  
  • Accessible course design with universal design principles, 24/7 support, and formal SSD coordination; Ally scores rose from 23% (2016) to 85% (2026). 
  • Faculty development: 157 webinars/workshops, 3 cohorts, and 1,027 enrollments in 2025; “Fix Your Content” days drew 403 enrollments in 2026.  

Quick Wins: What faculty can do now 

  1. Use Ally to remediate high-impact issues and promote student use of alternate formats—no extra upload steps required. 
  2. Caption all video: prerecorded media needs accurate captions with speaker IDs and key nonspeech audio; live sessions require real-time captions (CART). 
  3. Kaltura REACH provides automatically generated captions for videos uploaded to Kaltura and its capabilities are conveniently built into your My Media within Blackboard. 
  4. Plan for audio description when essential visual information is not conveyed in audio.  
  5. Leverage SHSU workflows for captioning and accessible media production.

Bottom line

Title II raises expectations, especially for media (live captions, accurate post production captions, and audio description), but SHSU’s existing infrastructure, services, and training put us in a strong position to meet the 2026 milestones through continued, coordinated improvement. 

For help, connect with SHSU Online’s Instructional Design and Media Innovation teams, blackboard@shsu.edu,  or SHSU's SSD, disability@shsu.edu, to plan course-level next steps and accommodations.