Published by: WCET | 9/4/2025
Tags: Accessibility, Department Of Education, Digital Learning, Distance Education, Managing Digital Learning, Online Learning, Regulation, Student Success, WCET
WCET has always taken accessibility seriously. When we updated our website in 2021, we worked diligently to ensure that all content, including PDFs, adhered to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, AA standards. We worked with WebAIM a few years after the website’s launch to ensure that our web-based content still complied with those standards.
Then, in June 2024, the Department of Justice issued their final rule revising the regulation implementing Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The revised rule specifically focused on web content, social media, and mobile apps. The rule also stated that at a minimum, organizations needed to comply with the WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria and conformance requirements (including for captioning). The timeline for compliance seemed reasonable:
Read our other accessibility posts for additional background:
WCET is a small organization with a lean but mighty staff. We are also part of a larger organization, WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. WICHE is a regional compact that serves the 15 western states and the U.S. Pacific Territories and Freely Associated States. This qualified us as a large entity with a deadline of April 2026.
To further complicate matters, WCET has three distinct networks: Membership, the State Authorization Network (SAN), and Every Learner Everywhere (Every Learner). Each network has its own website and social media presence.
It became apparent very quickly that we needed to work collaboratively in order to:
Like many of our members, we were trying to figure out how best to manage this important aspect of accessibility, not just to meet the DOJ deadline, but also to improve our content for everyone.
In the fall of 2024, SAN, Every Learner Everywhere, and WCET began meeting monthly to start addressing this challenge. We needed additional time to discuss our process, so we switched to a biweekly meeting schedule in the spring of 2025. Each network has two people participating in the meetings. In addition to these meetings, we created a Slack channel for sending reminders, asking questions, and sharing information.
The first meetings were important because they allowed us to understand the scope of work ahead for each of our units. We could also allocate funding to help with remediation because we were ahead of the budget cycle. The early meetings were also overwhelming because we realized the volume of content that was going to need remediation, including:
Once we fully understood the volume of work ahead, we rolled up our sleeves and began managing our parallel efforts. Each of the three networks managed its process slightly differently, but there were (are) four critical steps in the overall process.
It was essential to determine the quantity of content we had and how much of it would require review for accessibility.
For our created content, mostly hosted on our websites, we exported a list of media files, including file names, web links to the media, and publication dates. This did not include YouTube videos.
Once we had this information exported to a spreadsheet, we overlaid it with Google Analytics to see the content with the most views. This made it easier to identify which resources could be easily moved to an archive page or deleted. If a resource was older than 10 years and had very few views, it was clear we didn’t need to remediate it.
The most recent and most viewed resources were marked for review and remediation. The content between the two groups needed a staff member to review one-on-one and make recommendations.
Almost all of our video content is hosted on our YouTube channels. We used a similar process to the one above to select and prioritize videos for remediation, based on view counts and dates.
In step 1, the biggest lift was reviewing resources, specifically PDFs, that were published within the past ten years and/or had an average number of views.
Once each of the networks had a handle on the volume of web content that required review and remediation (over 500 pages of PDFs, and 100+ YouTube videos), we realized that we did not have the capacity or expertise to fix all of our PDFs, add audio descriptions to our YouTube videos, and caption plus transcribe all of those videos.
We explored several different companies to help. This was a very time-consuming process, and I would like to acknowledge Patricia O’Sullivan, Associate Director of Strategy Execution at Every Learner Everywhere, who did much of the legwork in researching, interviewing, and selecting our vendor partners. Ultimately, we landed on Be Accessible to help with PDF remediation and 3Play Media for Audio Descriptions.
This step is ongoing. For the PDFs, we have uploaded the files that need to be reviewed and/or updated to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards to our vendor, Be Accessible. Their staff is currently working on remediation. As we receive the updated files, we will swap them out with the outdated files across our websites. All networks will need to communicate with each other, as a PDF may be located on one or two different websites. For example, if SAN has an updated resource and WCET points to it on a webpage, we need to double-check that the link still connects correctly.
The networks are finishing up sharing our video content with 3Play Media. The staff will provide audio descriptions, as well as captioning and transcriptions, as needed. Once the videos are complete, we or 3Play Media will make sure our YouTube channel has the finished content. Every Learner, which has embedded videos on its website, will take an additional step of embedding the new code on their webpages.
In the meantime, we will begin to move content that we do not plan to remediate to a new archive page or, in some cases, delete it entirely. We are working with a web designer on a new webpage for archiving older resources that should be retained. If we receive a request to create accessible versions of any of these archived resources, we will remediate the file.
As all of this work is underway, and we find ourselves seven months from the DOJ deadline, we continue to generate a substantial amount of web-based content. Each network posts PDFs of reports, resources, and toolkits, and shares new videos on a weekly basis.
Simultaneously with our remediation efforts, we must ensure that our new content meets or exceeds WCAG 2.1 AA standards. We are using the PAC PDF checker and working with consultants who are knowledgeable about the standards when editing, formatting, and designing our content. Additionally, we will continue to work with 3Play Media to provide audio descriptions, transcripts, and captions for our videos.
The process has been a great experience. It was incredibly daunting at the start, but it has been wonderful to collaborate and learn across the networks. We will continue to keep you posted on our journey and provide a follow-up blog post about what we learned along the way. If I have any advice, it’s to just get started with the content that is most often accessed. It can feel overwhelming to aim for perfection by April 2026, but the key right now is to focus on making consistent progress.
WCET members join us in MIX, our online community platform, where we now host the WCET Accessibility Exchange (WAE). In this group, we provide tips and resources every month, and you are welcome to ask questions and engage in conversations with other members. Join us! This month, we will be sharing an accessibility focused, member-only fact sheet, and I will be leading this month’s Closer Conversation on September 26, WCET’s Accessibility Project: Progress, but Not Perfection.
This post was written by Megan Raymond
