Anonymous wrote:This isn't that new -- some universities were just being lazy about it. This falls under Section 508, and the update in 2017 -- 9 years ago -- covers WCAG 2.0 compliance. Federal government websites have been compliant for many years now.

We're a vendor and some of our clients are universities. The ones who have their act together have been verifying our compliance for many years now.

As for professors needing to take down their materials, archived content is exempt from the compliance requirement.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Professor at a private university. We were just told in the past few weeks about this and we have an extra year to be compliant, but it’s coming for us too.

I started looking at this for some of my classes and it’s going to take a long time. PPT has an accessibility tool built in that identifies slides with accessibility issues and then attempts to generate solutions, but it seems to only come up with suggestions for about 20% of the problems identified and then most aren’t usable at all.

The PPT fixes will take a lot of time but are doable, but the bigger problem is having to remove resources for students that are great learning aids but likely won’t be in compliance.

Our school also provides lecture recordings for students, and I assume that will be removed until AI gets good enough to caption them (it’s not even close right now).

We have always worked to meet accommodations for students who need them. As others have stated this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Yikes. No captions for lectures right now? They should definitely modernize their recording system.

Have you ever watched the AI generated closed captioning for videos? It's terrible, especially for anyone who speaks with an accent, is soft spoken, or speaks quickly. Sometimes when I'm watching a boring meeting I will look at the closed captioning for some humor relief. It's comical how bad it is!

Anonymous wrote:Professor at a private university. We were just told in the past few weeks about this and we have an extra year to be compliant, but it’s coming for us too.

I started looking at this for some of my classes and it’s going to take a long time. PPT has an accessibility tool built in that identifies slides with accessibility issues and then attempts to generate solutions, but it seems to only come up with suggestions for about 20% of the problems identified and then most aren’t usable at all.

The PPT fixes will take a lot of time but are doable, but the bigger problem is having to remove resources for students that are great learning aids but likely won’t be in compliance.

Our school also provides lecture recordings for students, and I assume that will be removed until AI gets good enough to caption them (it’s not even close right now).

We have always worked to meet accommodations for students who need them. As others have stated this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Professor at a private university. We were just told in the past few weeks about this and we have an extra year to be compliant, but it’s coming for us too.

I started looking at this for some of my classes and it’s going to take a long time. PPT has an accessibility tool built in that identifies slides with accessibility issues and then attempts to generate solutions, but it seems to only come up with suggestions for about 20% of the problems identified and then most aren’t usable at all.

The PPT fixes will take a lot of time but are doable, but the bigger problem is having to remove resources for students that are great learning aids but likely won’t be in compliance.

Our school also provides lecture recordings for students, and I assume that will be removed until AI gets good enough to caption them (it’s not even close right now).

We have always worked to meet accommodations for students who need them. As others have stated this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Yikes. No captions for lectures right now? They should definitely modernize their recording system.

Anonymous wrote:This isn't that new -- some universities were just being lazy about it. This falls under Section 508, and the update in 2017 -- 9 years ago -- covers WCAG 2.0 compliance. Federal government websites have been compliant for many years now.

We're a vendor and some of our clients are universities. The ones who have their act together have been verifying our compliance for many years now.

As for professors needing to take down their materials, archived content is exempt from the compliance requirement.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Professor at a private university. We were just told in the past few weeks about this and we have an extra year to be compliant, but it’s coming for us too.

I started looking at this for some of my classes and it’s going to take a long time. PPT has an accessibility tool built in that identifies slides with accessibility issues and then attempts to generate solutions, but it seems to only come up with suggestions for about 20% of the problems identified and then most aren’t usable at all.

The PPT fixes will take a lot of time but are doable, but the bigger problem is having to remove resources for students that are great learning aids but likely won’t be in compliance.

Our school also provides lecture recordings for students, and I assume that will be removed until AI gets good enough to caption them (it’s not even close right now).

We have always worked to meet accommodations for students who need them. As others have stated this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Yikes. No captions for lectures right now? They should definitely modernize their recording system.

DP. Colleges could stand to modernize a lot of things, but don’t be surprised when the cost of attendance keeps going up.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son told me that a professor mentioned they will no longer have access to class recordings from the past and no classes will be recorded going forward in order to prepare for new federal regulations. His professor also said links are being removed and there will no longer be notes available that are posted by the professor. He was confused so I was curious and looked it up.

There is a new federal rule referred to as the Title II Web Rule (long version "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities"). This means that anything that is on a website such as a university canvas class website has to be completely accessible.

So any scanned pdf from a book that has been uploaded is not accessible, so it is just easier to delete.

Recordings must have closed captioning that has at least 99% correct captioning including spelling and punctuation, so it is just easier to not post any recordings. Links to previous class recordings will be deleted.

PowerPoint's have to have manually written "Alt-Text" descriptions for every single visual including pictures, charts, and graphs explaining exactly what the data means and every single slide must have a unique title so a student can navigate the deck. Additionally, the order the powerpoint was created is important because screen readers for the blind don't read text in the order it appears visually. Instead they read it in the order the elements were added to the slide. So many professors won't be posting their powerpoint slides.

Recordings of lectures that are uploaded have to have Audio Descriptions (narration of what is seen). Let's say a professor posts a video clip explaining an example problem or a homework problem by showing a graph and saying"As you can see by this line here, the trend is upward". That is no longer allowed. There has to be a clear explanation so anyone who is blind can understand. So the professor has to say something like "Looking at the line graph for quarterly sales, the blue line represents the 2025 data. It starts at 10 units in January and climbs steadily to 50 units by June, showing a clear upward trend." If they have clips from previous years it is way to time intensive to fix them. So it is just easier to delete.

Many math professor write in LaTeX. That is no longer allowed because screen readers can't access it so anything posted online written in LaTeX needs to be deleted. A math professor is no longer going to post a video of a math lecture because there is no effective way to describe everything being written in the same time frame as a class. For a Calculus professor, "compliance" means re-typing every single equation they've ever written into a new, coded format. Many are deciding that it’s easier to just point students to a (compliant) digital textbook and delete their personal notes.

Students will be able to individually sue so professors and universities are leery that there are going to be tons of opportunistic lawyers at the ready. So the easiest solution is to delete, delete, delete.

Your college is engaging in malicious compliance.

The rule only applies to content that is required for current/future courses, not archived content, and certainly not video recordings, since the recorded class itself would be a violation of the same rule!

https://about.citiprogram.org/blog/new-doj-ada-rule-what-you-need-to-know-about-web-mobile-accessibility/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Professor at a private university. We were just told in the past few weeks about this and we have an extra year to be compliant, but it’s coming for us too.

I started looking at this for some of my classes and it’s going to take a long time. PPT has an accessibility tool built in that identifies slides with accessibility issues and then attempts to generate solutions, but it seems to only come up with suggestions for about 20% of the problems identified and then most aren’t usable at all.

The PPT fixes will take a lot of time but are doable, but the bigger problem is having to remove resources for students that are great learning aids but likely won’t be in compliance.

Our school also provides lecture recordings for students, and I assume that will be removed until AI gets good enough to caption them (it’s not even close right now).

We have always worked to meet accommodations for students who need them. As others have stated this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Yikes. No captions for lectures right now? They should definitely modernize their recording system.

Anonymous wrote:Professor at a private university. We were just told in the past few weeks about this and we have an extra year to be compliant, but it’s coming for us too.

I started looking at this for some of my classes and it’s going to take a long time. PPT has an accessibility tool built in that identifies slides with accessibility issues and then attempts to generate solutions, but it seems to only come up with suggestions for about 20% of the problems identified and then most aren’t usable at all.

The PPT fixes will take a lot of time but are doable, but the bigger problem is having to remove resources for students that are great learning aids but likely won’t be in compliance.

Our school also provides lecture recordings for students, and I assume that will be removed until AI gets good enough to caption them (it’s not even close right now).

We have always worked to meet accommodations for students who need them. As others have stated this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh fur hiss sake
Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation told you they would do this

To all of you that have kids in public colleges in red states you are morons!

It will be worse in those states than blue stars.

Your tax dollars pay for this utterly ridiculous nonsense and your tax dollars will now pay for colleges in blue stars to fight back

All of you who have maga family and still talk to them you helped do this!

Trump was your kids dumb and stupid your daughters uneducated breeders when are you going to wake up!??

Not like they didn’t tell you warn you or write it down and now you are oh gee wiz?? They told you they would do this!!

This rule was finalized in April 2024, under the Biden administration. It has nothing to do with Trump or Project 2025.

https://inside.twu.edu/technology/read/ada-title-ii-rule-ushers-new-era-of-digital-accessibility#:~:text=On%20April%2024%2C%202024%2C%20the,programs%2C%20services%2C%20and%20activities.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yet another example of unintended consequences of seemingly supportive “equity” policy. The intention here was make things more accessible for everyone. The impact is that if some can’t get it then no one can. This is the same for almost every type of equity policy they put in place. That old graphic of the kids trying to see over the fence… instead of tearing down the fence we’re building the fence higher so no one can see…

That is a cynical view. Why not just do it right?

Because resources are and will always be finite. Unless you provide the money to do it right, the easier route is to not do it. Just look at our K-12 system…

+1 It’s one thing to “do it right” going forward (although it takes a lot of diligence and most simply won’t bother), but not sure many of you realize how difficult it is to remediate materials that are already out there. This is a huge part of my job right now and I guarantee there’s no way we’ll meet the deadline. I am one person making less than $60k a year with many other job responsibilities.

This is brain-meltingly tedious work, as well. Repetitive, monotonous, and you find yourself spending tons of time on really old content that might get a handful of views each year, if that.

I think both of you are imagining an issue you haven't researched. I bet you don't actually know what the requirements are, nor do you know what the content is, nor have you actually researched the technology and resources available to handle this.