Back-to-school accessibility: what campus teams should fix before the semester starts

The two weeks before move-in are the busiest content stretch of the academic year. Orientation graphics, parking maps, welcome-week schedules, residence hall photos, dozens of department accounts posting their own first-day flyers. Volume goes up, review time goes down, and alt text is the first thing that quietly falls off the checklist.

It's also the worst semester to let that happen, because most of what you publish in August gets reused, reshared, and linked to for the next nine months.

The deadline moved, but the work didn't

In April 2026 the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule extending the ADA Title II web accessibility compliance dates by a year. For state and local government entities serving populations of 50,000 or more — which includes public colleges and universities, since the rule looks at the population of the state the institution belongs to, not enrollment — the date is now April 26, 2027. Smaller entities and special district governments have until April 26, 2028. The technical standard didn't change: WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which requires text alternatives for images.

A year of breathing room is real. It is not the same as a year of nothing to do, and how the rule applies to your particular institution is a question for your counsel, not a blog post.

Four things worth an afternoon this week

The evergreen set. Campus maps, parking diagrams, shuttle routes, academic calendar graphics — the images you'll repost every few weeks all year. Describing these once has the best return of anything on this list. For a map, don't attempt the whole thing; describe what the image is for and point to the accessible version: "Campus shuttle route map, four lines serving north campus and the medical center — full schedule and stop list at the link."

Flyers with the details baked in. Student affairs and department accounts post a lot of pictures of text. If the date, time, and location exist only inside a JPEG, they don't exist for anyone using a screen reader — and they don't exist for search either. Put the essentials in the post copy, and use the alt text to carry the same information.

Photos of students. August is the peak month for orientation and move-in photography. Lead with what's happening, not with a roster: "Two students carrying a mini fridge up the steps of Hartley Hall on move-in morning." Named people get names; crowd shots don't need them.

The accounts you don't run. Most campuses have dozens of department, club, and athletics accounts posting under the institution's name. You can't review all of it, but you can send one short guide before the semester starts — where the alt text field lives on each platform, one weak and one strong example, and a note that it takes about ten seconds. That message lands very differently in August than it does in October.

Set the habit while the calendar is still empty

Accessibility work fails on campuses the same way it fails everywhere else: not because people object to it, but because it arrives as a separate task at the moment someone is already late. The fix is to make describing an image take seconds, in the tool where the image already is, rather than a detour through another tab and another upload.

Do that now, in the quiet week, and it holds through homecoming, finals, and commencement. Wait until the semester is moving and you'll be auditing it in the spring instead.