This three-step, high-level compliance plan is a work in progress. It outlines essential steps to raise awareness and help JMU comply with web accessibility updates to the ADA Title II ruling by our campus's federal deadline of April 24, 2026. This plan is designed to be scalable and action-oriented, addressing content in need of assessment or remediation and recommending best practices for future content creation.

Support for individual instructors in creating and remediating accessible course materials is available on the Instructor Resources page. Future resources and guidance for staff in JMU administrative units is planned.

Here, you can explore the three core steps of the plan and learn about basic responsibilities of all JMU content provides. Our FAQ section is continually growing, and we invite you to send your questions to the campus Accessibility Committee — your inquiry could help others as well.

It is crucial that everyone understands their role in creating and maintaining accessible digital content and has the necessary tools to succeed. We strongly recommend completing the new JMU Digital Accessibility Awareness Training to gain a better understanding of how digital accessibility relates to your daily work. Additionally, JMU offers online guides, tools, and resources to demonstrate the building blocks of accessible content creation. We invite you to explore what is available now for staff, students, and instructors. Partnering teams across campus will be offering additional workshops and learning opportunities as we create and acquire relevant resources and new software to support your work. Look to Libraries, IT, Student Affairs, and HR Talent Development for new offerings as they become available. 

Take the Digital Accessibility Awareness Training

Website content

Pages on the main university (Cascade) website and Libraries-hosted websites are regularly scanned by IT and Libraries staff for accessibility compliance. If issues are encountered, content owners are notified and supported to remedy the problem as quickly as possible. These websites have undergone regular accessibility scanning for quite some time and are largely already compliant.

However, digital documents (Word, PDF, PPT, etc.) that are linked to from university webpages should also be reviewed by content owners for accessibility compliance ahead of the federal deadline. As a first step, we encourage you to identify whether the content is still needed or could be archived. Clearly marked, archived content that was created before the compliance deadline, has not subsequently been updated, and is being kept purely for reference or record-keeping purposes does not need to be remediated at this time. (Learn more about exceptions to Title II.) If you do need to keep a digital document current and widely available, consider whether it must remain as a formatted document file (PDF, etc.) that you will be responsible for making accessible, or if the information in it could be reasonably converted to an HTML/Cascade page, so it can be audited by IT as part of our regular campus process described above.

If you keep instructional or administrative content on a website that resides on non-JMU-hosted servers, you will be responsible for assuring that content meets the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard.

Canvas (Learning Management System) Content

We encourage instructors to archive Canvas courses that are no longer active and being used. As a next step, please use the Libraries’ new, integrated Anthology Ally system to access a comprehensive accessibility report. This report is private to you as an instructor and can help you prioritize accessibility issues to address. Ally can help you make some recommended changes quickly and easily within Canvas. In other cases, it will offer advice for improving the accessibility of course materials.This advice is particularly valuable for materials you will be using in your active Canvas courses by April of 2026.

As you plan future courses, consider the file types you will use. These may include digital documents (Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PDF, PPT, etc.), videos, audio, images, online activities, online forms, web links to external resources or textbooks, etc. Making a list and identifying the types of materials you use will make easier for you to apply the information provided in campus trainings. As you incorporate new materials into your courses, Ally will help provide guidance to you on what needs to be done to ensure accessibility for each file format, and allows students to convert files to alternative formats, including electronic braille, BeeLine Reader, OCRed PDFs, and more.

The Libraries also provides the SensusAccess system for remediating materials to a variety of more accessible formats. To test this tool with your course content, choose the “Accessibility Conversion” option when uploading files.

Additional considerations

We recommend that JMU departments also make an inventory of any other types of digital content that they provide. This may include third-party platforms, social media posts, web-published newsletters, etc. Guidance for ensuring accessibility may vary, depending on vendor support for accessibility for their tool(s). JMU Procurement will support contract negotiations related to Title II compliance for vendor-provided systems.

Priority considerations

Whether you are addressing course content or other materials published to the web, prioritizing your digital content will best ensure timely compliance. Start by identifying high-impact content, such as key public-facing web pages that may not have already been scanned by IT, essential course materials (starting with those impacting the largest audiences), and widely used digital documents.

Factors to consider when prioritizing content:

• Audience: Who is the audience for this content? Public-facing content and content with a wide internal audience must be accessible.
• Frequency of Use: How often is the content accessed? Frequently used content should be prioritized.
• Number of Accessibility Issues: Refer to our Resources pages for a growing list of remediation tools. If accessibility checkers indicate a high number of issues to remediate, this would indicate a higher priority.
• Number Affected: How many people are affected by the content? Content that impacts a larger audience should be prioritized.
• Age of Content: Is the content outdated? Unneeded content should be deleted or archived.

These prioritization factors are rooted in accessibility best practices, and can help departments and individuals proactively identify and address resourcing needs and mitigate the impact of these new federal regulations on workloads for faculty and staff. The key to effective prioritization is directing time and available resources to the most frequently accessed content first.

Once you have assessed the scale of the accessibility issue in your department or with the course materials you produce for your students, it’s time to address it and plan for the future.

This section outlines strategies to address both immediate remediation needs and establish long-term accessibility-first workflows. Integrating accessibility assessments into existing content creation workflows ensures that accessibility becomes a routine part of information sharing, instruction, and content maintenance at JMU. Just as a document isn’t considered complete with spelling errors, the upcoming federal regulations suggest it also isn’t complete until it is accessible to all users.

Considerations:

• Identify who can help with immediate and ongoing accessibility compliance in your department or office. Supervisors should consider re-prioritizing existing duties to allow assigning accessibility-related responsibilities to a designated employee, or creating a dedicated accessibility support team.
• Clarify which aspects of accessible document creation and remediation will be the responsibility of the document creators themselves, and account for the impact of these new regulations on faculty and staff workloads.
• Talk with supervisors and leadership to articulate resource needs that may be local to your department. Reach out to the Campus Accessibility Committee to suggest new university training or software needs.
• Define a departmental approach to compliance and set clear internal goals and timelines for each phase.
• Regularly monitor the accessibility of new and existing content. To avoid future remediation needs, prioritize the creation of new accessible content as you go, and implement a periodic review process for your individual or departmental digital content inventory, archiving unused materials and ensuring that needed online content remains current, accessible, and compliant.

By integrating these steps into your own or your team’s existing workflows, you can help JMU meet federal compliance standards and promote good habits of thorough content review before finalization. Accessible and compliant digital content more easily adapts to any future technologies and or updated standards, which means that work done now is an investment in the future, benefiting both your department, your students, and your public reach.