2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Due to inaccessibility, disabled students routinely face barriers that require them to do “invisible” work to get to the same starting point as non-disabled students. One of the most persistent barriers for the last decade is inaccessible learning materials. However, in 2024, congress updated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title Ⅱ to adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard. For professors, this update meant that whatever files are uploaded on a learning management system (LMS) must meet these guidelines by April 2026 or April 2027, depending on city population size. These files include videos, audio, PDFs, documents, slide decks, and images, all essential components of a course. While many instructors have offered accommodations before, the new law obliges them to retroactively fit their course materials to the legal standard, regardless of a student asking for this accommodation. Retrofitting presents a well-known accessibility challenge and requires significant time to complete. While the legal standard will help to address some persistent barriers experienced by disabled students, it will not eliminate all. Updating a course should therefore begin with the legal benchmarks and extend beyond them. This experience report offers an in-depth look at the practical work of bringing a course up to the legal standard. The authors kept time diaries that logged the tools used, the effort spent, the costs incurred, and the challenges faced. In total, the author who did the adjustments took about 18 hours over the course of 3 months to complete this endeavor. The authors also describe the obstacles encountered with tools or processes and the adjustments made to achieve compliance in effort to help other instructors do the same for their courses.