Digital Accessibility

The United States (U.S.) Department of Justice released a new rule on digital accessibility under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) mandating that by April 24, 2026, Oregon State University (OSU) is required to meet certain digital accessibility technical standards with few exceptions.

This requirement includes the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS) website, your lab websites, video and audio products, instructional materials, social media posts, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and more.

Ernie Colantonio did a seminar on March 13, 2026 going over the topics on this page and to answer questions.

Recording of seminar

(We are still working on error-correcting the close-captioning.)

Where to start?

The main things

Essential topics

Alternate ("Alt") text for images
Correctly nested heading levels
Descriptive text for links
Bulleted and numbered lists
Use of color

Important exceptions

Preexisting conventional electronic documents

Some state and local governments have a lot of old documents, like PDFs, on their website. It can sometimes be hard to make these documents accessible.

Documents that meet both of the following points usually do not need to meet accessibility standards:
- The documents are word processing, presentation, PDF, or spreadsheet files; AND
- They were available on the state or local government’s website or mobile app before April 24, 2026.
Example: This exception would probably apply to a PDF flyer for a Thanksgiving Day parade posted on a town’s website in 2018, or a Microsoft Word version of a sample ballot for a school board election posted on a school district’s website in 2014.

Other info about complying with the rule

Use of conforming alternate versions

You might think having two versions of the same content on different pages would be okay: one version that is not accessible and another versions that is accessible that provides all of the same information.
This is usually considered NOT compliant because people with disabilities should get equal access to the content on the same page.
Conforming alternate versions are allowed only when there is a technical or legal limitation that prevents inaccessible web content from being made accessible.

Accessibility checkers

Help finding and fixing accessibility issues

Microsoft Accessibility
- Accessibility help & learning
Testing accessibility using Lighthouse
WebAIM WAVE (web accessibility evaluation tools)
Editoria11y (live accessibility checker inside OSU Drupal)
- Princeton's Editoria11y About page
Aquia Web Governance (formerly called Monsido)
- Oregon State technology Aquia page

What about OSU WordPress?

You know, blogs.oregonstate.edu

You might have noticed that OSU WordPress is not listed above. Here is some useful guidance from OSU Digital Experience:

The retirement of OSU WordPress has not been officially decided, and there is no announced timeline.
OSU WordPress is still in use today and has not been formally deprecated.
That said, OSU Drupal is now the university's flagship web content management system, and where accessibility improvements are focused.
So, Drupal is the platform OSU Digital Experience now most strongly recommends for new institutional, academic, and grant-funded sites.
Existing OSU WordPress sites are still expected to meet OSU's digital accessibility requirements.
WordPress generally requires more hands-on effort and expertise to maintain accessibility over time compared to Drupal.
For new sites (especially grant-related or long-lived projects), OSU Drupal is the recommended platform.
For existing WordPress sites, they may continue to be used, but site owners are responsible for ensuring accessibility, and OSU support is more limited.