Educational accessibility in 2026: The key to student success and institutional compliance

More students are asking for accommodations than at any point in higher education’s history, and the number isn’t a blip. Federal data shows college students reporting disabilities have jumped more than 50% over the past decade, and at some schools the shift is staggering: disability registration at Harvard and the University of Chicago climbed from under 3% of students in 2015 to 21% in 2024, while Cornell went from 6% to that same 21%. It’s not just the Ivy League. Pace University saw registration go from 5% to 37% between 2015 and 2024, Hampshire College climbed from roughly 10% to 38%, and Scripps College went from roughly 11% to 36%.

Educational accessibility isn’t a regulatory checkbox anymore. It’s the difference between a student who thrives and one who quietly falls behind. And yet, even now, just 11% of school district technology leaders say accessibility is a top purchasing priority, according to CoSN’s 2026 State of EdTech report. That gap between obvious need and institutional priority is exactly why 2026 is a pivotal year: institutions are staring down updated ADA Title II deadlines, more complex student needs than ever, and hybrid learning environments that never fully went away, all while budgets stay tight.

The question institutions face isn’t whether to prioritize accessibility in education. It’s how to make it work at the scale of an entire campus without breaking the budget or the timeline, which is exactly the gap solutions like Verbit’s Campus Complete were built to close.

The Transformation of Accessibility in Education: A 2026 Perspective

The Surge in Student Disability Registrations

The rise in students seeking accommodations comes from several forces converging at once: more ADHD and autism spectrum diagnoses, a post-pandemic mental health reckoning, and less stigma around disclosing a disability in the first place. Together, they’ve fundamentally changed who shows up at the disability services office.

Shammah Bermudez, of Macalester College’s Center for Disability Resources, has described how students today more often arrive with multiple, overlapping diagnoses, ADHD alongside a mental health condition and a learning disability, for example, which makes their needs harder to address with a single accommodation. That complexity is exactly why institutions are moving past one-off accommodations and toward integrated, technology-enabled support systems that scale.

The Academic Outcomes Gap

This isn’t only about who registers for services. It’s about what happens to them academically once they do. A February 2025 analysis from the Postsecondary National Policy Institute found that just 23% of undergraduates with disabilities complete a bachelor’s degree within five years, compared to 38% of their peers without disabilities, a 15-percentage-point completion gap. That gap compounds over a lifetime: the Center for Research on Disability’s 2025 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium puts the share of adults 25 and older with disabilities holding a bachelor’s degree or higher at roughly 21%, compared to about 39% of adults without disabilities. That gap is the clearest evidence that accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what stands between a student and the degree they came for.

The scale of who this affects is larger than most institutions plan for. Federal data cited in that same PNPI analysis puts self-reported disability rates at 21% of undergraduates and 11% of graduate students, the most recent figures available. And plenty of students never show up in those numbers at all: a 2025 national survey of disabled college students found that only 47% of students who identify as having a disability had disclosed it to their school’s disability or accommodations office, meaning more than half of the students who could benefit from accommodations never formally access them.

ADA Compliance Deadlines Extended: What This Means for Your Institution

Understanding ADA Title II Compliance for Educational Institutions

The regulatory picture has moved fast. The Department of Justice’s Title II web accessibility rule, published April 24, 2024, originally set April 24, 2026 as the deadline for public entities with 50,000 or more residents (which covers nearly every public university) to bring web content, online course materials, and other digital content up to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

In April 2026, the DOJ issued an Interim Final Rule extending those dates, citing the staffing and technology constraints many institutions are working within. Larger public entities now have until April 26, 2027, and smaller entities and special districts have until April 26, 2028.

That’s real breathing room, but it isn’t an excuse to wait. Institutions that start now, while the pressure is off, will hit the deadline without the scramble everyone else is racing toward. Verbit’s roadmap to Title II compliance breaks the requirements down month by month if you want a head start on planning.

Core Technical Requirements for WCAG 2.1 Level AA

Meeting these standards means getting specific technical details right across every digital property:

Clear heading structure and readable formatting, so screen readers can navigate content the way they’re designed to. Alternative text for images that conveys meaning and context, not just a literal object label. Captions or transcripts for every piece of multimedia content, which is how deaf and hard-of-hearing students access video and audio material at all. Sufficient color contrast (a minimum 4.5:1 ratio for normal text, 3:1 for large text) for students with visual impairments. Descriptive link text instead of a vague “click here.” Properly tagged, accessible PDFs and documents that assistive technology can actually parse. Full keyboard accessibility, so nothing on the page requires a mouse.

Mitzi Montoya, Provost at the University of Utah, put it well: “Thoughtfully designed digital materials support those who use assistive technologies, while also improving clarity and usability for everyone.” That’s the reframe institutions need: accessibility improvements help every student, not only the ones with a documented disability.

Enforcement and Institutional Risk

Falling short of ADA compliance carries more than reputational risk. The DOJ enforces Title II through complaint investigations, compliance reviews, and private lawsuits, and the consequences can include civil penalties and court-ordered remediation. Beyond the legal exposure, there’s a simpler stake: students who can’t access course content can’t fully participate in their own education.

Modern Challenges in Digital Accessibility

The Hybrid Learning Reality

Hybrid learning, some mix of in-person and online instruction, isn’t a pandemic-era stopgap anymore. It’s just how school works now, and it raises the bar for accessibility considerably. Students expect to move seamlessly between attending in person, joining remotely, and reviewing a recorded lecture later, which means accessibility has to hold up across lecture capture platforms, learning management systems, video storage, and live communication tools all at once.

The pandemic also exposed real gaps in connectivity and device access that institutions are still working to close as part of a complete accessibility strategy. Modern accessibility in education spans physical, cognitive, sensory, and technical dimensions, and none of them can be addressed in isolation.

The Role of AI Tools for Educational Accessibility

The technology answer in 2026 is AI paired with human oversight, not AI alone. Automated tools can generate captions and alt text at a speed and scale no human team could match, but human review is still what keeps that output accurate and contextually correct.

That combination, AI-powered automation plus targeted human review, is the model institutions are converging on to scale accessibility without sacrificing quality. Leading institutions have largely moved away from manually editing every caption and toward a tiered approach: AI-generated captions across the broad content library, with human-reviewed captions reserved for accommodation requests and high-stakes content like final exams or accreditation materials. It’s the same model Verbit built Campus Complete around, more on that shortly.

That shift also reflects a bigger mindset change: institutions are increasingly treating accessibility as an ongoing program with dedicated ownership, not a one-time compliance project that gets closed out and forgotten.

Campus Complete: A Comprehensive Solution for Educational Accessibility by Verbit

Integrated Technology for Scalable Accessibility

Figuring out how to improve educational accessibility starts with getting the plumbing right: your accessibility solution needs to integrate directly with the tools you already use, lecture capture, your LMS, video storage, so content flows into captioning and transcription workflows automatically instead of through manual handoffs that create bottlenecks.

Campus Complete by Verbit is built around exactly that kind of integration. The platform combines AI-powered captioning and transcription with human review, audio descriptions for visual content, multilingual translation, and direct LMS integration, covering the core media accessibility requirements under WCAG 2.1 Level AA in one subscription.

Core Capabilities That Scale

Campus Complete’s captioning and transcription services for education cover both live instruction and on-demand content:

Real-time captioning for lectures, webinars, and campus events, so every student can follow along simultaneously whether they’re in the room or watching remotely. Post-production captioning and transcripts for recorded media, integrated directly with LMS platforms like Canvas and Blackboard, so students can review material at their own pace. AI-and-human audio description for video, demonstrations, and tutorials, built for blind and low-vision students. Live translation in multiple languages, extending accessibility to international and ESL/ELL students. Professional note-taking services that round out accommodation support alongside captioning and transcription.

Because these captioning and transcription services for education plug directly into the LMS platforms institutions already run, they eliminate the manual handoffs that create bottlenecks and inconsistency, cutting administrative burden while keeping quality high where it counts most.

Supporting Multiple Compliance Standards

Campus Complete is built to cover the full stack of standards institutions have to meet at once: ADA Title II, WCAG 2.1 AA, and Section 508 for federal electronic content. Implementation guidance is tailored to each institution’s timeline and budget, because accessibility transformation is a journey, not a single deadline to clear. Verbit’s Title II compliance guide is a good starting point for mapping out that timeline before you talk to a vendor.

Proven Educational Impact

The payoff isn’t just compliance. Captions and transcripts measurably improve comprehension and retention, especially for ESL/ELL learners and neurodivergent students, which means the same investment that satisfies a regulator also improves learning outcomes.

Roberto Santiago, Associate Director of the Disability Program at San Francisco State University, put it simply: “As a large organization, we’ve had a really good experience with Verbit, and that’s why we keep renewing the contract every year.” When the underlying technology just works, institutions get to spend their time on the educational mission instead of troubleshooting.

Best Practices for Digital Accessibility in Education

Strategic Implementation Approach

Institutions figuring out how to improve educational accessibility tend to follow the same phased approach:

Start with high-impact content first, prioritizing high-enrollment courses, graduation requirements, and anything already flagged through an accommodation request. Integrate with existing workflows so accessibility tools work seamlessly with the lecture capture, LMS, and video platforms already in place. Train faculty so instructors can build accessible content from the start instead of retrofitting it later. Monitor continuously so compliance gaps get caught before they become a complaint. Shift the culture from viewing accessibility as a compliance task to recognizing it as educational equity.

Universal Design for Learning principles, multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression, build that flexibility in from the start rather than bolting it on afterward.

Building Sustainable Programs

Treating accessibility as an ongoing program instead of a one-time project means putting some structure behind it: a dedicated owner for coordination and monitoring, regular audits of digital properties, vendor partnerships with providers who treat accessibility as core to their product (not an afterthought), and a real feedback loop so students can flag barriers and request accommodations without friction.

The Future of Educational Accessibility

Beyond 2026, expect the technology to keep getting sharper: more accurate automated captioning, more nuanced audio description, and tighter integration with whatever educational tools come next. Extended reality accessibility, for virtual and augmented reality tools entering classrooms, and voice and conversational interfaces are both pushing institutions toward multimodal design that doesn’t assume every student can or wants to use voice commands.

The institutions that come out ahead won’t be the ones treating accessibility as a burden to manage. They’ll be the ones that saw it early as a chance to serve more students well and to make good on higher education’s actual promise: that every student, regardless of ability, can get the knowledge and skills they came for.

Partner with Verbit: Leverage Our ADA Title II Solution, Campus Complete, for Accessible Education

Good intentions won’t hit a WCAG deadline. Integrated technology, expert guidance, and ongoing support will.

Campus Complete gives institutions a clear, manageable path to compliance and beyond: AI-powered accessibility tools, human quality assurance, and integration with the campus technology already in place. Whether your institution is just starting its accessibility journey or scaling a program that’s already underway, book a walkthrough with Verbit’s team to explore what Campus Complete can do for your students and your compliance timeline.