Designing for Every Learner: Accessibility and Inclusivity in Higher Education LMS Platforms

Frostburg State University has two people in its Instructional Design and Technology department. Between them, they support hundreds of courses. 

Rita M. Thomas, Ed.D. manages the department and spoke about accessibility work in higher education at the most recent InstructureCon: "Faculty and staff are expected to produce accessible content ... but they usually build and revise that content outside business hours, when our central accessibility office is offline."

Her response was to build a custom AI assistant, grounded only in sources Frostburg State already endorses (not the open internet), that answers faculty questions about alt text, heading structure, color contrast, and accessible tables whenever questions come up.  It walks users through remediation in Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and Canvas by Instructure, explains why each recommendation exists by tying it back to Universal Design for Learning and the Quality Matters rubric, and hands off to a human instructional designer when a question falls outside its scope. 

Every institution has an obligation to accessibility, but the work falls to every instructor who uploads a PDF, and the support model most campuses have was built for a smaller volume of content than they now produce.

The deadline moved by a year

On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice published an interim final rule pushing back the compliance dates in its ADA Title II web accessibility rule. Public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more now have until April 26, 2027. 

What did not change is the standard itself. WCAG 2.1 Level AA still applies to websites, mobile apps, and digital course materials, and every underlying ADA obligation stayed in force. The extension bought schools time, but didn’t change any of the work required. 

Unfortunately, progress has been well under where it should be. WebAIM tested the top one million home pages in 2026 and found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% the year before, which reversed six straight years of slow improvement. 

• The average page carried 56.1 errors, a 10 percent jump in 12 months. 
• Six failure types account for 96% of everything detected: low contrast text, missing image alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language. 

Education sites performed better than average at 48.9 errors per page, which is still lagging behind where it should be. 

There is no average student

Regulatory pressure explains why higher education needs to prioritize accessibility, but not what good design looks like once you're doing it.

Aimee Stork of Joni and Friends, while speaking about designing for neurodiversity, put the design problem this way: "For decades, design and education have chased the ghost of the 'average user.' We build interfaces, write curricula, and create digital modules for a mythical, standardized mind that simply does not exist in nature."

Her framing moves the conversation past compliance checkboxes and into interface decisions. Stork describes the first thing a neurodivergent student meets in an unfamiliar course as structural anxiety: "They are asking themselves, Where am I? What is expected of me? How do I navigate this?" A course with unpredictable navigation charges every student a tax before any learning happens. "When a user doesn't have to waste finite mental energy trying to decode the interface, they can dedicate 100% of their cognitive capacity to processing the actual content."

That principle produces concrete design choices:

• Clear module organization and learning objectives stated upfront. 
• A spiral structure that reintroduces foundational concepts at predictable intervals instead of sealing each topic in its own box. 
• Accordions, expanding tabs, and flip cards so students unpack dense material at their own pace rather than facing a wall of text. 
• Interactive transcripts that run alongside video, synchronized and clickable, so a student can read, listen, or jump to a timestamp.

Designed for some students, used by most

Students with disabilities don’t make up the majority of students, but the majority of students benefit from accessibility features. In 2019–20, 21% of undergraduates and 11% of postbaccalaureate students reported having a disability, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

An Oregon State University Ecampus Research Unit study surveyed 2,124 students across 15 public and private universities. Among students who used captions, 98.6% found them helpful. Across all respondents, 75% used captions as a study aid in both face-to-face and online classes, and 85% used transcripts the same way. Only 13% of those respondents had registered with disability services, but reported ways that accessibility features like captions helped them, including with focus, retaining information, and getting past bad audio. 

This is the whole case for building an inclusive learning management system rather than a compliant one. If your accessibility strategy activates only when a student files paperwork, it reaches a small fraction of the students who benefit. Stork's notes, "What is necessary for some is often beneficial for all."

What to look for in an accessible LMS

Platform capability sets the ceiling on what any instructional designer can accomplish. These four questions can help you build an accessibility program and meet the federal deadline.

1. Ask for the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. Canvas documents conformance against W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guidance, Section 508, EN 301 549, and WCAG in its VPAT, and Instructure has published its ongoing work toward full WCAG 2.1 AA conformance in areas including color contrast, ARIA roles, focus handling, and keyboard operability.
2. Ask which screen readers get tested and how often. Canvas testing covers JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack across supported browser combinations.
3. Ask what authors get at the point of creation. The Canvas Rich Content Editor includes an accessibility checker that catches common errors, along with alt text fields, caption management for video, and table header designation. Checking at authoring time is what keeps remediation from becoming a semester-end project.
4. Ask what students can change themselves. In Canvas, that includes a high contrast interface setting, underlined links, keyboard shortcuts throughout, an agenda list view of the calendar, font sizing that survives browser zoom, and the option to turn off alert timeouts and animations. Institutions can also enable the Microsoft Immersive Reader button, which strips visual distraction, adjusts spacing and fonts, isolates lines of text, and reads content aloud.

Accessibility is more than just a document you produce for auditors. Our guide, Accessibility in Higher Education: Building a Better Student Experience, covers Universal Design for Learning in course design, the platform features that carry the most weight, and how to set institutional standards faculty will follow. Get the guide here. 

Frequently asked questions

What makes an LMS accessible? Two things have to be true at once. The platform must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, documented in a current Accessibility Conformance Report. The course content built inside it must also meet the standard, which is the institution's responsibility rather than the vendor's.

What is WCAG 2.1 Level AA? WCAG 2.1 is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version incorporated by the Department of Justice ADA Title II rule. Level AA is the middle of three conformance levels and the one used as the legal benchmark in US enforcement.

What changed in WCAG 2.2? WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on October 5, 2023, revised December 12, 2024. It adds nine success criteria and removes one, 4.1.1 Parsing. Four of the nine additions are Level AA: Focus Not Obscured (Minimum), Dragging Movements, Target Size (Minimum), and Accessible Authentication (Minimum).

What is the difference between a VPAT and an ACR? A VPAT is the blank template published by the Information Technology Industry Council. An Accessibility Conformance Report is the completed document containing actual evaluation results. 

Who is responsible for accessibility in online courses? In a 2025 survey of 78 US educators published in Open Praxis, 50.67% named faculty, 36% said faculty and staff share responsibility, 9.33% named distance education staff, 2.67% disability resources, and 1.33% IT. Legally, the obligation sits with the institution.