OER Content Faces Title II Scrutiny
With the April 2026 DOJ Title II deadline looming, legal experts are warning that Open Educational Resources (OER) must be fully accessible. As colleges increasingly adopt OER to cut costs, they now face a legal mandate to audit and remediate these materials for students with disabilities.
The Department of Justice's final rule on Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, issued in 2024, established the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA as the specific, legally enforceable standard for digital accessibility for public entities. This moved the requirement for public colleges from a general principle of non-discrimination to a clear technical benchmark. For most public institutions, the compliance clock is ticking towards an April 24, 2026 deadline. Smaller public entities, serving populations under 50,000, have a deadline of April 26, 2027. The rule's scope is comprehensive, applying to all of a university's web content and mobile apps, including internal systems, online learning platforms, and all digital course materials. This mandate intersects with the rapid growth of OER adoption in higher education. The percentage of faculty requiring OER nearly doubled between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 academic years, as institutions seek to alleviate the burden of textbook costs, which can exceed $1,200 per student annually. Historically, however, accessibility has not been a primary focus in the creation of many open resources. A 2011 study of open textbooks found that none of the PDFs reviewed were accessible and 42% of the web-based versions had significant accessibility flaws. Common issues include a lack of captions for video, missing alternative text for images, and documents not structured for screen readers. The decentralized nature of content creation at universities presents a massive challenge. Individual faculty members often select and create their own course materials, leaving institutions with the difficult task of auditing and remediating thousands of legacy documents, videos, and other files scattered across their learning management systems. Failure to comply carries significant legal and financial risk. Even before the new Title II rule, universities have entered into resolution agreements and been the subject of lawsuits from the DOJ and the Office for Civil Rights for inaccessible digital content and educational technologies.
