Public University WordPress Accessibility
Nobody at a public university can tell you how many websites it has. That is not incompetence — it is what happens when every department, lab, centre, program and conference can stand one up in an afternoon. Remediation at that scale is a governance problem wearing a development problem's clothes.
A public institution is a public entity
ADA Title II
April 26, 2027
Public entities with a population of 50,000 or more
About 8 months from today.
ADA Title II
April 26, 2028
Public entities with a population under 50,000, and special district governments
About 20 months from today.
Public colleges and universities are public entities under ADA Title II, and in practice most land in the earlier group. The awkward part is not the date. It is that the date applies to the whole institution while the web estate is owned by a hundred budget centres, and central IT has influence over some of them.
Related institutions can sit differently: a foundation, an alumni association or an affiliated hospital may be a separate legal entity with its own analysis, and a hospital may also be reached by the HHS Section 504 rule. Sort that out with counsel before scoping, not after.
All four dates, in full
| Compliance date | Rule | Who it applies to |
|---|---|---|
| April 26, 2027 | ADA Title II | Public entities with a population of 50,000 or more |
| April 26, 2028 | ADA Title II | Public entities with a population under 50,000, and special district governments |
| May 11, 2027 | HHS Section 504 | Recipients of HHS federal financial assistance with 15 or more employees |
| May 10, 2028 | HHS Section 504 | Recipients of HHS federal financial assistance with fewer than 15 employees |
Where these dates come from. Verify current guidance before relying on any date for planning — both rules have already moved once.
- U.S. Department of Justice — ADA Title II web rule: ada.gov/resources/web-rule-first-steps
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — Section 504 deadline extension: hhs.gov press release
MakeWPCompliant provides technical accessibility services, not legal advice. How a rule applies to a specific organization is a question for current federal guidance and, where appropriate, qualified legal counsel.
Where the WordPress estate ends
Before anything is scoped, it is worth writing down which systems are actually in front of you. On a campus, most of the accessibility surface is not WordPress at all:
- The LMS and its course content
- Student information and registration
- Library discovery and databases
- The institutional repository
- Room and resource booking
- Athletics, on a commercial platform
- Giving and advancement
- Application and admissions portals
- Housing and dining systems
- Campus maps and wayfinding
- Emergency alerts
- Ticketing and events
Course content in the LMS is web content of the same institution, but it is a different team, a different budget and usually a different vendor conversation — instructional design rather than web development. Naming that split early prevents the most expensive misunderstanding in higher-ed accessibility work, which is a web project that everyone assumed included the courses.
We work on the WordPress estate, and we tell you precisely where it stops.
How a several-hundred-site estate actually gets fixed
Not by remediating several hundred sites. The order matters more than the effort.
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Find out how many sites there are
The network list is a starting point, not an answer. Departments run installs on lab servers, on grant-funded hosting, and on a domain someone registered for a conference in 2019. An estate inventory — network subsites, standalone installs, and anything pointing at an institutional domain — is the first deliverable.
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Fix the shared theme
This is the whole reason the work is tractable. Navigation, skip links, focus behaviour, heading structure, colour and the components every site inherits are one codebase. A defect corrected there is corrected everywhere at once, including on sites nobody has edited since 2021.
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Fix what new sites are born with
A university provisions new sites continuously. If the starter template, the default menu and the sample pages carry a defect, the estate manufactures new instances of it every week. Correcting the provisioning template is the highest-leverage change after the theme itself.
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Narrow what departments can install
Sliders, tab widgets, accordions, popup builders and event calendars are where per-site findings come from. Deciding which are available network-wide — and testing those few properly — removes far more future work than auditing the ones already installed.
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Remediate the sites people actually visit
Traffic in a university estate is extremely uneven. Admissions, the academic calendar, the course catalogue, a handful of flagship programs and the emergency page carry most of it. Those get per-site work. A lab page last edited by a graduate student who has since finished does not, and saying so out loud is part of an honest scope.
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Hand it to whoever runs the network
Departments publish independently and will keep publishing independently. What survives is what is built into the theme, the template and the publishing screen — plus a short reference for the person who inherits a department site with no handover. Scheduled retesting is worth more here than almost anywhere else, because the estate changes without anyone telling you.
The findings that only universities have
Academic publishing produces content types that ordinary accessibility guidance never mentions, and they are a real part of the finding list:
- Research posters posted as a single image
- Publication lists rendered as PDFs
- Course catalogue and schedule tables
- Mathematical notation as images
- Data tables from a spreadsheet paste
- Recorded lectures and seminars
- Accreditation and self-study documents
- Faculty CVs, in every format there is
- Conference microsites, then abandoned
- Interactive dashboards and visualisations
- Archived journals and proceedings
- Grant-required public reports
Not all of that is remediable within a website project, and some of it belongs to document remediation, which is a separate discipline with a separate cost. What we can do is tell you which is which, so it is budgeted rather than discovered.
April 2027 is a deadline, not a starting date
If your public-sector WordPress site needs to meet the Title II technical requirements, start identifying the real remediation work now.