It’s mid-September. Syllabi are published, course sites are live, and somewhere on campus, a Disability Services Office (DSO) coordinator is opening the fifteenth inaccessible PDF of the morning. It’s a scanned textbook chapter with no text layer and no headings, just a flat image of words that a screen reader can’t read.
This probably sounds familiar to almost anyone who’s worked in disability services. Across higher ed, DSOs send thousands of accommodation letters to faculty each fall. They usually offer a list of “approved” accommodations which can help students succeed, such as alternative formats for print materials. But simply asking professors to provide alternatives to print materials doesn’t necessarily equate to accessible, usable content for students with disabilities.
It’s not a checklist item. It’s a student’s access to the class.
Providing digital formats of textbooks or other printed handouts by quickly scanning them is an easy fix, and checks the box of providing “alternative formats.” However, scanned PDFs usually aren’t accessible, and that fact is often overlooked until the student tries to do their homework.
Disability staff are the ones hearing from students how the files they’re receiving aren’t tagged and accessible, even if they do meet the “alternative format” requirement. They’re the ones getting panicked messages at all hours about how the content they need to read for the next day’s class is unusable, and they’re the ones scrambling to fix documents.
The problem isn’t a lack of concern, it’s an unintentional disconnect between the disability services staff and faculty. But clear communication and efficient tools are the keys to shared responsibility, and ultimately student success.
Accommodations are also legal compliance issues
The Department of Justice finalized a rule under ADA Title II requiring public colleges and universities to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards for digital content by April 2027. That includes course materials, not just websites.
If your institution is public, or receives public funding, you can point to federal compliance deadlines when you request a course-materials review process, faculty training budget, or better remediation tools. Referencing ADA Title II and other accessibility requirements can help faculty understand that creating accessible course materials is an institutional compliance responsibility, not simply a way to accommodate individual students.
What “inaccessible” actually looks like
Most instructors aren’t being careless. They genuinely don’t know what to look for. The usual culprits:
- Scanned pages saved as images. No digital text layer means no screen reader access, no searchability, and no way to adjust text size.
- Missing heading structure. Sighted readers scan a page visually; screen reader users navigate by headings. A document that’s just paragraph after paragraph is like a city street with no signage.
- Tables without proper markup. A table that “looks fine” visually can be unreadable nonsense when read aloud cell by cell out of order and without row and column headings.
- Low-contrast text or tiny fonts as part of a scanned image, which can’t be resized or adjusted.
- Missing alt text on charts and figures, leaving a student to guess what a graph is showing.
None of these are exotic problems. Most have straightforward fixes, but the fixes take a little time, and time is something many faculty don’t have in the two weeks before the semester starts.
Procuring the right tool can save a lot of time and make remediation easy enough to do for every document before the semester even starts, instead of scrambling during the school year. Dedicated AI-powered remediation platforms like Equidox are designed to cut that down dramatically. Automated tools detect headings, tables, and reading order, and turn a task that used to take a full afternoon into a few clicks.
Making PDF remediation easy to learn and do makes it achievable for any member of the school, from experienced DSO staff to professors with no knowledge of digital accessibility and even student workers.
Helping faculty make PDF accessibility doable
DSOs can encourage faculty to make their PDFs accessible in practical, efficient ways, without needing them to become technical accessibility experts.
Start with born-digital files, not scans. If a publisher provides a real PDF or Word file, use that instead of scanning a personal copy. It’s a five-second decision that saves hours of remediation later.
Offer tools built for this, not just Adobe. Manually tagging a PDF in Adobe Acrobat is genuinely tedious. Tables and lists in particular can take hours to fix by hand. Professors won’t have the bandwidth to learn and use manual, technical software for remediation. User-friendly tools like Equidox make PDF accessibility faster and easier by combining AI-powered automation with intuitive workflows, enabling remediators of any experience level to tag PDFs accurately in just a few clicks.
Run the built-in accessibility checker before you upload anything. Word and Adobe Acrobat both have checkers included. They’re not perfect, but they catch the big issues and take less time than answering a single accommodation email mid-semester.
Encourage faculty to loop in the DSO early, not as a last resort. A conversation in August about a course’s reading list is far more useful to everyone than a panicked email in October. By October, offices are triaging. In August, they can actually plan.
The culture shift that actually moves the needle
Accessibility improves fastest not through more mandates, but through faculty who treat it as a normal part of course prep. When that shift happens, DSOs stop being the office that chases down problems and start being a genuine partner in course design. Providing faculty with clear communication and the right tools is essential to creating accessible content to promote student success.
Nina Overdorff
Nina comes to Equidox with years of sales and marketing experience from a variety of industries and holds a BS in Language Arts Education. Nina has a passion for words, storytelling, and information, which she believes everyone should have access to regardless of ability. After spending time as a teacher with a blind student, she became much more aware of the limitations and abilities of web accessibility, and how essential it is to those experiencing disabilities. “Being able to access information equally ensures that everyone has an equal opportunity for education, employment, and success in life.”