Supporting faculty and staff in implementing digital accessibility standards
A letter from Provost Jesse Perez Mendez and Vice President Thomas Lane.
Monday, March 24, 2025
Dear colleagues,
As we shared last month, the digital accessibility task force has been hard at work reviewing current policies, assessing resources and tools, and identifying the current state of academic and web content, all building toward the creation of an implementation plan and accompanying timeline to lead the institution toward WCAG 2.1 AA compliance by April 2026. Today, we are pleased to share the task force's initial report and implementation plan, which shares key findings, identifies required investments, outlines interrelated work streams and defines a clear timeline for compliance.
First and foremost, it is important that we take the time to acknowledge that to meet these new standards by April 2026, remediation efforts will require the mobilization of the vast majority of K-State's workforce. This is a simple yet incredibly significant statement, as it speaks to the critical role that our faculty and staff will play and the essential support the institution must provide to our faculty and staff in this endeavor.
To that point, the task force's implementation plan calls for investing in enhanced academic content auditing/remediation tools and web content auditing/remediation resources. The university is committed to investing in expanding our toolset where required, and the task force is immediately pursuing the identification and onboarding of these resources, building a foundation that will support the launch of tools, resources, and accompanying training and workshops for faculty and staff by the beginning of the fall 2025 semester. This means that between August and December 2025, the bulk of individual remediation work will occur, updating existing academic and web content for launch in spring 2026.
While vital, we want to reiterate that these investments in technology cannot serve as the only solution. This effort will require people power to select and onboard technologies, pulling on our IT professionals, web content experts, academic leadership and more. It will require leadership from our institution's instructional designers and training and workshops from our accommodations champions. It will require the input and participation of university governance to ensure we have a mechanism in updated policies that supports compliant content and mandates an appropriate auditing schedule to ensure sustained compliance beyond April 2026. And, of course, it will require an investment of time from our faculty and staff, who directly create many forms of digital content.
That is why the implementation plan calls for the establishment not only of working teams dedicated to the required policy enhancement work and the onboarding of technology tools/resources, academic content remediation support and web content remediation support but also the establishment of a working team to monitor staffing capacities during the remediation period and beyond, creating an additional support mechanism for faculty and staff.
We want to thank the task force for its diligent work to get us to this point and again invite the entire university community to review the full implementation plan and timeline online. As always, we invite you to continue to visit the Digital Accessibility Initiative website in general, as tools and trainings will be shared in more detail there as they become available. The task force will also be planning town hall discussions with faculty and staff in the near future, so continue to check back for more information on those opportunities to learn more about how we will collectively implement WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
While the formation of our task force and its concerted action around digital accessibility have admittedly been spurred by a compliance requirement, this is more than an exercise in compliance; it is a marked opportunity for our institution to showcase how we live our land-grant mission. We are confident that our university community is capable and deeply dedicated to its mission: providing service and access for everyone.
Go 'Cats!
Jesse Perez Mendez
Provost and executive vice president
Thomas Lane
Vice president for academic success and student affairs and dean of students