Make course materials accessible for every student

Section 504 and ADA Title II

Public universities must comply with both Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and ADA Title II. Private universities receiving federal funding (virtually all of them, through financial aid programs) must comply with Section 504. The DOJ's 2024 final rule sets a April 26, 2028 compliance deadline for entities serving populations under 50,000 — which includes most universities.

The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) actively investigates accessibility complaints. Resolution agreements often require universities to remediate all existing digital content — including every PDF on course websites, library repositories, and administrative portals.

Common university documents that require remediation

• Syllabi and course schedules — posted as PDFs on LMS platforms, often with complex formatting
• Lecture slides and handouts — images, charts, and diagrams all need alt text
• Exam materials and assignments — form fields, reading order, and heading structure must be accessible
• Research papers and dissertations — institutional repositories contain thousands of legacy PDFs
• Financial aid documents and enrollment forms — form accessibility is required for equal access
• Library reserves and digital collections — scanned historical documents need OCR and tagging

LMS and workflow integration

Universities publish documents through learning management systems like Canvas, Blackboard, D2L Brightspace, and Moodle. RemeDocs can process PDFs before they're uploaded to these platforms, ensuring every document students access is already compliant. For institutions with large document backlogs in existing courses, batch processing can remediate thousands of files in hours rather than months.

VPAT and procurement

University procurement offices typically require vendors to provide a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) documenting their product's conformance with accessibility standards. Contact sales@remedocs.com to request RemeDocs' VPAT and discuss education pricing.

Course catalogs and syllabi

Course catalogs and syllabi are among the most widely distributed PDFs on any campus. They are posted to learning management systems, departmental websites, and student portals — often in formats that have never been tagged for accessibility. RemeDocs adds semantic heading structure, proper list tagging, and reading order so that students using screen readers can navigate course descriptions, prerequisites, grading policies, and schedules independently.

Financial aid and scholarship forms

Financial aid applications, scholarship forms, and award letters frequently contain fillable form fields, data tables, and dense legal language. Students with disabilities must be able to complete these forms without assistance. RemeDocs tags form fields with proper labels, structures data tables with header associations, and ensures that instructions and deadlines are presented in a logical reading order.

Student handbooks and policy documents

Student handbooks, codes of conduct, and institutional policy documents are often lengthy PDFs with complex heading hierarchies, cross-references, and appendices. RemeDocs generates a complete bookmark outline from the heading structure so students can jump directly to the section they need. Every paragraph, list, and table is tagged for screen reader navigation, and the document language is set so that pronunciation engines work correctly.

Research publications and dissertations

Institutional repositories contain thousands of research papers, theses, and dissertations — many of them legacy PDFs that were never tagged. These documents frequently include charts, equations, footnotes, and complex table layouts. RemeDocs processes them in batch, adding alt text to figures, structuring data tables, and tagging footnotes so that the research is accessible to readers who use assistive technology.

Admissions materials and applications

Prospective students interact with admissions brochures, application forms, campus maps, and program guides before they ever set foot on campus. If these documents are inaccessible, the university is excluding potential applicants with disabilities from the very first touchpoint. RemeDocs ensures that admissions materials meet WCAG 2.1 AA with proper tagging, alt text for campus photography, and accessible form fields in application PDFs.

The Department of Justice's 2024 final rule under ADA Title II requires state and local government entities — including public universities — to make all web content and mobile applications conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. For entities serving populations under 50,000, the compliance deadline is April 26, 2028. Larger institutions (50,000+) face an April 26, 2027 deadline. Private universities receiving federal financial assistance through student aid programs are subject to similar requirements under Section 504.

PDFs are explicitly included in the scope of these regulations. Every syllabus, form, report, and publication posted to a university website or LMS must be tagged, structured, and validated against WCAG 2.1 AA. Institutions that have not yet begun remediating their document libraries face a significant backlog — thousands or even tens of thousands of PDFs across departments, course archives, and administrative portals.

RemeDocs is built for exactly this scenario. Batch processing can remediate hundreds of documents per hour, allowing institutions to work through legacy backlogs while ensuring that every new document published is compliant from day one. For a detailed breakdown of the regulations, timelines, and practical steps universities should take, see our guide: WCAG 2.1 AA for Universities: What Higher Education Must Do Before the 2027 Deadline.

Related resources

Learn more about higher education PDF accessibility compliance on the RemeDocs blog:

• WCAG 2.1 AA for Universities: What Higher Education Must Do Before the 2027 Deadline