A digital accessibility program that scales: The operating model higher ed actually needs

Most accessibility programs fail because they’re organized like a ticket queue rather than a strategic program. Universities treat accessibility as an endless stream of individual fixes, a PDF here, a video there, drowning small teams in reactive work while new, inaccessible content floods in faster than anyone can remediate. The result? Burnout, stalled progress, and programs that can’t scale past the next crisis.

Scaling accessibility requires a three-lane operating model: remediation that focuses on what matters most, prevention that stops new accessibility debt at the source, and governance that keeps cross-campus owners aligned while proving progress to leadership. In a recent conversation with Chronicle Intelligence, we unpacked what this looks like in practice.

You can get the key takeaways or watch the full discussion.

This isn’t about adding head count. It’s about building a program structure that turns scattered efforts into coordinated action.

A scalable accessibility program:

• Treats accessibility as both enterprise risk and IT governance, not a compliance project hidden in one department
• Runs three parallel workstreams, each with clear ownership: remediation, prevention, and change management
• Stops creating new problems through procurement controls and content creation standards
• Proves momentum with transparent road maps that show progress across your entire digital footprint

First, let’s examine why the “hero model” keeps failing.

Why the ‘’hero model fails

Most accessibility programs run on the passion of a few people who actually care. At the University of Washington, Terrill Thompson watched this play out for years. He saw staff scattered across departments, raising awareness, building community, fixing what they could reach. He calls it the grassroots effort.

The problem? Grassroots doesn’t scale. Those champions can’t force procurement to reject inaccessible vendors. They can’t mandate content standards across colleges. They can’t allocate budget or head count. They’re working around the edges of a problem that requires institutional infrastructure.

Without executive backing and formal governance, you end up with:

• Inconsistent standards: Each unit interprets accessibility differently, creating a patchwork of compliance across your digital properties.
• Duplicate efforts: Teams solve the same problems in parallel without shared tools or knowledge transfer.
• Burnout: Your most committed people carry impossible loads while the organization treats accessibility as "their thing" instead of everyone’s responsibility.

’What finally changed things at UW? Title II forced leadership to formalize what had been informal. Thompson describes accessibility fitting into two governance structures simultaneously: enterprise risk management and information technology. That dual placement matters. Accessibility isn’t just an IT problem or just a compliance issue. It’s both, and it requires institutional backing to match.

Programs that scale move from “whoever cares enough to fix things” to clear roles, executive sponsorship, and cross-functional teams with real authority.

Why accessibility can’t live in just one department

Accessibility falls through the cracks when nobody owns it institution-wide. Is it IT’s job? The provost’s problem? Legal’s headache? When everyone thinks it’s someone else’s responsibility, nothing gets fixed systematically.

Thompson’s description of UW’s structure cuts through this because accessibility sits in both enterprise risk management and IT governance. Not one or the other. Both. That’s recognition that accessibility creates legal and reputational risk while also being fundamentally a technology and content problem.

Most universities default to broken models. Either IT owns it and can audit websites all day but can’t make the provost prioritize faculty training. Or compliance owns it and handles accommodations reactively but doesn’t control procurement or content workflows.

Programs that work recognize accessibility as a shared mandate. At UW, that means an ADA Digital Accessibility Board with executive sponsors from IT, the provost’s office, and the UW Medicine faculty. Each sponsor brings authority over their domain. IT controls infrastructure, the provost influences academic policy, and Medicine handles clinical systems.

This cross-functional ownership gives the program teeth. When procurement needs new vendor requirements, IT can enforce them. When course content needs remediation, the provost’s office can set expectations for deans.

If your accessibility program reports to only one person in one department, you don’t have a program. You have a bottleneck.

Get executive sponsors who control budget and policy

Executive sponsorship isn’t about getting the president to smile in a photo with your accessibility statement. It’s about having leaders who can allocate budget, change policy, and hold people accountable when they ignore accessibility requirements.

At UW, the digital accessibility initiative has executive sponsors from three power centers: IT, the provost’s office, and UW Medicine. That’s not accidental. Each sponsor controls levers that the others don’t.

IT controls vendor contracts and can reject tools that fail accessibility reviews. The provost’s office sets academic policy and can require deans to address inaccessible course content. UW Medicine manages clinical systems and patient-facing digital experiences, which have a massive surface area with their own compliance stakes.

Without this level of backing, accessibility programs turn into suggestion boxes. You can send reports. You can offer training. You can flag problems. But when a college says “We don’t have budget for that,” or a vendor says “It’s on our road map,” you’re stuck.

Kristina England, who works across the entire University of Massachusetts system, makes the distinction clear. Her office manages procurement accessibility at system level for all campuses, but each campus runs its own remediation projects. That separation works because procurement is a shared service with centralized authority. Content remediation isn’t; it lives in departments, colleges, and units with their own priorities and timelines.

The lesson: Match your governance structure to where authority actually exists. If you need cross-campus vendor standards, you need executive sponsorship at system level. If you need faculty to fix course content, you need the provost or deans making it a priority, not just IT sending emails.

Programs fail when they ask people without authority to solve problems that require institutional power.

The three-team structure that makes programs scale

UW restructured its accessibility work around three teams, each tackling a different problem.

Remediation fixes what’s already broken. This team triages the backlog (admissions pages, course registration, patient portals) and either remediates or archives what can’t be fixed. It’s expensive, it’s urgent, and it has a deadline.

Sustainability stops new problems from being created. Thompson describes this as “developing new ways of creating content and procuring content,” so you’re not constantly retrofitting. Examples include procurement standards that reject inaccessible vendors before contracts get signed, content templates with accessibility built in, and workflow checks that catch issues before publish.

Change management shifts how people work. This is the culture piece; training that actually sticks, policies with real enforcement, making accessibility standard practice instead of a special accommodation. It’s the hardest of the three because it requires changing behavior across thousands of faculty and staff.

The issue with most programs is that they only do remediation. They’re trapped in a cycle where fixing yesterday’s mistakes consumes all available resources while new, inaccessible content piles up faster than anyone can address it.

Lanes two and three exist to make lane one obsolete. Without them, you’re just paying for the same fixes forever.

Prevention happens at two choke points

Remediation is a losing game if you’re still creating new accessibility problems faster than you can fix old ones. Prevention has to happen at two choke points: procurement and content creation.

Procurement is where most programs leak. Cyndi Wiley at Iowa State University makes the point bluntly: If a vendor’s product doesn’t meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards, don’t buy it. Money is the only thing that will force vendors to fix their tools. Collecting Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) doesn’t work if nobody enforces the standards or walks away from bad products.

Wiley’s team requires VPATs for every software review and verifies them. Sales reps filling out accessibility checklists isn’t the same as actual compliance. If the product fails, they either negotiate remediation timelines into the contract or choose a different vendor.

Content creation is harder to control because everyone publishes: faculty, staff, communications teams, and department admins. Thompson talks about campaigns such as “Think Before You PDF” that question whether PDF is even the right format before anyone tries to remediate it. Could this be a webpage instead? An accessible Word doc?

The sustainability work isn’t sexy. It’s vendor reviews, template libraries, and CMS guardrails that prevent people from publishing broken content in the first place. But it’s the only way to stop digging the hole deeper.

Accessibility spans admissions to alums (and everything between)

The April 2026 deadline focuses attention on course content, but Laura Rothstein, Emerita Professor of Law and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville, points out what many overlook: that accessibility requirements extend far beyond the Learning Management System (LMS).

Virtual tours for prospective students. Online housing applications. Ticket sales for athletics. Hospital appointment scheduling. Alums’ donation portals. If the public interacts with it digitally, it’s covered. If employees use it for their jobs, it’s covered. If students encounter it anywhere in their journey from admission to graduation, it’s covered.

Rothstein’s concern isn’t theoretical; it’s about where complaints will actually come from. A prospective student who can’t navigate your admissions site. A staff member who can’t access HR systems. A patient trying to book a clinic appointment. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re everyday interactions across your entire digital footprint.

Kristina England adds another layer that programs often miss: social media accessibility. Do your social media specialists know how to write alt text for images? Are videos captioned before they’re posted? And this isn’t just about course content. It’s every tweet, Instagram post, and Facebook update your institution publishes.

The scope isn’t “fix the LMS and we’re done.” It’s every digital touchpoint from prospective student to retired alum, across dozens of departments that may not even know they’re publishing inaccessible content.

Most programs underestimate scope by an order of magnitude. Then they wonder why they’re drowning.

Show leadership (and users) that your program is working

Christina Adams from Siteimprove makes a point that accessibility leaders forget: Leadership doesn’t want to hear about WCAG success criteria counts. They want to know if the program is working and whether the risk is shrinking.

That requires visibility across your entire digital estate; not just the pages IT manages, but everything published by colleges, departments, athletics, advancement, and auxiliary units. You need to know what’s broken, where it’s broken, and who owns fixing it.

This is where most programs hit a wall. They can audit individual sites or courses, but they can’t answer basic questions such as: Are we getting better or worse? Which units are making progress? Where should we focus next month’s remediation budget?

Siteimprove.ai can provide the governance layer that makes programs defensible — scanning across your web footprint, tracking issue trends over time, and clarifying ownership so fixes don’t stall between “found” and “fixed.”

Used well, Siteimprove.ai helps turn scattered remediation into reportable, campus-wide progress that leadership can understand and teams can act on.

Adams pushes the transparency angle further: Show your program publicly. Be transparent about what’s still inaccessible, what you’re working on, and how people can report issues. Thompson echoes this, suggesting that you publish a road map showing what you’ve addressed and what’s in the queue. That transparency will build trust with users and defuse complaints before they escalate.

The programs that survive scrutiny are the ones that can prove momentum. Siteimprove.ai turns scattered accessibility work into reportable progress that leadership understands and users can see.

The operating model you can copy-paste

Accessibility programs fail when they’re built like ticket queues instead of institutional infrastructure. You can’t scale by fixing PDFs one at a time while new inaccessible content floods in unchecked.

The model that works runs three lanes in parallel: remediation focused on high-impact fixes, prevention that stops problems at procurement and content creation, and governance that proves progress to leadership.

Start with executive sponsorship across IT, academic affairs, and major units. Without leaders who control budget and policy, your program is just suggestions.

Use tooling that gives visibility across your entire digital footprint and maps accountability to owners. Programs die in the gap between finding problems and someone fixing them.

Request a demo to see how Siteimprove.ai helps accessibility leaders run programs that scale.