Digital Accessibility FAQ

The key issues were summarized in the January 29, 2026, campus message from Chancellor Hu and me. The federal government has established new requirements to ensure that digital content produced by public agencies is sufficiently accessible to all potential users. The UC system has responded by revising its digital accessibility policy. These accessibility goals also align with the University’s commitment to inclusivity.

Because digital content is produced and managed broadly across the university, almost all of us at UCR will need to change our work habits. The January 29 message goes into additional detail, including a section for instructors who use Canvas.

Information, resources, and access to training is available on the Digital Accessibility website. Everyone should review the sections titled “Does This Apply to Me?” and “Where Do I Start?”, which includes a link to a training module titled “Accessibility for Everyone.” Further down the page, under “What Do I Need To Do?”, resources are organized by task: for example, writing and formatting, audio and video, websites, and courses. Some important resources include:

• SiteImprove: helps website managers identify and resolve accessibility issues with their webpages.
• UDOIT: integrated with Canvas, helps instructors identify and resolve accessibility issues with their Canvas courses.
• Accessibility Guidance for Faculty: provided by XCITE, includes links to workshops and trainings, FAQs, and other resources for specific use cases.
• Course remediation support: funded by the Provost’s Office and provided by XCITE, this service prioritizes upcoming courses but will be offered for an entire year.
• UCR website archive: many UCR websites have been archived by ITS, making it easier for site owners to delete content instead of remediating it (with the option to retrieve it from the archive and remediate later, if needed).
• Slack channel: ITS has organized a “digital accessibility community of practice” on Slack that now includes 90+ members to help answer questions. New members are welcome to join.
• Department meetings: members from the Advisory Committee have contacted all department chairs and offered to attend faculty meetings to provide an overview of the digital accessibility requirements and answer questions.
• Webmaster & content owner meetings: hosted by ITS, these recurring sessions provide a collaborative space for organizational liaisons and other stakeholders. Topics have included: digital accessibility strategy and policy, performance tracking, deep dives into new tools, technical support channels, available training, and critical program updates.

• You may hear that the Department of Justice extended its compliance deadline for regulations under the ADA (pushing it back a year to April 26, 2027). Despite this extended timeline, we have already remediated, archived, and updated many of our campus digital assets, and we remain focused on timely prioritization and remediation.
  
  Ongoing remediation efforts should be prioritized based on these criteria:
• Public-facing and/or high traffic content
• Content required to access UC services (including instruction and research)
• Content with known users with disabilities
• Content including critical features with known accessibility defects
• Content provided by a third party without an accessibility standard in the contract
• Content undergoing material alteration

The Digital Accessibility Advisory Committee includes faculty members nominated by the Academic Senate, the ADA/504 Coordinator, and representatives from Legal Affairs, Procurement, SDRC, Disability Management, Communications, and XCITE. Questions may be emailed to the members of the Advisory Committee or submitted to the Slack channel.

Questions may be submitted to the Advisory Committee or the Slack Channel. However, UCR is just one of many universities striving to comply with the new regulations and best practices are still being developed. Questions that are specific to an academic discipline may be best answered by members of that discipline, such as leaders of an affiliated professional association.

The SDRC director is a member of the Digital Accessibility Advisory Committee. The Library has established its own accessibility team that is focusing on the Library’s web resources and engaging with the California Digital Library. The team hosted a town hall meeting and the team chair joined the Slack channel to help answer questions. The Library is also collaborating with SDRC, ITS, and XCITE to develop best practices and assisting faculty with identifying accessible versions of journals and other course content.

Qualtrics has a built-in accessibility checker that runs automatically when a survey is published and provides the survey author with suggestions to improve the survey's accessibility. Authors are encouraged to implement these suggestions but UCR is not making any enterprise level changes to the Qualtrics environment that would require implementing these suggestions before a survey can be published. However, Qualtrics recently announced that starting June 3, 2026, all new surveys will automatically default to their "New Survey Taking Experience" (NTSE), which complies with the new accessibility standards. According to Qualtrics, existing live surveys will not be affected or visually altered and copying an old survey will preserve the original layout and theme settings. For more information, review the Qualtrics web resources on the NTSE.

Captions provide context for an image, while alt text describes the image itself in very literal terms. Both are helpful for search engine optimization, and both provide a benefit to people with visual impairment, but alt text is required. Captions are only required for print materials. If alt text is not possible for any reason, captions and/or the text preceding the image or graphic describes it. See more information in the images and graphics resource page.

You can find the UCOP Digital Accessibility FAQ here.