Brief overview and key links
Before Getting Started
The U.S. Department of Justice requires all public colleges to ensure that digital content and systems meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards by April 2026. This includes public-facing, student-facing, and internal materials, as well as websites, forms, applications, and administrative platforms.
The deadline for compliance is April 2026.
Resources
The VCCS is coordinating training and support for colleges and agencies in meeting this compliance requirement. Specific materials are to be found on the EdTech web site under the accessibility tag, and on the main VCCS web site.
As part of this project, training webinars have been scheduled initially during the Fall of 2025. Recordings and supporting materials are available at the link above.
The primary exception to this requirement is unused archived materials. Any other materials must be compliant, which includes emails.
External Sites
Outside of image alt tags, one of the most important things that people can do is create document structure through the use of styled headings.
Office 365
In Office 365 Products, there are accessibility tools built-in. This includes Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, etc. These tools can be accessed from menus, but can also be configured to be always running, typically under File -> Options -> Accessibility. Below is a screenshot from Classic Outlook where the option is set to always be checking accessibility.
When this option is chosen, a message with accessibility issues will display as below.
Similarly, in Microsoft Word:
Google
There are add-ons for Google that enable accessibility checking, but often because the documents are created online, they have fewer issues. One tool VCCS ITS has used is Grackle Docs. There are parallel products for Google Slides, etc. To learn more about Grackle, please review the Grackle: Overview and Getting Started knowledge base article.