Comment on FR Doc # 2026-07663

I appreciate the Department’s decision to extend the compliance dates for the 2024 Title II web and mobile accessibility rule. The extension is especially important for higher education, where accessibility obligations intersect with decentralized teaching, instructor-created materials, intellectual property issues, and individualized accommodations. I respectfully request clearer guidance on how the rule applies to instructional materials created by individual faculty members. The framework is relatively clear for public-facing university websites, admissions pages, registration systems, official policies, and other centrally controlled university content. It is much less clear when applied to materials independently created by instructors for a specific course. This is complicated by ownership and control. In many higher-education settings, instructor-created materials are not necessarily owned by the university as works made for hire, and textbooks or other assigned materials are often owned by third-party publishers. DOJ should clarify how responsibility is allocated when a public university uses materials that it may not own, control, or be able to modify directly. In traditional in-person instruction, accommodations are handled individually: a student requests an accommodation through the university; the university evaluates it; and the instructor reasonably assists, provided the accommodation is reasonable and does not fundamentally alter the course. This model allows the university, instructor, and student to determine what form of access is appropriate in context. My concern is that universities may interpret the web accessibility rule as replacing this model with a blanket rule that every digital file shared by an instructor must satisfy WCAG 2.1 Level AA before it can be shared. In practice, this shifts responsibility from the university as the public entity to individual instructors, who are not themselves public entities under Title II and often lack the time, staff support, technical training, and resources needed to remediate complex course materials. This is especially problematic for handwritten or mathematics-heavy notes. It is reasonable to expect instructors to make simple digital materials accessible when doing so is straightforward, such as using headings in Word documents, adding a few alt-text descriptions, or structuring slides appropriately. It is not reasonable to expect individual instructors to make large amounts of handwritten notes fully accessible to screen readers. Handwritten notes are pedagogically important precisely because they are not textbooks. In mathematics, live derivations, spatial organization, annotations, diagrams, and intermediate steps all carry instructional meaning. Converting such notes into fully screen-reader-accessible documents may effectively require creating a second textbook-like version of the material. DOJ should clarify that, where appropriate, accessible alternatives may satisfy accessibility obligations without requiring every instructional artifact itself to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Such alternatives might include an accessible textbook, typed outline, lecture recording, note-taking support, disability-services assistance, or another course-appropriate accommodation. Finally, I request higher-education-specific examples addressing instructor-created materials, handwritten notes, mathematics-heavy content, publisher-owned materials, and course materials shared outside the learning management system but used in a course. Clear guidance would help universities avoid overly broad rules that discourage instructors from sharing useful digital materials while preserving equal and effective access for students with disabilities.