What Makes Faculty-Created Course Materials a Challenge?
Faculty-created content is a major ADA Title II risk because slides, PDFs, videos, and other course materials are often created without consistent accessibility checks, training, or remediation. This can leave important learning content inaccessible to students using assistive technologies.Common Types of Faculty-Created Content and Where Accessibility Breaks Down
Here’s a closer look at the common types of faculty-created content and where accessibility breaks down:
1. Lecture Slides
PowerPoint and similar presentation tools make it easy to build visually rich lectures. Faculty can add text, images, charts, tables, diagrams, and videos in a matter of minutes.
The trouble starts when the visual layout becomes the only way information is organized. A screen reader may not follow the intended reading order, headings may not be recognized as headings, and an important image may have no description. For anyone using screen reader software, the difference between a well-structured slide and a poorly structured one can be substantial.
2. Scanned Readings and Legacy PDFs
This is one of those problems that can hide in plain sight.
A scanned reading looks like a normal document to someone who can see it. Technically, though, it may just be a collection of images. There may be no text for a screen reader to read, no meaningful headings, and no logical reading order.
Legacy PDFs can create similar issues. If the same files have been used for years, those accessibility problems can follow a course from one semester to the next.
3. Word Documents
Word documents are often treated as simple files that do not need much accessibility work. They still have plenty of room for problems.
A heading might only be bolded instead of being marked with a heading style. A table may not have proper headers. An image may be inserted without alt text. These choices may not change anything for a student reading the document normally, but they can make navigation much harder for someone using assistive technology.
4. Recorded Lectures and Video Content
Making a lecture video accessible involves more than adding captions.
Captions make spoken content available in text, but they do not necessarily explain what is happening visually. A professor may point to a chart, demonstrate a lab procedure, highlight text on a slide, or refer to something that students can see but cannot hear.
That is where audio description becomes important. It provides additional context for visual information that would otherwise be missed.
5. Images That Contain Important Text
A screenshot, graph, diagram, or photograph can sometimes contain information that is central to an assignment or lecture.
If that information exists only inside the image, a student using a screen reader may have no way to access it. Simple images may only need useful alt text. More complicated charts, diagrams, and visual data may need a longer description or an accessible text alternative.
These practices also benefit anyone who uses screen reader software, not only individuals with visual and cognitive impairments.
The Reasons Why Faculty-Created Content Accessibility Breaks Down
The problem is not necessarily that faculty do not care about accessibility. The bigger issue is that accessibility has to compete with everything else involved in teaching. Anthology’s 2025 Faculty Survey of 2,508 instructors shows just how large that gap is.
1. Low Awareness of Title II Requirements
81% of faculty say they need more information about the ADA Title II requirement for WCAG 2.1 conformance. That includes 36% who are not aware of the requirements at all and another 45% who are aware but unclear about the details.
That is a difficult starting point. If instructors are still trying to understand what the requirements mean, expecting them to catch every accessibility issue in a course file is unrealistic.
2. Capability Gap Despite Good Intentions
The survey also shows that faculty understand why accessibility matters. 76% agree that accessible content positively impacts student outcomes. Yet only 11% say they have the right tools and training to create accessible course content.
So there is a clear difference between wanting to create accessible content and having the resources to do it consistently.
3. Lack of Training
29% of faculty cite lack of training as a top barrier.
Accessibility involves dozens of small decisions. How should a heading be structured? What makes alt text useful? When does a chart need a longer description? How should a PDF be tagged? What does a video need beyond captions?
Without practical training, these are not always obvious answers.
4. Lack of Time
Another 28% of faculty cite lack of time as a top barrier.
And this is probably the easiest barrier to understand. Faculty already have lectures to prepare, papers to grade, students to support, and courses to update. Asking them to manually remediate every PDF, presentation, image, and video adds another substantial task to the list.
5. Limited Knowledge of Available Tools
27% of faculty say limited knowledge of available tools is another major barrier.
The problem is not always a complete lack of technology. Sometimes the tools are already available, but faculty do not know which ones to use or how to work them into their existing process.
6. Low Confidence Among Newer Faculty
Instructors with fewer than two years of teaching experience report the lowest confidence in their ability to create accessible content.
That matters because newer faculty are often creating course materials from scratch while also figuring out their teaching routines. Without proper guidance, accessibility can become another area where they are expected to learn as they go.
7. Inconsistent Communication of Accessibility Options to Students
There is another problem that happens after the content has been created.
Only 18% of faculty proactively tell students about tools available to access coursework in different formats. Meanwhile, 30% do not share this information, and 17% are unaware of what their own institution provides.
So even when an institution has accessibility resources available, students may not know they exist.
How Continual Engine Can Help Higher Education Institutions
The numbers make one thing pretty clear: universities cannot expect faculty to handle every accessibility task manually. There is simply too much content being created, too little time to review it, and a wide gap in accessibility training.
This is where Continual Engine can take some of that work off faculty and accessibility teams. Using artificial intelligence and human expertise, Continual Engine helps higher education institutions remediate digital content across documents, courseware, videos, and websites.
Here’s what that can look like in practice:
Document and PDF Remediation
- Automated tagging and structure: Continual Engine can add tags, reading orders, headings, and lists to legacy PDFs and scanned documents, making them easier to navigate with assistive technologies.
- Complex STEM content: Math equations, chemistry formulas, tables, charts, and other technical content can be particularly difficult to remediate manually. Continual Engine can convert these elements into more accessible formats without requiring faculty to rebuild the material from scratch.
- AI-generated alt text: Images and visual data often end up in course materials without useful descriptions. Continual Engine uses AI to generate alt text for images, graphs, and other visual content.
- Compliance reporting: Institutions can generate accessibility reports aligned with ADA, WCAG, Section 508, EAA, and the RPWD Act, as well as PDF/UA standards, giving accessibility teams a clearer picture of where content stands.
Courseware and Multimedia Accessibility
Faculty-created content does not stop at documents. Online courses are filled with videos, recordings, and other multimedia that need to be accessible too.
- Video captions and audio description: Continual Engine provides automated closed captioning and extended audio description for educational videos, helping students access both spoken content and important visual information.
- Course audits: Institutions can audit entire online course modules and digital curricula to identify accessibility issues across multiple types of content, rather than relying on individual faculty members to spot problems themselves.
Make Your Digital Learning Content Accessible
Simplify accessibility across your institution with Continual Engine’s AI-powered remediation and compliance solutions.
Closing Thoughts
Making digital course content accessible should not depend on whether an individual faculty member has the time or training to fix every file. Universities need a practical way to manage accessibility across the large amount of content they create every semester. Continual Engine helps institutions simplify that process with AI-powered accessibility remediation and compliance solutions across documents, PDFs, videos, courseware, and websites. This makes it easier to support people with visual and cognitive impairments, while creating digital content that is easier for everyone to access and use.
