For school communications teams planning for the year ahead, ensuring your school’s digital content is ADA compliant should be at the top of your priority list. ICYMI: the U.S. Department of Justice has updated its ADA Title II regulations, and public schools and districts must comply by early 2026.
These regulations set clear expectations for accessible digital content across websites, mobile apps, forms, documents, videos, and graphics, including social media. Districts serving 50,000 or more people must comply by April 2026; smaller districts by April 2027. The deadlines are coming up fast, and for many teams, the work feels heavy. But the path forward becomes far clearer when you know where to focus. Here’s how to approach the work in a way that’s realistic, sustainable, and built for the day-to-day pace of school communications.
The Impact of Accessibility on Everyday Content
Digital accessibility ensures every member of your community, including those who use screen readers, rely on captions, or need clear visuals, can access the information, updates, and stories you share. But, accessibility helps everyone. Parents who need to watch a video without headphones, grandparents with aging eyes, or students who are colorblind.
When accessibility enters the conversation, many people picture large-scale web projects or dense documents that need remediation. While those should certainly be on the list of projects to tackle, the more immediate shift should focus on training your teams to build accessibility-first habits in the content they’re sharing every day.
Undoubtedly, social media posts are some of the content families interact with most. They’re quick to produce, quick to publish, and quick to scroll past, which is exactly why accessibility is crucial. A post without alt text, a video without captions, or a graphic with low contrast may seem harmless, but it can keep a portion of your community from understanding the update entirely. In some cases, that gap means missing a deadline, a schedule change, or a key announcement.
Accessibility closes those gaps. It gives every viewer the same chance to comprehend what you’re sharing. And when you consider the steady stream of social content schools share each week, accessibility on social media adds up quickly.
Putting Digital Accessibility into Practice
The good news? ADA guidelines exempt pre-existing social media content, so you won’t need to revisit content you’ve already posted to ensure it’s compliant. Also good news: most school teams already do parts of accessibility well, often without naming it. Writing a descriptive caption, for example, makes a post easier to interpret with a screen reader. Adding accurate video captions includes those who can’t hear the clip or who watch without sound. Avoiding busy layouts or tiny text in design improves readability for everyone.
As you prepare for the spring 2026 deadline, the most effective work will come from building habits rather than chasing perfection. ADA compliance does not require you to reinvent your content. It requires you to approach it with clarity and intention. Here are some habits for content creators to focus on:
- Add descriptive ALT text to all images, videos, and graphics. (By the way, Class Intercom makes this easy, with automated ALT text added with the tap of a button.)
- Use good color contrast in graphics so text is easy to read against its background.
- Include accurate captions in videos.
- Avoid using all caps, special fonts, or too many emojis that make copy difficult to interpret with a screen reader.
- Ensure proper capitalization and punctuation in copy.
- Use specific and descriptive link hooks (e.g., “Register for the event” instead of “Click here”).
- Save links, emojis, and hashtags for the end of the copy and write hashtags in PascalCase (#GoWildcats instead of #gowildcats).
- Ensure text is clear, simple, and free of unnecessary jargon.
- Include important details from the graphic in copy as well.
In the two examples pictured here, the first image is less accessible for a number of reasons. The text has low contrast, and the caption includes mid-sentence hashtags and emojis that make screen reader interpretation difficult. The second design improves accessibility with high-contrast text, PascalCase hashtags, and by placing all hashtags and emojis at the end so screen readers can deliver the essential information more clearly.
These steps improve communication broadly, not just for those with identified accessibility needs. They reduce friction, increase clarity, and make your content more polished and professional. Stated another way, accessible content looks better and is easier to understand.
The same principles apply to flyers, handbooks, calendars, applications, and the documents families reference throughout the year. Clear text, strong contrast, accurate captions, and thoughtful descriptions make all content easier to navigate, no matter where it lives. As your team works toward the 2026 deadline, building these habits into your daily social posts creates muscle memory that naturally carries into larger accessibility projects.
What Else Schools Need to Know Before the 2026 Deadline
You’ll also need a plan for the larger body of digital content your community relies on. Most other digital content, including webpages, handbooks, calendars, menus, and documents must be reviewed and remediated as needed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Families use these resources every day, and they must be accessible by your district’s compliance deadline.
That said, you don’t need to fix everything at once. Older materials that are no longer active can be moved to an archive. Archived content doesn’t need remediation unless it becomes active again. The focus should be on current, essential content.
From there, remediation becomes far more manageable. Priority items can be addressed first: enrollment pages, district forms, lunch menus, calendars, and core handbooks. The rest can follow as part of your normal update cycle, one step at a time.
Archiving helps keep your workload focused. Moving outdated files into a designated archive space prevents them from being mistaken for current content and reduces the volume your team needs to remediate. What remains is a cleaner, more intentional digital footprint.
Moving Forward Together
At Class Intercom, we’re All in for Accessibility, and preparing for the spring 2026 deadline alongside the schools we serve because it’s the right thing to do. We’ve been updating our own tools and workflows, launched an AI-generated ALT Text feature, and are developing training resources for content creation teams. As the leading social media management solution for K-12 schools, we’re focused on helping schools make accessibility part of everyday content creation.
If you’re ready to build your district’s plan for 2026, we can help. Check out our recent session with accessibility expert Dr. Ann Knettler on making school communications ADA compliant and don’t miss our three-hour, hands-on workshop in collaboration with GrackleDocs, a leading provider of document accessibility tools, designed for communication teams and leaders navigating the new ADA requirements. You’ll leave with practical next steps and a plan you and your team can take into the new year. Learn more and reserve your spot using the link below.
