As DOJ Title II deadline looms, some gray persists in who must comply

U.S. student media may face the same deadlines as state and local governments to meet accessibility requirements

---

The first major deadline under the Department of Justice’s 2024 web accessibility rule is less than a month away for public colleges in the United States. Yet as that deadline approaches, student media are still looking for answers to whether student-run newsrooms are actually covered.

The rule requires state and local governments, including public colleges and universities that serve populations of 50,000 or more, to ensure their websites and mobile apps meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards by April 24, 2026. Under this requirement, mobile applications and digital content must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Why the answer is still unclear

Student publications seem to be occupying a murkier space. In the US, many student media outlets are funded by public institutions and tied to campus structures. There are also some that are housed on university servers, yet still operate with some editorial independence. It is this ambiguity that lies at the heart of the adoption issue.

For student news organizations at public schools and public colleges, the answer will depend largely on how the publication is structured, Mike Hiestand wrote in a March analysis for the Student Press Law Center.

According to Hiestand, some outlets appear to be part of a university’s communications system, while others function more like independent publishers. This differentiation matters, but it’s difficult to define.

The Justice Department’s guidance offers little definitive help for student media. The department states that the rule applies to web content that a state or local government “provides or makes available,” including through select outside arrangements. However, it also exempts some third-party content when those third parties are not acting for the government under a license or contract, or similar arrangement.

So, for student media, it is really a structural question. If a newsroom is closely overseen by an institution or treated as part of its official communications operation, it is more likely to fall under this rule. On the other hand, if a newsroom is more student-controlled and operates like an independent forum, it may not.

The newsroom burden is already here

While the concrete legal answer remains out of reach, the practical challenges are already becoming clear.

For some newsrooms, accessibility could mean going back through years of archived stories that were never created with these practices in mind. That could mean reviewing image galleries, PDFs, embedded videos, captions, heading structures, and older templates, then revising them to meet the new standards.

That is where the burden quickly becomes editorial as much as technical. For newsrooms specifically, the editorial and technical work collide: someone has to write meaningful alt text for photojournalism, and that requires editorial judgment, not just a developer running a plugin, accessibility web consultant Scott Kasun said. That’s a staffing model problem, not just a technical one.

In other words, accessibility is not just a backend fix. It also creates ongoing newsroom work that someone has to own.

This issue can be even more difficult to manage in student media, where leadership turns over quickly, and informal knowledge often disappears with each graduating class. The staffing reality is brutal for rotating student teams, said Matt Walz. Institutional knowledge walks out the door every graduation cycle. The only thing that survives that turnover is a documented process, not a person who knows how it’s done.

For this reason, many student publications are moving toward more accessible formatting. In his analysis, Hiestand notes that many student newsrooms are voluntarily adopting accessibility practices, including closed captions, image descriptions, and more accessible formatting, even without a definitive answer on whether the rule applies to them.

However, this forward momentum raises two key questions for student publications. First, who is responsible for web accessibility work? Second, at what point does it become part of the reporting process instead of something added after publication?

Larry Fowler, a journalism educator and newsroom leader, said the “big challenges are staffing and ownership.”

He added, In my world, the win is making accessibility part of the same discipline as accuracy. If you can’t describe an image or make a video understandable without audio, you’re not done reporting yet.

Additionally, the legal uncertainty does not end with the April 2026 deadline. A further complication is that student newsrooms serving populations under 50,000 may instead be looking at the April 26, 2027, compliance deadline.

Ultimately, whether a student publication must comply with these deadlines will depend on its position between institutional control and editorial independence, a distinction that remains unresolved, at least in the very near foreseeable future.

---