Is Good Faith a Legal Defense for Accessibility?

Four days before the original April 24 compliance date, the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule that gave higher education institutions some relief. The rule, now effective April 20, 2026, extends the Title II web accessibility compliance deadline by one year.

Though the date moved, everything else stands: 

• WCAG 2.1 Level AA is still the standard. 
• The scope of covered content did not narrow. 
• The underlying duty to communicate effectively to those with disabilities persists.

The ADA Title III practice at Seyfarth Shaw summarized the moment in a way worth keeping on a whiteboard: the extension is relief, but it is not immunity. Indeed, disability advocates called the delay "unconscionable" in the press. 

So any questions that higher ed administrators were asking have not gone away. In fact, they are perhaps more urgent now considering the work still to be done.

For example, if a complaint lands during the extension,a private plaintiff files, or an Office for Civil Rights review opens, what protects the institution? Many leaders assume the answer is good faith. They are partly right, and the part they have wrong is the part that exposes institutions to litigation.

What "Good Faith" Means to a Regulator

Good faith does not eliminate liability. Title II carries a private right of action and a fee-shifting provision, which means a plaintiff who prevails can recover attorney's fees, and an institution cannot escape that exposure by announcing good intentions. The law firm Duane Morris was blunt in its read of the extension: older nondiscrimination obligations still apply, and private plaintiffs and advocacy organizations are still free to sue.

What good faith does is shape what happens after a problem surfaces. Dated evidence that an institution assessed its content, set priorities, and acted on them is what regulators and courts weigh when they decide whether to open enforcement, how to structure a resolution, and what a remediation order should require. Like a student being assessed, an institution that can show its work stands in a very different position from the one that can only describe its intentions.

Five Elements of a Defensible Accessibility Record

The New York State Bar Association's guidance for in-house counsel at public colleges describes what a defensible posture looks like in practice. Reduced to essentials, a record that demonstrates good faith contains five elements:.

1. A written, dated, approved accessibility policy. It should name WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard and state how the institution applies it. Assume that an auditor, or a plaintiff's counsel, will eventually ask what your policy was on a specific date and who signed off on it. A policy with no approval date and no owner answers neither question.
2. A named coordinator and a governing body with budget authority. The bar association recommends an accessibility committee or task force chaired by a senior leader who controls a budget, paired with a designated web accessibility coordinator. Accountability that attaches to a specific person, backed by someone who can fund the work, is harder to dismiss as paperwork.
3. A risk-prioritized remediation plan tied to the deadlines. The plan ranks content by traffic and risk, fixes the highest-exposure items first, and maps the remainder against the 2027 and 2028 deadlines. What distinguishes a plan from a defect list is the ordering logic: visible evidence of what will be fixed first and why.
4. An audit that goes past the scanner. The NYSBA tells institutions to "pair automated scanning with manual and user testing by persons with disabilities." A scan finds a fraction of the problems; a person using a screen reader finds the ones that actually block access.
5. A dated progress log. A timestamped record of revisions, approvals, and fixes. A log shows movement over time, which a single report cannot demonstrate.

What a Scan Report Leaves Out

Automated scanning is where most good-faith records quietly fail because legacy tools catch just a third of WCAG issues. They flag a missing alt attribute, but don’t analyze whether the alt text is meaningful. 

The DOJ leaned on exactly this point to justify the delay. The Department acknowledged that current technology does not yet reliably remediate inaccessible content at scale, and that complex educational and STEM materials still require human review. At least one regulator warned that scanning by itself is insufficient, and does not serve as evidence that the work is finished. 

Modern AI has improved the speed, coverage, and accuracy of audits. Tools like AristAI accelerate the first step of the record by scanning and scoring LMS content, assisting with remediation of faculty-uploaded files, and maintaining a dated audit trail. But the defensibility of the record still depends on what institutions do after issues are identified. A scan is evidence of awareness, while remediation is evidence of action. A defensible record must show both.

Where to Start in the Next 30 Days

The extension offers a year of runway. Institutions that treat this year as time to build will be the ones with something to show in 2027. A practical first month includes four steps:

1. Inventory the digital footprint and assign owners. List websites, apps, and documents, and for each one record who is responsible, how high the risk is, and how it will be fixed. Work with the Library on academic materials, and academic technology or distance education for LMS-based content or online courses. Ownership is what turns an audit into action.
2. Triage by exposure. Rank content by traffic and by how directly it touches a student's ability to enroll, learn, and finish a course. Student-facing services and course materials belong at the top.
3. Date everything from day one. The value of a progress log comes from its timestamps. A log opened in the first month of the extension is worth more to your counsel than a thorough one assembled the week a complaint arrives.
4. Watch for deadlines that did not move. The DOJ's extension is not universal. The Department of Health and Human Services kept its Section 504 web accessibility deadline at May 11, 2026 and did not follow the DOJ, which means institutions with HHS-funded programs were already past a compliance date before the summer started. State law did not move either. Several states, New York and California among them, allow damages that federal Title II does not, and those clocks keep running regardless of DOJ action.
5. Begin LMS-specific remediation work. Start assessing and remediating LMS content early, focusing on high-enrollment courses and files used every term. PDFs, slide decks, and faculty-uploaded materials should be reviewed first, as they represent the largest body of inaccessible content and the most common source of barriers cited in investigations. Establish a per-file, per-course, per-term workflow so progress can be documented and exported when needed.

The Hardest Record to Build Is Inside Your Courses

Even institutions that maintain accessible public websites and coordinate effectively with publishers must still address their largest body of inaccessible content: the materials inside the LMS. This content spans PDFs, slide decks, and office files—each of which must be analyzed and remediated. 

Most administrators understand that while an LMS vendor can attest to the accessibility of its platform, it cannot attest to the accessibility of a file a professor uploaded last week. This is the part of a good-faith record that is hardest to prove. Course content changes every term. It is created by hundreds of faculty rather than a single web team. The labor of fixing it has historically landed on instructional designers and faculty who were never given the hours. And a great number of the files are PDFs, which are notoriously and historically difficult to make accessible. 

A defensible record that holds up at the course level must show per-file, per-course, per-term progress: the granular, dated evidence that an institution assessed a course, fixed what it could, and tracked what remained.That is the same evidence a regulator asks for, and the same evidence most institutions cannot generate by hand. 

Tools that automatically score course content and keep a dated, exportable audit trail for every file turns the hardest part of compliance into a record you can hand to counsel without flinching. AristAI was built for that specific gap: it scans and scores the content inside the LMS, remediates the files faculty have uploaded, and logs the work by file, course, and term, so that good faith stops being a feeling and starts being a paper trail.

Good Faith Must Be Earned

The extension bought higher education a year. It did not buy immunity. Institutions still face complaints, lawsuits, and investigations, and the ADA’s obligations remain fully in force. Good faith may influence how regulators respond, but it must be demonstrated through assessment, prioritization, remediation, and documentation.

The institutions that emerge from this period in a defensible position will be the ones that used the time to build a diligent record.  

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Want to see what a defensible course-content record looks like? Request a demo and get your institution's accessibility score.

Or try AristAI’s PDF remediation tool for free!

This article is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. Consult qualified counsel about your institution's specific obligations.