From Red to Green: How We Made Thousands of Course Files Accessible with Ally

The April 2024 Department of Justice (DOJ) final rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has redefined accessibility as a proactive obligation, not a reactive accommodation. Public colleges and universities now face an enforceable April 24, 2026 deadline requiring all course content—including materials inside password-protected LMS courses—to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standards from the moment they are published. This poster presents a proven, scalable system for meeting that mandate using Blackboard Ally in Blackboard Ultra. Drawing on a multi-school implementation at a major research university that successfully brought three graduate schools to full compliance before the 2026 deadline, with two more actively in progress, the poster visualizes the strategies and workflows that made it possible. These include an 85% institutional score benchmark, a semester-at-a-time surgical migration approach, and a Learning Object Repository (LOR) enabling fix-once, update-everywhere efficiency. The display maps common Ally flags by content type: Word documents, PDFs, podcasts, VoiceThread recordings, Panopto and externally hosted videos, and Perusall reading assignments, alongside the practical remediation steps that resolved them. Visitors are invited to explore the data, discuss challenges specific to their own institutions, and leave with a triage framework and WCAG 2.1 AA content-type checklist adaptable for any context.