Leveraging the Title II Crisis: Leading Systemic Change to Achieve Digital Accessibility at Scale

Changing culture and shifting mindsets is hard and takes both time and intentional leadership. The announcement of changes to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in April 2024, with an effective date of April 2026, calls for a shift in mindset from accommodations to design for inclusivity from the start. The State University of New York (SUNY) leveraged that announcement as the basis for leading a transformative system-wide change initiative to build a culture of accessibility across its 64 campuses. In this session, presenters from SUNY will share how they mobilized a team and applied change leadership principles to move the dial on digital accessibility at scale. They will walk through how they established a sense of urgency, created a shared vision for a culture of accessibility, navigated power structures at multiple levels, and engaged communities of practice across the system to build a guiding coalition of digital accessibility champions. They will share the specific strategies they used for communication, professional development, collective problem-solving, resource allocation, and compliance assessment with a range of campus stakeholders, ultimately transferring ownership for digital accessibility to individual faculty, staff, and administrators on each campus. Attendees will have the opportunity to share their own experience and perspectives and will leave with some takeaways they can apply in their own context.