The "Single Source" Accessibility Fantasy

Somewhere in a compliance meeting on a sleepy private university campus, someone with an important sounding title is proposing that faculty cede the ability to modify their online course content to non-student facing staff working in a back office. Every content change, regardless of complexity, needs to route through the administrative unit. The rationale for the proposal is that it's the only way the university can guarantee compliance to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by May 2027.

To be clear, it's not the only way and a lot of people know it.

Section 504 states that online content has to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. It says nothing about who must produce and manage the content. If compliance doesn't require an online content gatekeeper, how is the gatekeeper actually helping the university? In theory, a narrower channel is easier to audit and easier to certify. In practice, it's a truly idiotic model that creates severe and unnecessary bottlenecks by placing an access control mechanism between faculty and the content they've created (ask any operations lead with an iota of experience and understanding of how online courses are built, deployed and updated). 

Tuition-dependent mid-tier private universities aren't staffed to have a single back office process every micro-edit across every online course in every online program. So they'll either grow those administrative units into unwieldy cost centers nobody budgeted for (and certainly can't afford amid the current existential budget crisis), or faculty will route around it, emailing updated files directly to students, using personal tools, and posting outside official channels. The result will be a massive compliance risk with no audit trail and no institutional visibility.

What works, and what past HHS Office of Civil Rights resolution agreements consistently point toward, is a hybrid approach in which faculty are trained to author and publish accessible content using the tools and technologies built into the LMS, and then using a small specialized team to handle the genuinely difficult work such as video captioning.

Single-sourcing accessible content is a staffing decision that co-opts a federal deadline to make itself sound necessary. If this is unfolding at your university, ask which administrative operations hack proposed it, and then ask what else they're planning on centralizing and how they plan on paying for it.