If you audited university documents published in the last year – research reports, policy briefings, annual reviews, departmental guides – the accessibility failures would be consistent and uncomfortable.
Not because universities don’t care. Most have institutional commitments, accessibility policies and dedicated support teams. But commitment at policy level doesn’t translate into compliant university documents at departmental level. The gap between policy and practice is where most failures live.
This article looks at where accessibility breaks down in university documents, why decentralised publishing amplifies the problem, and what a structural fix actually involves.
Common accessibility failures in university documents
Accessibility failures cluster in predictable places. These aren’t random errors. They’re systemic gaps appearing across institutions because they share the same root cause: university documents designed to look right, rather than built to work right.
Heading structure in university documents
This is the most pervasive issue. Headings in most university documents are created by manually formatting text – making it bold, increasing the font size, changing the colour. Visually, it looks like a heading. Structurally, it’s just decorated text. Screen readers rely on heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to help users navigate documents. Without them, a 40-page report has no navigable structure at all.
Colour contrast
University brand palettes are often chosen for visual appeal or brand differentiation, not for accessibility. Pale greys on white, mid-toned brand colours on light backgrounds, coloured text on coloured backgrounds – all common, all frequently failing WCAG contrast minimums. The problem compounds in charts and data visualisations, where colour is often the only way information is encoded.
Untagged PDFs in university publishing
PDFs exported from InDesign or Word without accessibility tagging are structurally inaccessible regardless of how they look. Most university departments don’t have a tagged PDF workflow. Export happens at the end of a project, with no accessibility check built in.
Forms and interactive university documents
Fillable PDFs, online forms and interactive documents are often the worst performers. Form fields without labels, missing tab order, lack of error identification – these are consistent failures that make documents unusable for many people with disabilities.
Images without alt text
Infographics, photos, charts and diagrams published without alt text are invisible to screen readers. In research documents, where a chart might carry the central finding, this isn’t a minor omission. It’s a failure of communication.
Accessibility statements that don’t reflect reality
Many departments rely on the central university accessibility statement rather than publishing one that reflects their own content. When that content has known issues – as it usually does – an inaccurate accessibility statement creates additional compliance risk.
Why decentralised publishing makes this worse
Universities aren’t monolithic publishers. A large university might have dozens of research centres and departments publishing independently – each with their own templates, workflows and interpretation of what “accessible” means.
Central guidance exists, but enforcement is rare. Templates are distributed, but not always used. And when someone needs to publish a report quickly, they use what’s available rather than what’s correct.
The result is a publishing landscape where accessibility compliance varies across the same institution. One department’s university documents might be exemplary. Another department’s might fail at every checkpoint.
For institutions with regulatory obligations – which is most UK universities – this creates real exposure. Non-compliance isn’t just a reputational issue. It can result in formal complaints, investigations by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and requirements to remediate content retroactively.
The difference between looking structured and being structured
This is the distinction that matters most in practice. A document can look beautifully structured – clear hierarchy, consistent formatting, logical layout – and still be completely inaccessible.
Accessibility isn’t assessed visually. It’s assessed structurally. The question isn’t whether a heading looks like a heading, but whether it is tagged as one. The question isn’t whether a chart is labelled visually, but whether that label is accessible to someone who can’t see the chart.
This is why visual quality and accessibility quality are not the same thing, and why organisations that invest heavily in design can still produce inaccessible documents if the design process doesn’t include structural thinking.
What a structural fix looks like
Improving accessibility across a university’s document output isn’t primarily a training problem. It’s a systems problem.
Training helps people understand what accessibility requires. But if the templates they’re working from don’t support accessible output, training only goes so far. The goal should be templates that produce accessible documents by default, processes that include accessibility checkpoints, and clear ownership so that someone is responsible for compliance.
A document audit is a useful starting point. It establishes a baseline, identifies where the failures are most concentrated, and provides a clear brief for remediation. Talk to us about auditing your document output.