My university went through an accessibility remediation process recently, and it was a rather nightmarish undertaking. Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a time, and I've always wondered if these would be targeted by people looking to bring a complaint.
Our HTML was more or less fine (though we found and fixed a few bugs), but the unbelievable number of PDFs and un-captioned videos nearly broke us. The culture shift has been difficult, particularly with people who want to post videos or PDFs but don't have the resources or training to make those pieces of content accessible.
> Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a time
Wholeheartedly agree with this. I once hosted a microsite on my personal server for a group at the university I was a web flunkey for as it needed to get up quickly, and well, corporate IT wasn't the fastest thing there, and it took them years to ask for changes after I'd left.
It's usually pretty easy for universities to update their main public facing pages, but as you mention, it's the thousands of other, quite often slightly bespoke (as this Professional or that Dr wants their own, custom slice) that's the breaker.
And I'll bet the vast majority of those PDFs were bitmaps made by somebody printing them on paper and then scanning them in because they didn't know how to make a text-based PDF directly from Word, or why doing so was a better idea.
Our HTML was more or less fine (though we found and fixed a few bugs), but the unbelievable number of PDFs and un-captioned videos nearly broke us. The culture shift has been difficult, particularly with people who want to post videos or PDFs but don't have the resources or training to make those pieces of content accessible.