Ensuring Digital Accessibility in Higher Education: Legal Challenges and Emerging AI-Based Solutions for Students with Disabilities

Digital accessibility; Higher education; Students with disabilities; WCAG compliance; AI-supported accessibility

Dr.Nita Nath1*
Associate Professor, Law, IPR and IT, Royal
Global University, Assam.
Email ID: [email protected].
Orcid ID:00090005-5834-5436

Mr. Debarghya Bhattacharya2
Assistant Professor, School of Law,
Constitutional and Administrative Law, Kristu
Jayanti (Deemed to be University).
Email ID:[email protected].
Orcid ID:0009-0009-6504-6636

Address for correspondence: Dr.Nita Nath,
Associate Professor, Law, IPR and IT, Royal
Global University, Assam.
Email ID:[email protected].
Orcid ID:00090005-5834-5436

Received:17-06-2026
Revised:21-07-2026
Accepted:28-07-2026

European Journal of Prosthodontics and Restorative Dentistry (2026) 34 (7s), 1041–1052

Ensuring Digital Accessibility in Higher Education: Legal Challenges and Emerging AIBased Solutions for Students with Disabilities

Digital accessibility is a key component in inclusive higher education as students rely more and more on the institutional websites, learning management systems, digital documents, multimedia, and AI-supported learning environments. This study investigates digital accessibility in terms of technical, legal and institutional evidence for students with disability. The mixed methods design employed was secondary data. The DD-WARF Accessibility Dataset was quantitatively analyzed, with the results of the WAVE assessment of 348 university websites, and Lighthouse mobile and desktop scores. Legal challenges were analyzed using an OCR corpus of 68 documents compiled to 29 case-level documents, and IPEDS 2024–25 data was used to offer contextual evidence of disability-service URLs and distance education. The results revealed high and very high risk websites (31.61%) and accessibility barriers were present across the board, particularly Missing Perceivable and Missing Operable WCAG failures. From the OCR findings, the following were present in all cases: web accessibility, document accessibility, WCAG compliance, policy, monitoring, and remediation. IPEDS verified that digital and disabilityservice infrastructure plays a key role in the functioning of the institution. The study ends with a conclusion that accessibility needs governance, humanreviewed remediation, regular audits and responsible tools with AI support, and not just the automated scores. It provides a realistic strategy for institutional accessibility planning, which is guided by the law.It provides a practical approach to legally-informed institutional accessibility planning.

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