Disquisitions

As you look towards graduation, you will likely be focused on completing and defending your disquisition, but you'll also need to prepare said disquisition for publication. As a professional document, your disquisition will be part of your professional portfolio for the rest of your career, and it also needs to meet the high standard of quality set by all previous disquisitions published by NDSU. Therefore, as a penultimate step before graduation, you will need to submit your disquisition to the Graduate School and complete our publication review.

Before you submit your disquisition to the Graduate School, your pre-submission requirements should be met and your disquisition should meet the formatting and construction requirements set out in the Graduate School Publication Guidelines. Once you submit your disquisition, the Disquisition Coordinator will review it based on our Publication Guidelines and send you a memo noting any required changes.

While the outcome of the review is your published disquisition, we also see it as one last opportunity to help you develop and practice a valuable skill: how to produce a professional document. To that end, we've prepared a disquisition knowledge base with formatting tips and solutions to common problems, we have graduate consultants at the Center for Writers and Instructional Design Center available to help you one-on-one, and we host formatting workshops throughout the semester.

Getting Started?

Accessibility Requirements

Pursuant to the interim final rule issued by the United States Department of Justice, requirements for PDF structure tags in disquisitions published by NDSU are waived and are no longer mandatory, effective May 8, 2026. Therefore, the following are not required in your PDF:

  • PDF tagging
    • Your document does not require structure tags.
  • Table scope & regularity
    • Data cells do not need to be associated with headers, and headers do not require a defined scope.
  • Alt-text
    • Annotations, figures, and equations do not require alternative text.
  • Figure bounding boxes
    • Image locations do not need to be defined.

These requirements are expected to resume Fall 2026. Additionally, pre-existing requirements for readability, usability, and accessibility are not exempt, such as minimum font sizes, font color, and heading bookmarks. If you have questions about these changes, how they will affect your review, or what is now required in your document, please contact the Disquisition Coordinator.

To help us prepare for the federal reinstatement of these requirements, we plan on reintroducing the full WCAG 2.1 AA requirements for disquisitions beginning Fall 2026. Thus, all disquisitions that have not completed the publication review by the end of Summer semester will be bound by these requirements.

No; on the contrary, accessibility remains a top priority. However, the initial rollout of our requirements has revealed that the resources, support, and infrastructure available to both student publishers and staff was not sufficient to meet the substantial technical challenges they face when authoring, remediating, and reviewing accessible documents.

This decision was made in service to our commitment to publishing accessible documents. While temporarily removing these requirements may seem counterintuitive, this interim period provides us the opportunity to improve our authoring guides and web content, streamline our review process and guidance, and train students and staff on the tools they need to successfully author and publish an accessible document.

Yes, and we encourage you to do so. Digital accessibility is not "all-or-nothing"; for example, adding alt-text to your figures makes a big difference for users with screen readers, even if your equations don't have alt-text. Most of the WCAG 2.1 AA requirements can be implemented in your source document without requiring any PDF remediation, meaning that a mostly-compliant document could be produced without touching a PDF editor.

For more information on implementing WCAG 2.1 AA requirements in your document, please see visit W3C's website, our document accessibility page, or contact the Disquisition Coordinator.

Center for Writers

Email: ndsu.cfw@ndsu.edu Phone: (701) 231-7927 Campus location: Library 16 Contact Page Manager