The world of accessibility and disability accommodations seems to evolve continuously, as new technologies emerge, social attitudes toward disabilities shift and laws are updated. When we last wrote about disability accommodations in 2022, one of the major issues was how the university was meeting rising demand for accommodations, as the social isolation students experienced during the pandemic and the transition back to in-person life fueled an increase in accommodations requests for anxiety and depression. At that time, the approach to accommodations most often focused on the individual: A student with anxiety, for example, could meet with someone from Disability and Accessibility Services, who might recommend an accommodation like additional time to take tests. DAS would then send an email to that student’s instructors detailing the nature of the accommodations, and their professors would make the appropriate arrangements. DAS would also serve as a resource for faculty if they needed help, say, figuring out how to adjust the timed test option for an individual student in Canvas.
This is still how the process works today, and individual accommodations are still very much a thing (more on this below). But talk with those who work within this space and you’ll likely also hear about a push for “universal” accessibility, which may have the effect of reducing the need for one-off, individual accommodations. The thinking is that many of the most common accommodations for those with the disabilities — flexible deadlines, video captioning, making readings screen reader-friendly, providing options on assignments or assessments, or posting lecture slides ahead of time — actually benefit all students. Multiple studies have demonstrated, for example, that . Digitize a reading in a screen reader-friendly format and anyone can listen to a reading while they’re commuting or cooking dinner. Providing slides before class gives students an opportunity to pre-digest material and engage at a deeper level. Getting to choose between a test and a project to demonstrate what they’ve learned grants students more autonomy and lets multiple learning styles shine. In other words, if we design the learning experience with accommodations in mind, we end up benefiting everyone — and ultimately reduce the time faculty invest in implementing accommodations for individual students.
Many instructors at UM-Dearborn have made these kinds of adjustments to their courses in the past few years, often with support from the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources, which provides course design services, big and small. If faculty haven’t started moving in this direction already, though, it’s likely they’ll be thinking more about it very soon, at least when it comes to anything online, says UM-Dearborn’s Director of Digital Education Chris Casey. That’s because in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a new rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires public institutions, including colleges and universities, to ensure that all web content, mobile applications and other digital technologies are usable by people with disabilities. That means by April of next year — the compliance deadline for an institution of UM-Dearborn’s size — all websites, documents (such as PDFs), university communications (including emails) and digital tools have to meet the .
To meet this compliance deadline, U-M has created , which provides practical guidance for creating and maintaining accessible digital content. For the past year, Casey’s team and other campus units, especially the Hub and the Provost’s office, have been busy helping faculty make the transition. Casey says it’s good that they’ve gotten a running start because they’ve unsurprisingly encountered some challenges. PDFs, for example, “are just a nightmare, in general,” Casey says. For years, PDFs were a popular choice for digitizing everything from journal articles to math worksheets. The problem is that screen readers, the technology blind and visually impaired people commonly use to listen to text, often lose a lot in translation. It’s not just the low-quality, 30-year-old scan of a journal article or a handwritten math worksheet that causes problems either. Take, for instance, a standard journal article that has images, charts, tables, subheadings and is formatted into two columns. Our eyes can generally make quick organizational sense of how the information is supposed to flow. But Casey says, left to its own devices, a screen reader often garbles that “reading order” that our eyes and brains find so intuitive.
Casey says his team does have some tools to help faculty with specific accessibility challenges. Some applications, like Yuja Panorama, a Canvas plugin that can peruse documents and identify accessibility issues and recommend fixes, work pretty well. But with those nightmarish PDFs, the solutions might not always be straightforward. If it’s a journal article, Casey recommends faculty check with a subject-matter librarian or the publisher to see if the source already exists in an accessible format or if the publisher has plans to have an accessible version available before the compliance deadline. If those options don’t work out, he says they do have some automated PDF remediation tools, but gives them a “50/50” effectiveness grade. If automatic remediation fails, Casey says faculty may have to try manually adding accessibility features to the PDF, though he warns that’s an adventure that can “get super in the weeds super fast.” He concedes that, when possible, sometimes the best option might be for faculty to retype a document (assuming that doesn’t violate copyright laws) or consider an alternative source that doesn’t have accessibility challenges. Other tools, like the custom generative AI alt-text generator created by UM-Flint Distance Learning Director Nick Gaspar, are working much better. Alt text is a way of describing visual elements, like images and charts, to make them accessible to people using screen readers. Casey said their team test drove the generator with everything from artwork used in an art history class to scatter plot graphs from the math department and got very good results. “With this alt-text generator, I finally feel like we have something that we can say to faculty, ‘This works,’” he says.
Not all accessibility hurdles will be cleared with a quick technological fix, however, which is why Casey’s team is trying to get in front of faculty as much as possible so he can give them a more detailed picture of what it might take to bring their online course materials into compliance. “Faculty are very busy, and some, understandably, want sort of the five-minute version of this,” he says. “But every course has its own needs. So it’s not like there’s a one-size-fits-all solution for every course,” he says. As a starting point, he recommends faculty take a two-hour that his team has created, which provides a detailed overview of the major compliance issues and recommended fixes. His team is even offering a $200 incentive for the first 250 instructors who complete the course. In addition, every Tuesday throughout the summer, his office is hosting , like how to deal with tables, using Yuja Panorama or how color choices impact readability. Over the past four months, Casey’s team has also held in-person sessions with every department, and they plan to keep that going through the fall and winter semesters.
Of course, much of the labor of updating course materials ultimately falls to faculty, who already have a lot of demands on their time. Understandably, many faculty are feeling a little stressed about the work that’s required to bring their online course materials into compliance, says Maggie Rathouz, an associate professor of mathematics education who also volunteers as an accessibility liaison for her department through DAS. “To be honest, the mood isn’t great,” she says. “It’s not at all that we don’t want to help our students. I think basically everyone gets why this is important. It’s more that we aren’t experts in this stuff, and yet it’s going to fall to faculty to become experts and make these changes, which takes time. I mean, it would be great if this was something AI could help with even more, because then faculty could spend their time on the implementation of these changes and how to teach with these changes.”
Casey says he totally gets that, which is why his office is trying to lighten that burden by providing efficient training sessions, compensating faculty for at least some of their time, and regularly evaluating new technologies that can help with the transition. His office is also providing 250 small grants for instructors to hire a student in their discipline to assist with accessibility work. Rathouz says things like that are helpful — to a point. Personally, the $200 incentive nudged her to sign up for the Canvas course, though she says she actually hasn’t taken it yet and has been “dragging her feet” when it comes to making some accessibility updates to her courses. Similarly, she says it would be helpful to have a student do some of the work but notes that student workers will still require a fair bit of guidance from a faculty member.
Overall, Casey says he feels good about where UM-Dearborn is at as it approaches the April 2026 compliance deadline. Paradigm shifts, even little ones, take time, and a little foot dragging is only human nature, especially when faculty have a lot of other obligations. But he’s hopeful that this new culture around digital accessibility will end up being one of those things that feels like a bit of a lift up front, but then becomes second nature as faculty move forward with creating new courses and materials. It should also be noted that even as this culture of universal accessibility grows some roots in the digital space, individual accommodations will absolutely still be available to students. Knowing faculty are already feeling a little stretched by accessibility-related issues, DAS Coordinator of Case Management and Support Hillary Degner-Miller says their team recently created a new faculty guide that provides the most essential information about the individual accommodations process, including examples of situations faculty are most likely to encounter. Since 2023, DAS has also been utilizing , who both serve as a resource for their colleagues about accommodations and help DAS staff better understand where faculty are coming from. Moreover, Degner-Miller says that her slice of the accessibility domain, which tends to focus more on accommodations for individuals, is also experimenting with a more universal approach. The next addition to the faculty accommodations guide will be a section on universal design principles, which can help faculty create course materials that are usable by everyone, regardless of disability. In the end, everyone’s hoping what feels like a time burden at the moment will feel like a big time saver in just a few years.
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Want to learn more about digital accessibility at UM-Dearborn? Check out the university’s new Digital Accessibility website. Staff should also read the July 23 email from Chancellor Gabriella Scarlatta and Vice Chancellor for Information Management Carrie Shumaker regarding accessibility training for staff. Story by Lou Blouin
