As the COVID-19 novel coronavirus has put our nation in quarantine, many universities have been rapidly switching to online modes of instruction to finish out the year. Classes have been reshaped into digital formats as quickly as possible, and this is even more concerning to blind students than the pandemic itself. I left my beautiful home, friends, and family in Hawaii in hopes of earning my PhD in education in Philadelphia, but my dreams of an education are now full of access barriers.
Since the turn of the century, digital learning platforms and electronic instructional materials have rapidly become more common everywhere we look in higher education. I took my first college class in 2006,and I remember when it was a novel idea that homework assignments would be uploaded onto a course management system. Electronic instructional materials are now everywhere you look. It is no longer a new idea; it is a part of college.
For blind students like me, there are programs called screen readers, which allow us to use our keyboard to make the computer tell us what we want to know about what is on the screen. Screen readers only work, though, with software platforms and document types which are developed and published in ways that allow our screen reader to pull information from them.
Electronic instructional materials have been inconsistent in terms of accessibility. If they are designed properly, we can use them. If they are not, we cannot. Congress recognized this problem over ten years ago and set up the Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) Commission, which informed Congress in 2011 that the primary problem for the accessibility of instructional materials in higher education was that there were no guidelines explaining how to make materials accessible.
Sure, we have laws on the books that say that colleges need to give us equal access, but there are no guidelines saying how to do that. All too often, colleges arrange accommodations for students with disabilities on an ad hoc basis, so we get our materials between late and never.
Blind students have been begging Congress to authorize the creation of voluntary accessibility guidelines to help get colleges, publishers, and developers on the same page to deliver products and instruction that we can access. If the first iteration of our ideal legislation had passed in 2012, all the instructional materials today would quite likely be accessible to us right out of the box. This session, the companion bills are H.R. 5312 and S. 3095. We still need one of those bills passed, but we have now hit the iceberg that we—and Congress—knew was coming. Right now, we are in an emergency because the hastilydeveloped digital instructional platforms and materials have been forced upon us by the pandemic. We trust that universities are doing their best to cater to the masses in this emergency, but we cannot afford to be lost in the crowd.
My call to action goes to the universities: The most important thing to do is to think about accessibility and inclusion in the design phase of everything you do. Work with blind students and disability resource offices to figure out how your design can help us. I would love to advise you to follow the guidelines, but the problem is that there still aren’t any guidelines specific to this need. Please do consider the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for web content, and partner with groups like the National Federation of the Blind if you need help. The infrastructure being built so hastily today is likely to last a long time. The steps we take today will affect us in the long run, for better or worse. Greater accessibility makes material more useful in the long run for everyone. College should be making our dreams accessible, but it only does when instructional materials are accessible.