Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Miranda Lacy and Harold Rogers became fast friends during their undergraduate years. Both students are Blind and say learning materials, from course modules to readings for class, have been inaccessible to them at West Virginia University (WVU). Many documents are not compatible with a screen reader, which is software that translates what is visually represented on a webpage into audible speech. Rogers opened a PDF from one of his classes: a word in the title had an extraneous gap, so the automated voice of the screen reader said "misspell, misspell, misspell," as if it's repeatedly walking into a virtual wall. Rogers navigated down to an image of a chart. "Unlabeled text box, unlabeled image, page break," the reader said. Both students say they have encountered dozens of inaccessible documents in a single semester, and that they have spent more time troubleshooting their education in the past three years than actually learning. Digital accessibility is a major barrier for Blind students and other Students with Disabilities. It is an ever-changing landscape that often isn't designed with disabilities in mind.
Both students tried for nearly two years to work with WVU, asking for barriers to be removed and working to ensure the university understood what access means for Blind students. "A lot of times on the weekends," Rogers says, "it is trying to scramble to see what is broken and how can we navigate through that." Rogers says he faced disciplinary action after asking for barriers to be removed. He felt this was retaliatory. Eventually, the conversations broke down and Rogers and Lacy, along with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), filed a lawsuit, claiming the university systematically denies Blind students equal access to an education. "We tried to negotiate," says Rogers. "My goal was to improve the standard of online learning and higher education with the premier school of social work at the premier institution in my state. Not to be litigious." Among other things, they are seeking policy changes to make WVU's digital materials accessible, and compensation for the time they lost trying to access their education.
An update to regulations in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), set to take effect at the end of April, will require public institutions to meet new standards that dictate what accessibility should look like. "Just as stairs can exclude people who use wheelchairs from accessing government buildings, inaccessible web content and mobile apps can exclude People with a range of disabilities," the rule says. "It was really a crisis and had become one of the disability community's top priorities to have a rule issued that set standards [for digital accessibility]," says Jennifer Mathis, who contributed to crafting that rule. She points out that the ADA has long required web accessibility, but the government had never established specific technical standards. "And so as a result, even though the ADA still applied, you had widespread inaccessibility in many contexts, including education," she says. The rule requires that all public entities, including colleges and universities, follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, covering things like better color contrast for Blind/Low Vision People, captioning for videos, and making a computer navigable without a mouse for People with motor disabilities.
At many colleges, it is the norm for Students with Disabilities to ask for barriers to be removed, rather than expect materials to be designed with them in mind. The new ADA rule "is essentially flipping that to say, from now on, everything digital must be born accessible," says Ella Callow, an ADA compliance officer at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Under the new rule, web accessibility will no longer be solely the concern of disability services staff on campuses. "There's nobody that's coming around annually and checking from the federal government that you have all the things in order and that you're in compliance," Callow says. She says the burden often ends up falling on People with Disabilities who are facing discrimination. "People with Disabilities get painted as litigious, when in fact, there are no other options to ensure their civil rights but to seek redress through the courts." That is exactly the position Miranda Lacy and Harold Rogers find themselves in. "If it's not us to fight, then who's gonna do it?" says Rogers. As Lacy and Rogers await a resolution in their case, they are excited to walk together at graduation this summer, towards what they hope will be a better future not just for them, but also for other students like them. Judith Risch speaks directly to Community Builders striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities. She says the faculty, website administrators, and procurement staff must each take ownership. Digital accessibility is a civil right and a shared responsibility.
Read the Full Article: These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help.
By: Jonaki Mehta
