Identifying one university’s prevailing online course accessibility issues

Abstract

Online and digital learning is becoming more widespread in a post-pandemic world. The rapid expansion of online education has introduced many accessibility concerns that may go unnoticed by inexperienced observers. With the number of students disclosing disabilities, and accommodation requests growing across the country, digital accessibility has become a necessity, going beyond following the letter of the law. Our institution conducted a quantitative analysis of 374 accessibility reports conducted by digital accessibility specialists across three semesters after reviewing faculty’s online courses. Reports evaluated course accessibility following Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). By identifying the most frequent accessibility issues from these reports, one goal was to create actionable steps to better support faculty training in high needs areas. Findings revealed that providing early feedback to faculty on a subsample of course content increased the likelihood of their courses meeting more accessibility standards by the full final review. Faculty who had gone through the online course development process before were twice as likely to include accessible electronic documents (MS Office documents, PDFs) and link formatting in their courses, compared to faculty new to the process. Course level had no bearing on whether they met accessibility standards or not, except for electronic documents, where graduate courses were more likely to meet standards than undergraduate. Based on these findings, we developed empirically-driven recommendations that accessibility professionals, faculty, and instructional designers at higher education institutions can use to provide support to their faculty and online students with disabilities.

Keywords

• digital accessibility
• higher education
• online course development
• disability inclusion