Lily Alvarez, a legally blind doctoral student who served on the report’s research team at the University of Texas at Austin, said barriers to usability can start with product design.
“Ever since I was in elementary school, my whole schooling has been very technology focused, as far as adaptive technology, but just because adaptive technology is so prominent doesn't mean that mainstream technology is built with the same design in mind," she said. “I think we really see a disconnect there.”
WHAT IS THE “AVERAGE” USER?
Earl Huff Jr., a professor and researcher of inclusive and accessible design at UT Austin, said this can be because technologies are designed with the needs of an average user in mind, and this practice obscures the needs of students like Alvarez.
Alvarez relies on digital tools to ensure reading materials have large font. Even working on the report itself, Alvarez said it was difficult to find coding programs for data analysis that were accessible to her visually, or library support databases to organize literature reviews that were screen-reader compatible.
However, the report showed that the average user requiring no accommodation is likely a myth.
While the survey aimed to understand the experiences of these students, researchers didn’t limit the survey to those who had disclosed a disability to the university. The National Center for Education Statistics, using university disclosure as a metric, estimated that 21 percent of undergraduate students had a disability.
“We have a number of students who told us they didn’t even know that what they had — multiple sclerosis — would qualify for accommodations, because it’s considered a health condition, but it is also a disability,” said Stephanie Cawthon, a psychology professor and principal investigator for the study. “I think [we need to make] sure that people understand that it’s not just the things that you’re born with, but it’s also mental health conditions, it’s depression, it’s anxiety, it’s some of the things you don’t always pick up on in K-12.”
Students might not know when a diagnosed condition qualifies as a disability, or might not know that their difficult experience has a name. Half of the surveyed students who had disabilities said their conditions were first diagnosed during college, and 36 percent said they didn't disclose their disabilities to anyone at school. All of these factors point to a lower estimation of students with disabilities than may exist in reality.
“It’s important that everything that we do has a more human-first perspective, and we really consider how diverse voices can have a greater impact than focusing on a very homogeneous sample of users, which was the case in technology’s past,” said Huff, who contributed to the report.
CAMPUS VS. CLASSROOM
This disconnect can create daily obstacles. While students in the survey gave high marks to centralized, campuswide technologies like learning management systems and institutional websites, their experiences with classroom technologies were middling. On a five-point scale, both disabled and non-disabled students rated campuswide online systems similarly. The average rating for online course systems was 4.5 for both groups, and 4.4 (disabled) versus 4.52 (non-disabled) for collegewide online materials. In contrast, ratings for online materials in instructional strategies averaged 3.07 for disabled students and 3.15 for non-disabled students.
Cawthon said UT Austin has worked to ensure accessibility features are built into its learning management system, Canvas. For example, everyone can make text bigger or access speech-to-text without requesting additional accommodations. PDFs are notoriously difficult to make accessible because some are images of text that can’t be read or enlarged like true text can, Cawthon said, and the institution has made efforts to make PDFs more accessible. However, classroom accommodations can have more variance.
Huff said in computer science, instructors can choose which code-editing tool they use in class, and some are more accessible than others.
“Some are very text based, and they work very well with screen readers,” he said. “But nowadays, a lot of people use a lot of graphical user interfaces for the editors, but those are not very accessible. How do you try to teach this course about Python and use technology that's going to work for everybody?”
Some instructors go above and beyond. Alvarez said Cawthon downloaded metadata from 2,500 articles and moved it from an inaccessible format to an Excel file, which works better for Alvarez.
“It’s all about the value that these professors have on disabled students," Cawthon said. “If one is accessible, hopefully that will encourage the other to be accessible, but I think that's not always the case.”
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE
Huff said designing technology in conversation with disabled users will benefit everyone and is something that needs to be more common moving forward.
“When you're making technology that’s accessible, you’ll find that even people without disabilities benefited from it as well,” Huff said. “They may see it more as a convenience or comfy feature, whereas those with disabilities may see it more as a necessity. But either way, you're going to see greater usage of that product when you’re actually taking the time to learn from all of your consumer base what it takes to make this product work.”
In addition to consulting with disabled students and faculty in the creation of technology tools, whether they're adaptive or mainstream, day-to-day changes can go a long way for students with disabilities. For example, Huff records all his lectures. He said this has been a helpful accommodation for students with depression, but similarly benefits all students.
Cawthon said faculty attitudes and adopting flexibility like Huff demonstrates will be just as important as updating technology itself. The report recommends building accessibility into standard classroom practices — captioning videos, sharing lecture materials ahead of time, allowing flexibility on deadlines and ensuring screen-reader compatibility. These are often framed as accommodations, but understanding just how many students benefit from these practices is an important starting point.
“[Professors] are also very unaware of how many students with disabilities are sitting in their classrooms who did not disclose,” Cawthon said.
