Digital Equality for Distance Learning

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Accessible content ensures that students with disabilities don’t fall behind during the Great Shutdown

by Mike Groth 

Here at KGL, we have long championed accessibility in publishing. Ensuring that your books, journals, digital products, websites and other content are either remediated or “born accessible” is essential to readers with disabilities. Many publishers by now appreciate that the same technologies and guidelines that improve access to materials for people with visual or hearing impairments, limited mobility, perceptual and cognitive differences can also open opportunities to better reach and serve all users. But if there has ever been a time to acknowledge the consequences of digital equality, it is the great experiment in distance learning of 2020.

Closures of primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted over 91% of the world’s student population, or more than 1.7 billion learners, according to UNESCO. While bandwidth and universal access issues remain a problem even in developed countries, there has nonetheless been a great and sudden migration to online learning at both the K-12 and higher education level. As many parents and students can attest, the response and embrace of technology has been highly variable across school districts, individual instructors, and student adoption. One area that has largely been left behind in the scramble is special education.

Braille keyboard

Last month, the US Department of Education issued guidelines for schools warning that ensuring compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) should not prevent them from offering distance learning opportunities to all students. For example, the advice on meeting the needs of students with visual impairments included the recommendation that teachers who distribute inaccessible documents should “read the document over the phone to the blind student or provide the blind student with an audio recording of a reading of the document aloud.”

At universities, where students with disabilities are provided accommodations reactively upon request, proactive digital accessibility in course materials is not the norm. Software that requires the use of a mouse despite physical disabilities, textbooks that are not compatible with screen readers, and subpar automated captioning in videoconference platforms are just some of the impediments online learners have experienced since residential campuses have closed.

Last year during less socially distant times, I moderated a panel discussion at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting that included Dr. Pamela Starr, Director of the Student Ability Success Center at San Diego State University. She described the onerous process universities must undertake to remediate non-accessible content on a frequent and ad hoc basis in order to level the playing field for the 11% of US undergraduates who qualify for accommodations. She pointed out the many “invisible” impairments students experience, including learning disabilities, ADD, chronic illnesses and brain injuries. In times that are challenging for everyone, this population is at even greater risk of falling behind simply due to learning materials not suited to their needs.   

It doesn’t have to be this way. Education publishers selling in the US school market will be familiar with XML-based formats for books to comply with the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS). But distance learning en masse creates the opportunity for all kinds of digital learning solutions at all education levels, including animations, games, simulations, widgets, courses and assessments. Many of these elearning products are now being put to the test and can be developed in compliance with Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 standards that include features such as text-to-speech, font adjustments, and visual (alt-text) descriptions. These formats allow K-12, higher education and even research publishers to develop materials once and fulfill the unique requirements of every learner, as well as global requirements.

It is of course unclear how long schools and universities will remain shut down, though at this point it appears that so-called normal life will resume in phases. But just as remote working has moved into the realm of general acceptance, it stands to reason that widespread distance learning in one form or another will be with us for some time. As publishers adjust and increasingly roll out new digital and interactive content, accessibility compliance should remain both a moral and business imperative. If the coronavirus era teaches us anything, it should be that publishers are in the best position to help vulnerable learners.

Michael Groth is Director of Marketing at KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (formerly Cenveo Publisher Services) and longtime denizen of the scholarly publishing industry. He can be reached at mike.groth@kwglobal.com. 

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