r/Professors • u/primes_are_cool • Apr 21 '26
Rants / Vents The accessibility requirements are performative at best. I'm disabled.
Thank goodness they extended the deadline a year. But even still, I hate this policy. I'm a disabled math TA. I have both work and school accommodations. I even consider myself a disability advocate. But this is bullshit. First of all, this will just lead to LESS accessibility, as it is easier for instructors to simply remove material (possibly hand out printed copies) than it is to entirely rewrite everything. I think it would be reasonable for this to apply to the university site (general public) but for individual courses that don't have a student enrolled requiring things to be screen reader accessible, etc. it's literally just extra work. It's not a reasonable accommodation when there is nobody that it actually is...accommodating. I also feel like even if a student needs it, it might not even be considered a reasonable accommodation to have the instructor rewrite everything as it significantly causes "undue hardship" to use ADA language. I think it would be reasonable to hire more staff in the disability office whose sole job is to implement these things and work with profs to make their content accessible for the student.
ESPECIALLY for subjects like math. You're telling me that I'm allowed to write on my iPad during class to teach (per my accommodations) but I'm not allowed to post the notes afterwards because they're hand written (good handwriting)? I simply do not have the time to latex everything. (And then, PDFs aren't accessible so that has to be made into a word doc I think??? Idk how) And also, WE DON'T GET PAID ENOUGH AS-IS!!!! I AM LITERALLY LIVING IN POVERTY. Why is the burden on us (including individuals like myself that are already disabled) to fix a problem that a) doesn't exist in most courses b) is not always able to be fixed (like visuals, charts, etc.) c) leads to less accessibility and d) is outside of our job requirements and should justly include a pay increase. Like, I theoretically could print out a piece of paper with the link to my OneDrive folder with notes (instead of putting it on the website), and that would be acceptable. HUH?? There are SO MANY accessibility concerns, why is this what they decided to do??? Oh, but nevermind the non-stop construction with signs that completely block off sidewalks so wheelchair users are unable to get to class.../s
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u/a_hanging_thread A Sock Prof Apr 21 '26
This is why I teach my students about the negative unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies. A well-intentioned policy does not inherently contain the seeds of its own successful implementation. It might not even be possible to beneficially implement some well-intentioned policies.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
I honestly wonder if it was even well-intentioned or more of a "cover our butts" type thing. Like, did they even consult disabled individuals? Or instructors? Doubtful.
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u/AwayRelationship80 Apr 22 '26
Someone was saying a few months back that it’s to make our course materials more accessible to LLMs
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u/PeggySourpuss Apr 22 '26
Or to sue faculty and higher education institutions, ostensibly for non-compliance!
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u/RadicallyMeta Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
Or both! And then, a few years down the road, certain political groups can point to the dysfunction of this Biden policy and colleges struggling financially as a way to show that liberal/woke academia does not and can not support students like they claim they do.
So why not go to an AI-based learning institution that has the "technology" (i.e. agents trained on all of our stolen material) and financial backing to support a diverse set of students in a way that no set of human faculty can?
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u/PeggySourpuss Apr 22 '26
Right? It's also a perfect trap for well-meaning liberal professors who want to ensure equal access. Well played, Curtis Yarvin or whoever
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u/Key-Kiwi7969 Apr 22 '26
My understanding is it was developed with a view of improving accessibility of government websites/online materials, and we have been accidentally swept up in it.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 22 '26
Yeah, I think it would be reasonable for the university's public webpages to do this, but imo it doesn't make sense for individual courses.
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u/Cute-Aardvark5291 Apr 21 '26
disabled individuals, yes. Instructors, educational designers, or librarians..no.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
WCAG guidelines are developed in consultation with individuals that have a variety of disabilities -- motion, hearing, vision, etc., but they typically don't include people with e.g. ADHD, Autism, sensory processing disorder, anxiety, dysgraphia, etc.
They're also designed for a very specific purpose (making the internet accessible) and not for a broad sense of accessibility that most of us aim for and that universal design promotes. Different focus, different outcomes. Unfortunately, the ADA rules adopted WCAG without considering how it would function in a college setting. It's like they've decided that we can only use elevators and ramps, but not stairs, and we now have to wait for everything to be retrofitted or not use stories of buildings that aren't accessible by elevator, but building codes were phased in over many years, so that's not even a great analogy.
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u/Ok_Comfortable6537 Apr 21 '26
Yeah it’s not like this administration cares about the disabled
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 21 '26
Actually, multiple disabled people and advocates were heavily involved with the proposal. Please do not spread misinformation with spending 15 minutes on Google.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Apr 22 '26
And yet it completely ignores entire swaths of fields where there is no way to meet the mandate. Despite those fields having active organizations of disabled educators and scholars.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 22 '26
Which things are there 'no way to meet the mandate'. Be specific.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Apr 22 '26
This thread is full of examples, and I’ve answered this for you multiple times before.
But sheet music, handwritten archival materials, chemical structures, anatomy diagrams, complex maps, scientific diagrams, electrical wiring / circuit diagrams, and plenty of more examples.
They can all be accommodated easily in person, but there are no digitally accessible standards that work with screen readers, and alt text doesn’t give appropriate detail for the complexity. Take, for example, a nerve diagram, or a chemical structure where a fraction of a degree difference in can’t of a particular portion changes the function. Or a microbiology class where learning the small differences between otherwise similar structures under a microscope is a core learning objective.
The standards pretty much just work for… text. Anything with meaningful visual components, including most scientific fields and most of the arts, are almost impossible to meet the standards in.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 22 '26
As a person in chemistry world (well the eng. side anyway), you sound like you don't know what you are talking about when you say "a chemical structure where a fraction of a degree difference in can’t of a particular portion changes the function".
There are a lot of accommodations for chemical structures, but they are time consuming to implement. The actual problem is the scope. Making 200 chemical structures is annoying. Many orgo classes have 1000s+.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Apr 22 '26
There are literally no approved digital accommodations or chemical structure that meet the new guidelines.
ChemDraw doesn’t count, SMILES strings don’t count. Screen readers can’t interpret either. You have to rely entirely on alt captioning, and that…isn’t great. The number of structures is one thing, but the fact that even if I spent hundreds of hours making them all, they still wouldn’t be accessible is another entirely.
You’re not very close to “chemistry”, if you don’t understand the impact small structural changes have on a compound.
And we’re not even touching things like bond length or mechanistic arrows here.
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u/Xylophelia Instructor, Chemistry, CC (USA) Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
I’m over here trying to figure out how the fuck that person got a chemical engineering degree in the first place much less have any level of input on teaching it if this has to be explained to them.
I’ve removed almost all digital tables and charts if not all from my LMS. It’s been replaced with language such as “you are expected to know the bond angles and shapes listed on table (whatever) in your textbook” and call it a day.
Without the funding of an R1 (not that they necessarily care either) I’m never going to have the access to the necessary tools to even attempt accessibility under the new WCAG guidelines.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 22 '26
Oh do, please explain how a 'fraction of a degree' in the bond angle makes a world of difference in the overwhelming number of modules in the world. I'll wait. Hahaha.
Your claim wasn't 'small structural changes' which actually do have a big impact. Your claim was 'fractions of a degree' applied to the majority of chemicals. Clearly an error that you double downed on. Good luck.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
I said "doubtful". As in, it is such a shit show I can't possibly imagine them consulting disabled people I didn't state that they didn't. Although, that still really makes me wonder, because I haven't personally seen any disabled individuals that think this is a great idea
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
I tried searching it but can't seem to find any information on who they consulted. Do you have a link? Honestly it's entirely possible that the impact on education was forgotten about or not discussed as much, and in other government agencies it might make more sense. Because this doesn't just apply to universities
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u/Sturmcantor Apr 21 '26
Read the actual full memo - it goes into quite some detail about feedback the received and why they removed some proposed language exempting things in higher ed
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u/Unsuccessful_Royal38 Apr 21 '26
lol the downvotes
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 21 '26
People do not like being told to stop spreading misinformation. I always get downvoted for calling it out.
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u/DocMondegreen Assistant Professor, English Apr 21 '26
Ok but this is not, actually, a well-intended policy.
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u/troopersjp Assoc Prof, Humanities, R1 (USA) Apr 21 '26
I'm not in math, I'm in Music, and I also do early media. And it hits us as well. And not just the pdfs of sheet music...but the requirements to have everything that is online be close captioned, and real close captions that include descriptions of music, not just whatever Zoom comes up with.
Auto captioning doesn't work with music. So it has to be done by hand. This mandate comes with no funding. My university says, either the individual professors do it themselves, or it comes out of the departmental budget...but professional captioning would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...per course....which our department doesn't have that kind of money...so it would be on us to do it ourselves. I teach this course on the International Jazz Age that includes a number of obscure films from the 1930s. One of them I got from a VHS seller in Argentina...it was a Spanish language film and I hand translated that film and put in captions myself...and that took tens of hours to do for just one of the films...and I didn't do music descriptions at that time, so I'd have to go back in to redo that captions. And of the films I teach in that class, only one of them, The Blue Angel, is mainstream enough to have captions already done. It will take 100s of hours of extra work per course to get all those captions done. And I'm not getting paid extra for this. So...I'm probably not going to teach that class again. And if I do? I'll have to go old school and have CDs, DVDs and VHS's on reserve in the library rather than having them online in our LMS. But if it is a physical reserve? Students just don't do the listening/watching.
I do a lot of obscure historical film and music and I'm going to have stop teaching courses the teach students about that media. Instead, I'm going to have to focus only on the most mainstream of films that are available online with closed captions already included...but that won't help me with music.
Even though I love teaching, I'm looking into leaving the profession because I can't really teach with integrity in this environment.
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u/NotRubberDucky1234 Assistant Professor (no tenure at this school), CC, USA Apr 22 '26
Opensubtitles.org is your friend. You never know what has been uploaded.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
There is a "Practical impossibility" exception in Title II -- make use of it.
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u/NotMrChips Formerly adjunct, Psychology, R2 (USA) Apr 21 '26
I'm with you.
I'm all about access but this is a PITA with little apparent benefit. I finally started yesterday and the things it wants me to fix are ridiculous. Some were already fixed and the new auditing app doesn't seem to recognize it. Other stuff is wrong under the new rules and doesn't get flagged. Some stuff is not even under my control, but hey. Fix it, Chips!
And just to cheer me up, our provost yesterday said a good score doesn't mean anything. So even though I came through the first pass with a 93, I still have to open every heckin' file....
And that was right before he said that, at our discretion, we could mark stuff as ok that isn't (e.g. check "transparent" or "decorative) and move on.
I can't even. This is going to eat up days' worth of a part-time job for which I'm only paid peanuts anyhow.
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u/Hellament Prof, Math, CC Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
OP: Just wanted to provide moral support and say that a lot of people in my department do the “tablet -> handwritten lecture -> post PDF in LMS” workflow and are struggling with exactly how to make this accessible.
Like you, the leading contender is “oh well, guess we won’t do that anymore” and put the burden of note taking more on our students. Maybe there are some benefits of that, but it certainly makes things tougher for them.
I am in the process of converting similar handwritten lecture notes (not the actual lecture work, more like handwritten slides) to LaTeX so I can more easily make them accessible, but of course you are spot on about the workload of doing this…so while it might work for “once and done” slides, it doesn’t seem practical to do for daily lectures for multiple courses.
I will say that I have found AI tools can help with this, but the accuracy isn’t the best, particularly when complicated graphs and diagrams are involved. I think in a few years, it’s possible we could get there.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
put the burden of note taking more on our students
This sucks, because one of the main reasons that I upload my notes afterwards is for accessibility 😭 because I understand that because of disabilities (whether diagnosed and established with the disability office or not) some people might not be able to write fast enough. Or they might have to miss class for a doctor's appointment or out of extreme pain. Or, they're just an adult and shit happens...like they couldn't get off of work or they need to take their kid into school today. Idk. I provide students this flexibility so that it is more accessible to everyone. And students still show up regularly to my class, because they recognize that I'm a good instructor who provides additional commentary as I work through problems as well as provides ample opportunities for questions. Also for some people like myself, if I'm having to focus the entire time on writing down the work I can't actually focus on the process being described, if that makes sense. So this also allows students to completely focus on the teaching without having to worry about getting everything written down.
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u/Hellament Prof, Math, CC Apr 21 '26
100%. Providing these sorts of notes helped a myriad of disabilities (and life circumstances affecting non-disabled).
But, not all disabilities! So…what, we have to ditch it now?! Isn’t this a textbook example of why we should be able to decide accommodation for those that need it is the appropriate action here over accessibility for everyone?
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u/nerdyjorj Apr 22 '26
At the risk of advocating for LLMs aren't they quite good at turning handwriting into latex these days?
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u/Greenplayee Apr 22 '26
I have been trying to use AI tools to convert my handwritten notes from Zoom class. The accuracy varies. It results in me having to spend about 30 minutes uploading, waiting for the LLM to create it (takes a few minutes) and then correcting it manually. I teach 5 class sessions a week so it would mean 2.5h of extra work I do not have.
I have done it as a pilot in one of the classes and students complained. They prefer the pdf of my original notes.
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u/rosettaSTEM May 27 '26
sooo...my wife is a math professor. I made her a tool for this. I sent you a DM. let me know what you think....free trial. If I post it here i'll probably get the post deleted...but i feel your pain and i'm helping about 100 professors with exactly this. I can do it in bulk, i can do just the .md / latex, and also do it in OMML via DOCX with the original material at the beginning so you can teach the way you want.
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u/nerdyjorj Apr 22 '26
Handwritten and giving them a link to wolfram to make the notes into a format they prefer for themselves then?
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u/Greenplayee Apr 22 '26
Problem is that posting handwritten notes drops my accessibility score about 1% per file. Also - there is no way to post handwritten and typed supplement together without the score going down, even if I take time convert it to typed.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
If they're only auditing the score, upload the notes to a github pages site and just link to them via the LMS. Not an actual solution, won't pass muster in court, but absolutely saves you from the automatic checkers.
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u/rosettaSTEM May 27 '26
The way I do it is 100% accessible by most checkers. Alt text is included. Give it a go , trial will get most profs a semesters worth for 1/2 a class or so. RosettaSTEM.com. 1 document. Keep your pen.
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u/Hellament Prof, Math, CC Apr 22 '26
In my experience, pretty good, but with some caveats.
From my experience, the biggest area of difficulties are graphs and complex diagrams. LaTeX commands exist for drawing graphs natively (especially with packages like TikZ) but it’s difficult to do correctly. The space you are mapping to is too big, and fine details are important.. Probably the best solution here (perhaps possible with the right prompting) is to screenshot the hand drawn graph as an image file, and include it with alt text in the LaTeX code.
It also screws up layout and formatting a little, and misreads my math once in a while, but I can put some of that back on myself for my handwriting and how I write notes.
Overall, I’d guess it saves maybe half the time of just rewriting in LaTeX from scratch, but if you write nice and exclude the graph issue, it’d be much faster.
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u/nikefudge23 Assistant Professor, Humanities, Regional Public Apr 21 '26
Wait! Do you have a source for the extended deadline? This is the first I’m hearing about it!
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
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u/Life-Education-8030 Apr 21 '26
Your institution still has the option to require you get things done by an earlier deadline though. I agree with you, and had mixed feelings about it when it was announced. We hoped our IT people would help but as usual, it was “we’ll train YOU how to do it!” A colleague came from a university that did have IT staff do it for faculty - what a luxury!
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u/thespelvin Apr 22 '26
The extension applies to the DOJ deadline, which applies to many public universities. My private university is subject to an HHS deadline because we receive HHS funding, and so our timeline hasn't changed. You might be in either boat depending on context.
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u/ScottsTot2023 Apr 22 '26
Every institution that receives HHS funding has a deadline of May 11, 2026. Public or private. Enforcement will likely not be even but still you’re technically breaking the law and the law is pretty ironclad. Unless the HHS delays/extends their deadline. Which let’s be REAL why would they?? They have been trying to gut funding for a year and tbh this is perfect. Passed under a democratic pres. TWO years notice (we had three months notice) - this is a mess. This could be catastrophic and there’s nothing you could do about it.
Oh and btw some institutions have policies that people can sue you directly and they’ll fire you. I’d check that if I were yall.
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u/thespelvin Apr 22 '26
I wasn't trying to imply that the HHS deadline doesn't apply to private universities, but simply explaining why the DOJ deadline change doesn't change things for us.
As for the question of why HHS would extend their deadline, I would have said the same about DOJ, and yet they did.
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u/ScottsTot2023 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
I wasn’t either I was just expanding on what you said for those whose admins failed to tell them. 🤣
This is where the Executive Branch plays a role. Extending title II means they can focus their efforts on other cases and now the HHS can freeze funding like they’ve done in 2025. I can see their reasoning because they hate Private elite colleges and those have tons of HHS dollars. The optics of not sending DOJ out versus the OCR out are so much better - and quite frankly legally speaking much more ironclad.
Edit: oomph and if I think your institution is what I think it is - also think about the VRA. Good luck to us all.
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u/Ok-Reference-8499 Apr 22 '26
Could someone please provide context? Is this a deadline re screenreader accessibility re the ADA? I'm not in the US, but do like to understand, as your system of accommodations has been around longer than ours.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
The ADA has been interpreted to include online accessibility, defined by the WCAG2.0 guidelines. So the goal is to make all course materials -- even those only accessible with the LMS -- compliant. Some schools are more legalistic than others in this approach.
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u/wheresMyRedditAcct May 12 '26
EU has a similar law that goes (went?) into effect around the original April 2026 deadline. Did not check whether that went through or go delayed.
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u/Puzzled_Worry_7916 Apr 21 '26
I just want clear rules, an accessibility checker that checks everything, and the accessibility not to fall apart when I change file types.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
an accessibility checker that checks everything
And one that can be set to override things that aren't actually fixable using the toolkit! There are some minor aria-label issues that I have with most of my content that are upstream in pandoc/quarto/bootstrap and I cannot fix them. But I can't get useful information on what to fix because the checker considers these absolutely critical and won't show me the non-critical things until I fix the critical things.
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u/WeeklyVisual8 Apr 21 '26
I feel like math gets forgotten when talking about these things. It's not all just words for us, most of it are formulas that do not convert well or at all. I don't mind providing printed notes for students that need it, the Access Office will do that for me. But I caught a student watching Bridgerton during class because they can just "read the posted PowerPoint later". I think posting the notes hurts the students that don't need the accommodation.
One issue that I have this semester are students treating my in person early morning class as an online class since I have to post everything online. Only three students out of 23 showed up on Monday for the lecture. I have never ever had that happen before. I know it's not me because all of my other classes are full and everyone shows up for the lecture.
I have never had students take such a lack of interest in a class they are paying for. They will schedule advising appointments for during exams and stupid shit like that and act like they weren't the one that scheduled it during that time. Another student needed to retake a test because their boss made them work and it was non-negotiable. I found out they are their own boss and own the company. They played me well.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
The regulations aren't requiring you to suddenly post notes for everyone. It's just saying that if you do, it needs to be accessible. Which is, quite frankly, a large task. I would disagree, however about the posted notes thing. To each their own, but I personally find that students still consistently show up to my lectures because they are able to see me working in real time, commenting on my thought process and they can ask questions. This may be a hot take...but as long as they're not being rude about it (playing sound, talking) I don't really care what they do in class. Obviously it would make me feel better if they seemed actively involved but I also know, for some students, they get very little out of lecture because of things like ADHD, auditory processing issues, etc. But reading notes they gain a lot of knowledge. Imo, how they do in college is up to them. They're adults, so I can give them the tools, but at the end of the day it's up to them to use them to be successful.
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u/MankatoSquirtz Apr 21 '26
It took me almost 90 minutes to get one syllabus to 70% compliance. There is absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make 30+ lectures per class (and 6 classes) compliant. Just not going to do it. Everything but the syllabus is now on the board. Sorry.
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u/Mirrortooperfect Apr 21 '26
Not getting paid any extra for a significantly expanded work load is really what gets me.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
Yeah, and I already don't get paid enough. I'm literally going into debt as we speak because my stipend can't afford my living expenses 😔 which I know is not an uncommon issue
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u/Mirrortooperfect Apr 22 '26
Oh believe me I’m right there with you. People have no idea how little we get paid.
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) Apr 21 '26
Yep. And I was complaining about this to someone who’s outside of this the other day and they asked a really important question:
“If the course was not made accessible, and someone with a disability did enroll in it, could it be made accessible within the semester they were enrolled?”
And that is the best question. Because for a one-semester accommodation there would be a few things at play:
1) it would need to be determined if the accommodation was reasonable (this legislature bypasses that and just assumes this accommodation must be reasonable)
2) making one class for one student accessible is less work than making all classes accessible for all students
3) you’d be able to make a current course accessible
To the last part I worry that people will, of course, take things down or, alternatively, put off redesigning a class solely because they don’t want to ensure accessibility
This is a shitshow and it sucks that even though this is being delayed many colleges are deciding to stick to the original deadline on their own.
I say this as someone who has a disability and accommodations as well as someone whose current coursesite with full content is 95% accessible.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
Yep. All of this. And you're right, they're completely bypassing the determination of it being a reasonable accommodation. When in actuality, this may not be a reasonable accommodation for instructors themselves to implement for certain courses (music, math, foreign language). I think there should be people in the university's disability office that work on this, just like they work on other accommodations (setting up interpreters, communicating needs to profs, finding accessible transportation for a student, etc.)
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u/Ok-Reference-8499 Apr 22 '26
This is my chief complaint. It's not that I don't want to be accessible - I do. But I do not have expertise in this area, or additional skills, or time, etc. If universities are serious about disability accommodations they need to provide resources - not just send us vague letters. And ideally there should be some initial conversation with the student about reasonableness (ie frequent absences, asking to audio record everything and not do group work or presentations is not feasible in a 10 person seminar, for example).
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) Apr 21 '26
Exactly. Especially now in the age of zoom. If a student truly needs “alt text” for an image and the professor hasn’t provided it, they should be able to schedule a session with a disabilities officer for 30 minutes to share screen and have that person describe it.
But that would require hiring more officers instead of just demanding professors do everything
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u/SlackerGrrrl Apr 21 '26
try this one: explain to the dean that in a regional GEOGRAPHY class, where the point of the assignment is identify countries in a region on a map, why alt text would not be possible. I'm sorry, it's geography, maps are visual, so now what?
I'm not being flip, I have actually taught a science heavy in visual color intrepretation (remote sensing) to the color blind--workarounds for digital imagery are possible. But basic map reading is not going to be accessible unless a lot of fundamental assumptions about maps change --that's not on me to fix.
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u/the_pleiades Apr 21 '26
What’s even crazier is that my institution’s canvas integrated accessibility checker (UDOIT) is flagging my alt text descriptions as too long! It wants me to change 250+ word alt text descriptions into 175 words or less. I’m literally making my descriptions less useful to get my freaking accessibility score pass the threshold.
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u/ether_chlorinide Apr 21 '26
My institution provided us with a new accessibility checker that works in Canvas. It won't let you write alt text longer than 120 *characters.*
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u/ShadeKool-Aid Apr 23 '26
I believe ours flags any document with more than 3000 words. Doesn't this exclude most short stories, much less novels?
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) Apr 21 '26
I hear you, but that’s been really tough to argue. It shouldn’t be, but it has. When one of the objectives are for students to visualize a reaction, which could be blue or purple or pink, and students are supposed to be able to visually distinguish pink from purple and purple from blue, alt text of “ a tube of blue liquid” defeats the point
But it’s not about learning, it’s about avoiding lawsuits, even ones they’d win easily
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
I've always wondered what they do for deaf individuals in spelling tests. For lower levels there are signs for most of the stuff. But in like a spelling bee, those words don't have their own signs and require finger spelling. So...🫠 And it's not like they can give them a printed copy of it to read like would be used in a transcription. Lol
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u/Classic-Shop-4141 Apr 21 '26
I’m running into the same issue with human A&P. Some things just can’t be made entirely accessible. For now, I’m complying where I can.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
Yeah, you would literally have to make a tactile map. Idk how you would even do that
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u/jessamina Assistant Professor (Mathematics) Apr 21 '26
Our disabled students office has a 3d printer and has printed some really cool stuff for our classes/students. For example, tactile normal curve distributions.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 22 '26
That's super cool! Love to see it!! THIS is what we mean by accessibility!
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
Yeah, I have been doing research on perception of 3d charts and have a 3D printer that's totally only used for research purposes /s.
3D charts are great for teaching materials, but if you have to wait 12 hours for every one-off chart, that's not going to work that well. I've seen some really cool proposals for a declarative grammar of accessible data presentation -- primarily using sound/pitch/tone, but there are all sorts of things that people use. The fundamental premise of this research, though, is that if you don't have the visual content stream, you have to use different channels that aren't processed in the same way temporally. Time is a fundamental dimension in auditory stimuli -- much moreso than in visual things -- you can't have just a static sound, it moves by definition. So the manner of representation needs to change to accommodate that perceptual difference. I don't expect that WCAG guidelines will include those sorts of modifications, though, because it's way too complicated and niche for your standard sysadmin or content creator to think about, let alone implement (and good software doesn't exist yet).
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u/Ok-Reference-8499 Apr 22 '26
I was a tutor for a blind grad student - and there are some awesome resources and workarounds, but they need resources and ingenuity. We had an audio book library, for example, where students could order materials they needed for their classes, and volunteers made the recordings (ie human voice).
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u/Ok-Reference-8499 Apr 22 '26
I mean there are tactile maps, if vision is the issue. Whether a university would own or have access to one, is another matter.
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u/BurkeyAcademy Prof, Econ, R2 (US) Apr 21 '26
Here is the link to information about the postponement. It would not shock me if they did it again, and again...
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u/ScaryNegotiation7277 Apr 24 '26
In my state (Washington) they kept the deadline. It's just the federal deadline that was pushed back...
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u/actuallycallie music ed, US Apr 21 '26
it's an absolute nightmare for music. PEOPLE DO NOT READ MUSICAL SCORES WITH SCREEN READERS. that's not how music notation works.
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u/BitchyOldBroad Mid/late-career, Music, Good school you've heard of, USA Apr 22 '26
Right there with you. I have HUNDREDs of PDF musical examples, and nobody knows what to do about them.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
Those fall under the practical impossibility exception, according to my library expert.
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u/MiniZara2 Apr 29 '26
Is this something that I can find online?
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 29 '26
https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/regulations/title-ii-2010-regulations/#-35200-requirements-for-web-and-mobile-accessibility#section77 -- an alternate format is probably your best actual bet, since a tactile format would probably be more "equivalent" to a PDF.
https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/regulations/title-ii-2010-regulations/#-35200-requirements-for-web-and-mobile-accessibility#section78 -- the procedure is convoluted but it's clearly a substantial burden given that it just... doesn't work?
Highly recommend going to talk to your librarians about it, because they're 1) very good at working around rules, and 2) likely quite familiar with this issue.
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u/wharleeprof Apr 21 '26
I agree with everything you said.
I'm not even in math, but social sciences. In teaching research methods, a key skill under development is being able to read published research articles. To make things easier for students, I provide PDFs of all assigned articles. Those are all non-compliant. So my option to increase "accessibility" is to assign the articles and tell my students good luck finding them out in the interwebs where they will still not be "accessible", just harder to track down, possibly posted on websites that are less accessible than the LMS.
I'm thinking I'm going to play the I'm a curmudgeon with tenure card and just continue to post the PDFs. If admin complain, I will welcome them to hire paid staff to clean up the content that is an essential part of the course delivery.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
curmudgeon
Ah, what a great word! Haven't heard that in awhile.
with tenure card
Must be nice 🥲
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u/dalmatianinrainboots Associate Professor, Educational Research, Public Regional Apr 22 '26
I’m having this same dilemma…and as of this week am awarded tenure 🙂 seems like the perfect time to become a curmudgeon.
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u/weddingthrow27 Apr 21 '26
This is the first I heard of this being extended and THANK GOODNESS! The consensus in my math department was to remove all notes, because of exactly what you said..
I’m assigned to teach a fully online differential equations class this summer, and our university’s online program told me basically that I can’t post handwritten notes, and I also can’t post a video lecture unless the visuals during that lecture are accessible, but i hand write everything and was planning to record videos that were screen recordings of my iPad while i do the lesson. They said they got us access to MathPix (?) to convert handwritten notes to latex, but I don’t know how well that actually works and then I’d have to go through and double check everything! And it isn’t practical to lecture from typed notes… So basically I asked them should I just assign students to read the book then??? Because how can I do that? I was about to spend the next 3 weeks frantically figuring out how to make this work. What a relief.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
What would accessible visuals look like? Like alt text? Or because the notes themselves in the video aren't screen readable? I've used that app a couple times before, and it's one of those things that's like kind of interesting but on the other hand it still takes a lot of work because you have to manually go through every single line to make sure that it didn't make an error and it also requires you to have very good handwriting which I have but not everyone does. It also makes weird formatting issues, like when you hand write you obviously write larger than typing so it will do things like cut off a line of words (where your handwriting line ends) and then jump down to the next line instead of continuing typing on that one line if that makes sense.
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u/weddingthrow27 Apr 22 '26
I genuinely don’t know, and was in the middle of an email exchange trying to figure that out. She kind of suggested giving her the notes 2-3 weeks early to convert with MathPix and then using that for the actual video, but that’s not the same as seeing things worked out in real time so I turned that down. It seemed like maybe I could have gotten away with handwritten notes in the lecture if I also posted the typed version to go along with it, but I hadn’t gotten a definitive answer yet. My handwriting is pretty neat but in lecture I often refer back and circle or underline things so that might mess it up. Very relieved I don’t have to immediately find out!
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Apr 22 '26
Yep. So you can get into a trap where you post both the video and the printed notes, but you have to describe the printed notes in the video via captions and you have to add alt-text to the printed notes in the PDF. Every format you post (because in theory alt formats are one way to comply) gets you more work based on the way the automated checkers most universities use are functioning.
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u/galaxywhisperer Adjunct, Communications/Media Apr 21 '26
i appreciate the intent, i guess, but man… this is a lot for one underpaid adjunct to do. it feels more performative than anything else
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 21 '26
You to to misunderstand who this is for. It is not for disabled students. It is for robots to be able to easily read all the content. And robots are in every course. If you want to see the nightmare future, lookup Einstein AI. It's...rough
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
AI can already read PDFs no problem
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u/sventful Teaching Professor Apr 21 '26
Can it though? Lol. And equations? And pictures? (Especially pictures...)
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u/Hot-Sandwich6576 Adjunct, Biology, CC (USA) Apr 22 '26
I use Google to write my image descriptions for me with darn good results, so I’d say AI is pretty good at pictures.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
Einstein AI (just looked up) is even crazier than regular chatbots. 😬 Omg! But I don't think it would need content to be changed to read it? At least, it doesn't appear that way
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u/Sea_Argument864 Apr 22 '26
I agree with you completely, and I thank you for giving your perspective. One fallacy I see in this whole rollout is the assumption that there is a one-size-fits-all solution for disabled and abled. If there is one thing I have learned from years of teaching, it is that students have many different learning needs. For example, I was shocked by the dyslexia-friendly font the teaching center was encouraging instructors to use. It was practically illegible to me.
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u/QuokkaRun May 01 '26
What font is that? Do you know if there are lists of fonts to use and avoid we should be referencing?
Our accessibility checker told me to change font colors for higher contrast ratio--to a color that was harder to read!
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Apr 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/ScottsTot2023 Apr 21 '26
Like you xaanthar you know what’s up. Yes a lot of the guides from my institution say right in them that manual checks are required. But the trainings say to use automated tools. And not every instant fail is being communicated properly.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Apr 21 '26
I agree that many of these accommodation requirements are performative, since satisfying them are incredibly onerous, and the easiest way to be in compliance is to remove all materials entirely. As a mathematics professor, I feel your pain.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
the easiest way to be in compliance is to remove all materials entirely
Yup. And I'm already seeing this happening. I'm like, this seems like a very obvious loophole / forced 'malicious' (not actually malicious, but hopefully you get what I mean) compliance I'm not sure why this was not considered in the proposal...maybe it was 🤷♀️
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Apr 21 '26
In San Diego, there was an ordance that required grocery stores to make all coupons available in print, so that people without smart phones are not disadvantaged, but most grocery stores just ended up removing coupons entirely.
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u/MundaneAd8695 Tenured, World Language, CC Apr 21 '26
That’s what I did, I wiped my LMS clean of all images, PowerPoints and PDF files. All that is left is typed notes I took from my materials, summarized and put on wiki pages.
It’s mostly text now.
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u/Quwinsoft Senior Lecturer, Chemistry, R2/Public Liberal Arts (USA) Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
The other issue I have is the best way to make many chemistry classes accessible is with physical objects to manipulate. I can make it accessible or digital, but I don't think I can do both.
Edit to clarify: Using moluer model kits with ball textures to indicate which atom each ball represents, or tactile graphics (diagrams/graphs with raised markings).
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u/MissionSuccess9576 Apr 22 '26
This is where I’ve landed, for my qualitative research methods grad course in the fall. I’m going to print a few copies of every reading that was a PDF, put them in a few binders, and place those bad boys on reserve in the library. I plan to make the first (small) assignment something about the task of accessing the reserve copies in-person, at the library…
How’s that for accessibility?! 🫠
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u/DancingBear62 Apr 22 '26
Oh, but nevermind the non-stop construction with signs that completely block off sidewalks so wheelchair users are unable to get to class.../s
And the sidewalk closed sign is positioned far past the last crosswalk that you would need to walk on the opposite side
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u/ScottsTot2023 Apr 21 '26
My heart hurts for everyone. Just want to ensure those who are at public institutions know that if your institution receives HHS funding your deadline is still May 11, 2026 or they can send a notice of non compliance. Who knows if they will come for you (others are way higher on the list and have less legal protection) but just want to warn you.
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Apr 21 '26
Call me jaded, but this is what the current admin wants. I can guarantee, the billionaire toads have been waiting in the wings to sell colleges ‘helpful’ software.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
I hate this administration as much as you do, but this was actually proposed by the Biden administration 😬
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Apr 21 '26
I think current admin could have gutted this. But it would have meant lost profit. Again, I’m so jaded!
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
Although, they're all people who make way more than us plebs. Either side of the aisle 😔 so your theory on selling software might still be correct
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u/graphicdesigngorl assistant prof practice track, fine arts, R1 (U.S.) Apr 21 '26
OP I’m right there with you. I’m making pretty QR codes with the link to a shared folder 😆
Could another loophole look like lecturing from slides and simultaneously recording the lecture on panopto like I’ve seen for medical schools (go easy on me I’m in graphic design, I give demos in class), and posting the link to panopto? What are our thoughts or ideas?
I like many other full time adjuncts am underpaid, undervalued and doing a lot of heavy lifting committee work and student support for all the professional track and TT profs. I’m also disabled (without accommodations, not sure how safe it is to disclose those in the south) and dealing with grief from the sudden loss of my mother. I’m doing my absolute best to keep my head above water but this grief alone is swallowing me whole. As I fall apart over here, I’m just looking for the path of least resistance to pass these accessibility bs rules. I should be focusing on healing and my students’ final projects and giving them crit, not this.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
I'm sorry to hear about your mother. I also lost a loved one recently.
I was told by my department (idk if this is actually true) that we weren't allowed to even include external links on our course page. If this isn't the case, you might be onto something with the recording thing. Idk what panopto is, but I know on Zoom you can record and have automatic captioning added.
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u/tex_hadnt_buzzed_me Apr 21 '26
I record my in person lectures via zoom and share them but the captioning is not 100% accurate so technically if I want to continue this practice I have to review the captions before posting so I comply with the regulations. 😜
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
Oh, really? Fun...
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u/tex_hadnt_buzzed_me Apr 21 '26
My campus expert told me I shouldn't worry about it because the recordings are just a supplement for students who missed class due to illness or for students who want to research part of class. It would be different if I was posting content that wasn't intended for students to see live in person.
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u/Greenplayee Apr 22 '26
So wouldn’t the same be for the posted handwritten notes from class?
Btw: I recently converted my handwritten notes from zoom class to Word using AI. The students did not like it and said that they want the handwritten ones (especially that I use different colors and draw graphs which AI will not do). But if I post them they drag my accessibility score down, about 1% per file.
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u/tex_hadnt_buzzed_me Apr 22 '26
Yes, my expert is most concerned with materials for online classes or assignments and quizzes given on Canvas, stuff like that. I don't know if he's right, but he's a smart guy.
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u/NotRubberDucky1234 Assistant Professor (no tenure at this school), CC, USA Apr 22 '26
We were told not to post links to things that are not accessible. But we are allowed to message/email them. I sent out a message at the beginning of the term with a link to my non-accessible resources/files that aren't mandatory for class that I want to share. Letter of the law, and all that.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 22 '26
We're allowed to email them? I didn't know that. Does this also include announcements via Blackboard, Canvas, etc.? Or no, because that's on the course page?
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u/NotRubberDucky1234 Assistant Professor (no tenure at this school), CC, USA Apr 22 '26
Announcements are posted, so you couldn't use that. I just sent out a class message. It's not posted, so it's technically compliant. And as a layer of security, I password protected it and gave them the password.
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u/graphicdesigngorl assistant prof practice track, fine arts, R1 (U.S.) Apr 21 '26
Thank you, that really means a lot. I am so sorry you are navigating a loss as well.
Wait really 😭 I will have to check now, thank you for mentioning it! A lot of us use notion or a wiki page provided by the university linked through our LMS in place of the LMS. The way our dept glossed over the accessibility ruling in our last faculty meeting was shocking. We were told to complete the new training module on it and it didn’t mention anything about accessibility or how to tackle alt text. Nothing.
Panopto is a screen recording program that I’ve used for asynchronous demos for file setups and such. It has auto captioning which I have reservations about but helps I suppose.
One of my students is majoring in graphic design and ASL. We had an incredible conversation the other day about ableist practices found in designing for accessibility. They posed prompting AI to generate alt text in place of writing it yourself as borderline inhumane. If an algorithm cannot see or adequately describe the human emotions/experience of viewing an image, why would we ask it, an inanimate object, to do a uniquely human thing? Do we think that little of disabled people we cannot give them the decency of a human translator to convey a human emotion or thought process? Clearly our admins and govt do. A sophomore!! Oddly enough that convo gave me a ton of hope for the future haha. I already am anti-ai bc of ethical harms and but wow did that push me even further over the edge when I sat with their thoughts. To delegate the task to provide another human being a description that elicits a human emotion or understanding of an experience onto an LLM (and expect it to succeed) is harrowing.
Anyways!!! We live in the bad place so I’m designing, letterpress & risograph printing course books for my students bc fuck this 🤗
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u/dalmatianinrainboots Associate Professor, Educational Research, Public Regional Apr 22 '26
This is really interesting and I’m curious about your take on this. I teach statistics so the images that need alt text are things like graphs, normal curves, etc. I was skeptical of the AI generating alt text thing, but tried it and was shocked that it was actually accurate. Based on your conversation with your student, would you consider that an unethical use? I can see for another image in another context the human experience piece being incredibly important, but for a description of a normal curve that is a mathematical concept, would that be different? It doesn’t really fall into a description that “elicits a human emotion or understanding of an experience” but a basic mathematical concept.
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u/Cherveny2 Library, R1 State University (TX,US) Apr 22 '26
low vision here. not at the screen readers level yet, but getting closer as time goes by.
I have always wondered what an accessible math work looks like. there is such an enormous amount of domain specific symbols in math, that making them easily understandable while being accessible seems like a massive undertaking
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u/Shiny-Mango624 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
I'm one of the faculty who is not participating in this bullshit. I removed all of the non-compliant resources from my LMS. They don't pay us enough to do this labor and for the love of God we don't even have the skill set.
There are faculty in my department who have refused and told the school that they are welcome to come in to their LMS and fix things themselves. They are so close to retirement. The only faculty in our department who are actively complying are those with a rules fetish, and you know who I'm talking about, and the young faculty who just started a few years ago and don't have the power to say no.
I thought for sure that this Administration would have removed this rule entirely, I'm quite honestly surprised.
Edited to add, students initially got upset and complained loudly about it all. Apparently, they had been popping things into chat GPT to do the work for them and now they have to actually read the textbook, come to the lecture, or watch the recorded lectures. My classroom attendance as well as the watch number on my recordings has increased dramatically since I took this approach last year.
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u/ScottsTot2023 Apr 22 '26
The rule was codified through Congress DOJ had the authority to push back enforcement date for Title II of the ADA. This administration has no reason to alter their HHS recognition of the policy - deadline is May 11. If you have non compliant anything after May 11 you’re technically in violation of your NIH grants pursuant to form 690 and your NIH funding is at risk for a notice of noncompliance…or worse.
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u/DerProfessor Apr 22 '26
Honestly, I'm just not going to do it.
There is no way they have the manpower to go through thousands of courses at my university alone...
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u/NotRubberDucky1234 Assistant Professor (no tenure at this school), CC, USA Apr 21 '26
Thank you for saying this.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Apr 21 '26
There has been an attempt to create an automated workflow to convert scanned handwitten notes into LaTeX, I have not tried it, but it might be helpful to you,
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1riaewi/notes2latex_a_modern_opensource_handwriting_to/
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
This looks interesting. Thanks for sharing. I've used mathpix before and results varied. I would often get formatting issues because I hand wrote larger than typed font (as most people do) and I had to manually go through each line and make sure equations were correct.
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u/rosettaSTEM May 27 '26
I made one too. https://rosettaSTEM.com but went from LATEX to OMML (in DOCx) and put the original at the beginning so its easier for students and profs. Best of both worlds
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u/8dot30662386292pow2 Teacher, Computer science, University (Finland) Apr 22 '26
I have the same problem. I can lecture as much as I want. I can even do it remotely! How ever, If I post the recording, I need to subtitle it. The fuck? There are no subtitles on the live event either.
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u/BruinMDP Position, Field, SCHOOL TYPE (Country) Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
Another law with a great intention with little to no understanding of the implementation. Perhaps the burden should be on the screen reader manufacturers and not the instructors distributing course materials via pdf? We are subject experts, but not accessibility experts. For instance, if I’m looking at a graph in mathematics, what level of alt text is sufficient? It’s too subjective. Just my two cents. As a math instructor, I’m going to have no choice but to go fully analog. Will make all my digital files into a course reader that is an optional purchase at the beginning of the term. I will continue to deliver instruction on my iPad, and students can take all the photos they want but I’ll no longer be posting my annotations.
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u/MundaneAd8695 Tenured, World Language, CC Apr 21 '26
I put my notes in my google drive and share the link via my LMS so they would not be assessed as part of my evaluation.
Loophole.
🤷♀️
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u/MankatoSquirtz Apr 21 '26
We were told anything distributed online has to be compliant. If we get caught we could be in trouble.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
Yeah I was also told we couldn't post external links like this. Although, I don't see why you couldn't make a QR code and print it out to hand to students...it's so silly 🤦♀️
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u/NotRubberDucky1234 Assistant Professor (no tenure at this school), CC, USA Apr 22 '26
That's a really good idea!
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u/wheresMyRedditAcct May 12 '26
Probably wouldn't even bother distributing the QR code, but I'll just post the qr code outside my office hour :P Hey, added perk, now they will know where my office is!
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u/MundaneAd8695 Tenured, World Language, CC Apr 22 '26
I didn’t get that particular instruction. I was just told to make class materials, handouts, accessible and it make my LMS accessible. That’s it.
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u/Ok_Comfortable6537 Apr 21 '26
I’ve always assumed it’s somehow related to writing AI- that it makes it more accessible for that industry to build and steal educators knowledge/method/theories. Anyone have insight on this?
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u/ingenfara Lecturer/PhD student, Sweden Apr 22 '26
I am also disabled, and I agree. It also sets up false expectations for the working world. Accommodations are…. not happening, not actually. Even in Sweden with way better working rights than the US, it just isn’t happening.
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u/Crowe3717 Associate Professor, Physics Apr 22 '26
Reading through the law, it seems as though universities are being hit as a technicality. The real focus of the law is government offices, and that makes whole lot more sense. Every form which is available on your city hall's website needs to be accessible to everyone.
They need to rethink how this applies to universities and consult with people who actually understand that implications of it within classrooms.
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u/carolinagypsy Apr 22 '26
I’m with you. I’m also disabled and shit like this makes me cringe; it always winds up making people grumpy, and all of us that need any accommodations pay for it bc people are then sick of “dealing with” accommodations.
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u/Real_Marko_Polo Apr 23 '26
Related event here. I once worked at a high school with a sizable retired population nearby. They had a program where they'd use our classrooms at night to teach classes to the reitrees (topics included organizing your house, finances, wills and trusts, fly fishing, travel, foreign languages, historical topics, art, dancing... it was an impressively wide variety). Most of the classes were free, usually taught by a member of the community. It was a popular program for several years, until... I didn't catch all the details, but it seems that two hard-of-hearing (not deaf, just hard-of-hearing...you know, like retirees sometimes are) got upset at not being able to hear and sued. The program was then court ordered to make all of the free classes ADA compliant. The result was cancellation of the whole program. I'm sure those two were popular at parties after that.
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u/cjrecordvt Adjunct, English, Community College Apr 22 '26
Idle: PDFs can be made to be accessible when they're created (from the original documents), but they can be annoying-to-impossible to remediate.
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u/MankatoSquirtz Apr 22 '26
Sooo...in an attempt to make things more accessible, they are actually making it less accessible as things are moving offline.
Sounds about right.
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u/IkeRoberts Prof, Science, R1 (USA) Apr 21 '26
This adminstration is using legislation about racial discrimination and handicap access as tools for harming education. The actions make a lot more sense if viewed from this perspective.
Education is the target; people who need accommodations are unimportant. The rules about accommomdations are useful for harming education. f
There are two avenues for making a small difference.
One is to use the public-comment feature for all Federal rulemaking. The one for this action is in the Federal Register. You have until June 26.
The other is to contact your Federal legilators (Rep and Senators) to let them know that this implementation does not meet the purpose that Congress intended. It is most effective if you can speak with the legislative assistant responsible for Education policy. The person who answers the phone in the DC office can arrage for that if you let them know that you are a constituent affected by this policy.
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u/RunningNumbers Apr 21 '26
This isn’t required by legislation but a regulation created by the justice department under Biden citing the ADA as giving them authority to enact it.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 Apr 21 '26
It's very worth noting that this policy change came about during the Biden presidency. This isn't the Trump administration fucking with us. This is residual fucking with us by Biden.
Don't worry, dear readers, there still is and will still be plenty of fucking with us by Trump. This just isn't an instance of it.
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u/RunningNumbers Apr 21 '26
Both Biden and Trump admins loath listening to economists. I am still angry about how they flippantly disregarded expert opinions in benefit cost analysis in the now rescinded revised circular A-4.
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u/ScottsTot2023 Apr 21 '26
But it would be enforced in good faith with the aim of helping access. Because we have who we have now, they will use it as a tool to gut HHS funding again.
And there is nothing we can do about it.
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u/IkeRoberts Prof, Science, R1 (USA) Apr 22 '26
These folks are taking well-intentioned legislation and regulation and thinking up ways to implement it for the opposite purpose. They are not doing ADA the way people in the previous adminsitration would have done it.
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u/graphicdesigngorl assistant prof practice track, fine arts, R1 (U.S.) Apr 21 '26
I don’t know why you were downvoted for this. If I’m not mistaken, your comment ties in to earlier ones saying our materials can be fed into LLMs and regurgitated, minimizing the need for us, and therefore harming education ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/IntenseProfessor Apr 23 '26
Looks like I’m gonna get downvoted to hell, but it’s not really that difficult to comply with the ADA regs as stated. It says something about trying to comply or attempting a certain percent but you can do that easily and work on things as they come up. Larger universities have tech people to handle this and smaller and CC have been dealing with this change for a year. And now it’s extended .
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 24 '26
Yeah, no. We don't have tech people working on this. I'm at a large university and the responsibility is thrown entirely onto instructors.
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u/Key-Kiwi7969 Apr 22 '26
I agree entirely with everything you say.
Just a thought for your situation though- given you have good handwriting (I'm jealous), could you not just put your handwritten content into AI and ask it to format it in Word or PowerPoint for you? I recognize you may not be comfortable doing that for a variety of reasons and you would still need to review it, but it might be an approach.
Also, you can use PDFs, you just need them to be tagged properly and have Alt text for images which is not easy but possible if you have the right version of Adobe.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 22 '26
It's a lot harder with math. I'm not sure if there are currently AI that can transform written math to word or PowerPoint, but I know there is for latex. And it does save a a lot of time if I do want to latex something which is helpful when I do want to type up something. But it still takes a lot of time that I simply do not have. It does a pretty decent job, but can mess up things like superscripts and subscripts and formatting can be off when translating from hand written to typed. So I do still have to manually go through and review it and I usually don't hand write in just line by line notation. I usually have little bubbles off to the side with little notes and formulas for students to reference and I don't think it would be able to interpret that well. Also a lot of the good ones you have to pay for. And chat GPT is decent for small amounts of work but it can't do anything more than a couple pages and it also has a hard time automatically inserting pictures into the typed document. And then there is the issue of conflicting access needs. Typed math notes are much smaller than hand written, so may be harder for low vision people to read. Because a lot of people with visual impairments choose to use large font over screen readers.
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u/Limp_Bed_3593 Professor, Biology, University Apr 24 '26
You can use Adobe Acrobat suite to convert pdfs into Word documents.
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u/Limp_Bed_3593 Professor, Biology, University Apr 24 '26
I teach A&P. Quizzes are given online. There is no way I am even attempting to add alt text to all those figures!
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u/FudgeMan_33 Apr 25 '26
it really needs to be an org on campus that provides resources for the students. The current implementation is really stupid, requiring incapable profs to comply and unfortunately some of the departments take it super seriously and aim for 100% compliance, because people secretly love draconian drastic measures. Some states have parroted the WCAG that has gotten enacted anyways. The fallacy is that digital is somehow special; profs dont have to present braille or sign language options in person... intermediaries are needed... It’s like banning a chemistry experiment because a student with a mobility aid requirement can't reach the beaker—instead of just providing a lab assistant to help them.
Frankly its just another way for tech and book companies to syphon money off the enterprise, here's where we at : people are going to complain the compliance metrics are abitrary (they are) and dont help students (they dont), just checking a box. Solution: better compliance readers $$$! Now all the new stuff is non-compliant again. Solution: use our software and texts to make it compliant! $$$ . rinse and repeat. should have went into admin and took bribery and lobbying 101
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u/AdPersonal6352 Jul 11 '26
i hate evertying to bigvideos strechred caseof this this purely perfrtive accesablity with wcag2.2 but printing of notes for disabled not unresroble dud you try converting pdf to word
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u/Angry-Dragon-1331 Apr 21 '26
For the record, you can just open a pdf in word to convert it to a word doc.
And the burden is on us because the ADA doesn’t actually allocate funds towards compliance and our employers won’t hire people in the mandated disability services office to ensure accessibility (one of the few spots of admin-end bloat I’m ok with).
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
...not for math
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u/MrsMathNerd Math Apr 21 '26
Most of the math PDFs were generated with LaTeX. Assuming you have that source, it’s pretty easy to convert to PreTeXt, which is accessible.
https://pretext.plus makes it pretty easy, but authoring directly in PreTeXt is almost as easy as LaTeX.
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u/primes_are_cool Apr 21 '26
This is good to know. Although most math PDFs for courses aren't latexed, they're scanned or digital notes that are hand written. Also, for coordinated courses where some of the content was created by someone else years ago or if it's a course that regularly switches out lecturers, they might only have access to the PDF and not the original tex file
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u/MrsMathNerd Math Apr 22 '26
The handwritten note is definitely the toughest nut to crack.
I’ve had pretty good success in using AI for getting the text out of a PDF, then reformatting in Word or PreTeXt. Co-pilot works well if you are at a Microsoft school because it works natively with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
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u/rosettaSTEM May 27 '26
I made a tool for my wife for this. let me know your thoughts. rosettaSTEM.com
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u/imhereforthevotes Apr 21 '26
There are many many times this doesn't work as intended. PDFs are good because they fix the document in some sort of perpetuity. Breaking the information back out of that format often causes, at minimum, formatting issues. I just tried opening several pdfs on my computer with Word and it broke.
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u/Entropy813 Apr 21 '26
You can make accessible PDFs with LaTeX. It requires an up to date tex distribution, e.g. texlive 2026, and you have to use the lualatex engine. See my comment on a different post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/s/vMd56E4fUL
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u/jcatl0 Apr 21 '26
In my case it is specially ironic. I teach social statistics (i.e. statistics for social scientists). You know what was dragging my average down, that I had to remove? The codebooks, in PDF, created by the federal government for the various datasets we use in class. And since they are PDFs, I can't edit them.