June 4, 2025 • 45 mins
While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible, specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title II of the ADA. In this episode, Mark Greenfield joins us to discuss the new regulations and what that means for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.
Mark retired as the University at Buffalo's Web Accessibility Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S. Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible,
specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title
II of the ADA. In this episode, we discuss the new regulations and what that means
for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.
(00:28):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:58):
Our guest today is Mark Greenfield. Mark retired as the University at Buffalo's Web Accessibility
Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital
accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S.
Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about
(01:20):
digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US. Welcome, Mark.
Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. Today's
teas are:... Mark, are you drinking any tea?I am drinking tea. It is a Blackberry sage.
That sounds nice. I have just some decaffeinated breakfast tea,
(01:40):
thanks to John making me some hot water. I have a peppermint, spearmint, and tarragon
tea today. I've already had a lot of caffeine today.
So Mark, we've invited you here today to discuss new regulations in the U.S. related to Title
II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and digital accessibility. In order to ground our
conversation today, though, can you share a definition of digital accessibility?
(02:03):
Sure. So when we're talking about digital accessibility, the goal is to make sure
that everything we're doing online works for people with disabilities. And it's interesting,
as I kind of explain, over the last few years, what I do for a living, how many people don't know
that that's a thing, when, in fact, not only is it a thing, it's a very important thing. And I like
(02:25):
to also use the words digital accessibility rather than web accessibility, for a couple of reasons.
One is that with web accessibility, you're talking about a very specific technology where,
with how technology has changed over the years, it really is much more than just websites. The other
reason I like to use the word digital rather than web is that it lets people know that this just
(02:48):
isn't the purview of web developers. It actually impacts anybody who's creating content online.
So when I have a lot of conversations with faculty, if I talk about web accessibility,
they're assuming this is IT, and IT compliant, without realizing the impact that a faculty
member has when it comes to making sure that their materials are accessible.
(03:09):
You mentioned that digital accessibility requires that the needs of people with disabilities be met,
but are those the only people that benefit from digital accessibility?
So there is a lot of myths around how many people are impacted when it comes to digital
accessibility. Most people, in their mind, automatically default to somebody who is
(03:30):
blind or somebody who is deaf, when in fact, there's a number of different indices on how
many people have a disability. The number I use is 20%; about 20% of the population
has a disability that impacts their ability to use technology. And when you're thinking about
the different kinds of disabilities, it's visual disabilities, people who are both blind and have
(03:54):
low vision and are colorblind. I think the number is 8% of the male population is color blind,
so if you're using color to provide information and using red and green as your color combination,
somebody's not going to be able to differentiate that. Then beyond visual disabilities,
you have auditory disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, motor disability,
(04:15):
somebody who can't use a keyboard or can't use a mouse, and also cognitive disabilities. And this
is something I think is important for educators when you think about dyslexia and other types of
learning disabilities, this falls into the realm of digital accessibility. But the other thing to
remember is that, even though we're talking specifically about people with disabilities,
(04:36):
almost everything you do related to digital accessibility, improves the user experience for
everyone. What can be frustrating for the general population can be a barrier for somebody with a
disability. I've always been a huge advocate of user-centered design usability, and there's a
direct correlation to accessibility with that. And my message to web developers always has been, when
(05:01):
you're addressing accessibility issues, you are improving the overall experience for everyone.
Can you talk a little bit as we're kind of framing this idea of digital accessibility, what
some of the specific skills are related to digital accessibility, especially for content creators?
Sure. So there are a lot of things that make a website or a document accessible. Some of it does
(05:25):
get complicated, but much of it is very simple to do, and something that I think everybody should
just build into their workflow, whether you're creating a web page or creating a document. So
some of those include (05:35):
color contrast, so the difference between the color of the text and
the color of the background, there are specific contrast ratios you should be thinking about,
but understanding to make that contrast workable for people who have low vision, and think about
using your cell phone out in the sun. That would help in that situation as well. Related to colors,
(05:58):
making sure that you don't use color to convey information. I see a lot of schedules where an
available time slot is green and an unavailable time slot is red, red/green is the most common
color blind combination. So if somebody can't see that difference because you're relying solely on
color to reflect that information. So another thing that everybody should think about is what
(06:20):
I call semantic markup. And what semantics mean is that you're describing the function of the
information rather than what it looks like. So think about a heading. What you don't want to do,
whether you're in Microsoft Word or using Google Docs or making a web page, is take your heading,
make it a larger font and bold it, because that's just addressing what it looks like, but not what
(06:44):
the function of that content actually is. So when it comes to headings, when it comes to lists, when
it comes to links, those are all things that can be marked up in a way that assistive technology
understands what that is and will work properly with that. Again, very easy to do. Another thing
is with images, making sure that you have provided alternate text, which allows a screen reader or
(07:08):
other assistive device to be able to know the content of what's in that image. Again, very
easy to do. Another thing related to that is with videos, making sure that they're captioned. Again,
the tools are such now that you can do captioning much quicker than you could even five years ago.
So really, no reason not to caption all your videos. And one of the things when I talk with
(07:30):
faculty about captioning is that this really can be part of Universal Design for Learning.
When I was working at the University of Buffalo, we had a large international student population,
and they benefited from having captions on the videos, because they could understand the content
much better. Making sure that when you are using a form, whether it's a PDF form or whether it's
(07:53):
a web-based form, that you have labels for the input, again, important for assistive technology
to understand how that form is working. I also want to make sure that when it comes to web pages,
that your content will work with just a keyboard, not relying on the mouse. This is a skill that
I recommend everybody learn. It takes about five minutes to learn how to navigate a web page using
(08:18):
just the keyboard. Push your mouse to the side, and there are just a handful of keys you need to
learn to be able to navigate a web page. This is very important for two reasons. One is most
automated testing tools cannot determine whether the keyboard is working correctly or not. The
second is that when it does not work correctly, that can be a complete barrier for somebody
(08:43):
with a disability. One of the examples I use is that there was some administrative software at
the University of Buffalo that we used, once you were into the software, it was fairly accessible,
the problem was to log into it with your name and password, required the use of a mouse. So
anybody who needed to use a mouse, it was a complete barrier; that tool was unusable. So
(09:06):
really a good skill for everybody to learn.You used assistive technology a lot in your last
description, can you just describe what that is for folks that might not be familiar?
Sure, so assistive technology is developed specifically for people with disabilities.
The most common assistive technology are screen readers, and there's a variety of screen readers.
(09:28):
Many of them are free. In fact, I recommend that people use free screen readers. On the Windows
side. NVDA is a free screen reader, which is really powerful; on the Macintosh side, VoiceOver
is included on both the iPhone and on a Mac, so again, very easy to learn how to use those. Those
work for people who are blind. And one of the things about screen readers is that there are
(09:52):
people who use those who can see but have other disabilities. So it's not just somebody who has
a visual disability. Another type of assistive technology is known as a mouth stick. So this
is somebody who does not have use of their hands, but can still use a keyboard by just putting the
stick in their mouth and then pressing on the keys instead of using their hands to do that.
(10:16):
More sophisticated assistive technology is something like a Braille keyboard. So there are
keyboards that allow you to type and get feedback using just Braille. So pretty advanced technology.
And one of the things we're starting to see is, I'm wearing AirPods right now, and those AirPods
can be used as a hearing device as assistive listening, and that's one of the things I'm
(10:39):
happy to see is that a lot of mainstream devices now can be used as assistive technology.
The history of legislation related to disabilities is fairly recent, beginning with
the Americans with Disability Act (or the ADA) that was enacted in 1990. At the international
level. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the UN General
(11:02):
Assembly in 2006. In it is the explicit claim that accessibility is a human right. The first version
of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released in 1999 with a 2.0 version adopted by
the International Standards Organization in 2012. More recently, laws have been updated
(11:22):
throughout the world to more explicitly address issues of digital accessibility. As one example,
can you talk about the recent updates to Title II of the ADA in the US?
Sure, so Title II of the American with Disabilities Act had rules established
last April, and this was, in my opinion, a really important event in the history of how the web and
(11:46):
disability come together. The important thing to remember about the American with Disabilities Act
is that is a civil rights law. So that should be the message. This is about human rights and
about civil rights. As you mentioned, the ADA was adopted in 1990, which predates the web.
So the web went public in 1993. I was fortunate enough that I was there like a week after that
(12:08):
it went public, and guessed that the web might be a thing. I taught myself how to program and away
I went. But it's always been case law, rather than regulations from the government about what
does disability actually mean. And it was a long process. The real start to the current regulations
was in 2010. That rule making was then dropped in 2016, picked back up and finally adopted last
(12:35):
year. So this has been a long time coming, and one of the things to remember about the ADA Title II
is that now we have a specific technical standard that we can reference. And for the ADA Title II,
it is WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, level AA, and we can
(12:59):
talk more about what all that means if we want to talk more about what all that means. But anyways,
this was the first time that there was a specific technical standard that people could reference.
There was an interesting case with Domino's Pizza. This was like four or five years ago.
Domino's was sued because somebody who was blind could not order a pizza online, so they took
(13:22):
Domino's to court, and one of Domino's defenses was, “Tell me what it means to be accessible,
and I'll make it accessible. There's no standard. How do I know if I'm making it accessible or not?”
For me, that was an interesting argument. However, eventually that case did go to the Supreme Court,
and the Supreme Court chose not to hear it, so Domino's didn't win on that argument,
but it raised a really legitimate point (13:43):
that having a technical standard would be so helpful,
and this is why the ADA Title II regulations are so important. A couple other things about the ADA
Title II regulations. This is specifically for state and local government. That is what Title
II is. And all public colleges and universities fall under Title II. Private colleges, however,
(14:10):
are not part of Title II, and some people who work at private colleges may think, “I'm off the hook.
I don't need to do this,” when, in fact, that is not the case at all. For anything outside of state
and local government, it's business as usual. That means that you still absolutely can be
sued in court, if you have accessibility issues, but they're not going to use the WCAG standard
(14:35):
necessarily as the measuring stick. It's going to be up to the court to decide what are we going to
use as a measuring stick. In fact, there was just a case in Louisiana in February where the state
of Louisiana said we don't have to do this until next April. And the courts are saying, “Oh, yes,
you do. This is still in effect, even though the deadline for Title II isn't until next year.”
(14:57):
So, Mark, you're talking a little bit about the laws in the U.S.,
but this isn't just a U.S.-specific thing. Can you talk a little bit about what's been
happening globally, in a general sense? Yes. So, globally, there has been a tremendous
increase in legislation specific to Web and Digital Accessibility. In the European Union,
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they're actually a little bit ahead of the United States, because their accessibility
laws deadline is this June, and pretty similar in terms of what the expectations are technically,
but they're again a year ahead of where the United States is. Ontario, same thing. Ontario
has had a pretty strong accessibility law in place for quite a while. So, in many ways,
the US is catching up to this. One of the things that is nice about the WCAG standards is that they
(15:45):
are internationally recognized. So almost every law that you see specifically references the WCAG
standard, which I think makes it much easier for consistency, to understand what is expected when
it comes to web and digital accessibility. How do the changes in Title II impact our
educational system, specifically higher ed, in terms of its effect on institutions,
(16:07):
students, and faculty and staff?So, Title II regulations are actually a major
change with the way that colleges and universities need to think about Web and Digital Accessibility.
And that major change is that the ADA Title II regulations move to a model of full accessibility,
(16:29):
rather than accommodations. For anybody who is familiar with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation
Act, that is an accommodation model. If someone has a disability, it is very specific to their
situation. This person is blind, is trying to access this information, and we're going
to create an accommodation that will help that specific person. The expectation with Title II is
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that everything is fully accessible from the get go. So this, for institutions is a major change
philosophically in terms of how you need to think about meeting your accessibility goals… huge,
huge change. For faculty and staff at a university, I think the Title II regulations
bring the importance of this to the forefront. I am a longtime advocate for accessibility
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beyond legal requirements. In fact, I would do everything that I normally do when it comes to
creating a website if there was no law, because it just is best practice and usability and all
of those kinds of things. But with law, that gets people's attention, and I think with the Title II
regulations, this is getting people's attention because you are breaking federal law if you
(17:46):
are not making your sites accessible if you're a public university. So I think that changes things
for faculty and staff, where there's a level of seriousness now and a level of training that's
needed that perhaps wasn't there before. When it comes to students, I think this is an opportunity
for students to learn about accessibility and why that matters. One of the questions I get is that,
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technically, students posting information onto a class website or a class activity within their
learning management system, that needs to be accessible. And a lot of administrators, faculty
and staff, are kind of pushing back against that, saying, “How are we going to make that happen?”
Well, the answer is, you train students how to do it. It's not that hard to do the basics. Every
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student I've ever talked to has been fascinated by the fact that you can make things accessible
for people with disabilities. There's a level of empathy there that perhaps isn't there with
people in my generation. So I think this is a great opportunity to train students on what
accessibility means and give them the basic tools to make their content accessible.
(18:50):
I've heard some conversations with decision makers across higher ed about whether or not
these regulations will be enforced because of current executive orders related to DEI,
the dismantling of the Department of Education and the reduction of the federal workforce.
What is your sense of the stability of the law and the momentum of the work on
(19:10):
digital accessibility in higher education?So that is a great question, and my answer may
change an hour from now than what it is right now. That's fair. It is very, very fluid. That being
sai, one thing about the Title II regulations is that the current administration cannot legally
(19:31):
just throw those out. They were established in April of 2024. I believe it's 180 days have to go
by, and then it's kind of written in stone at that point. So the current administration can't say,
“Never mind. We're going to just ignore these.” That's legally not what they can do. Now,
whether they do that anyways, we'll see what happens. So that's one thing to think about.
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The second thing to think about is that much of what happens in the courts around accessibility
are private lawsuits. That has nothing to do with the Department of Justice and how they prioritize
Title II. Anybody can bring a lawsuit against you at any time, and now you're in the court system,
and it has nothing to do with the administrative branch of the government, so you are always
(20:15):
exposed to a lawsuit, and that's where most of this activity happens. The other thing to
keep in mind is that most states also have laws around accessibility. For those who are in New
York state, there are pretty strong laws around web and digital accessibility. So even at the
federal level, you may not think you need to worry about this, but at the state level, you absolutely
(20:38):
do. As far as the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, I'm actually pretty good friends
with a lot of people who currently and formerly work there, unfortunately. What has happened with
the OCR is that the central team still exists, and again, I'm saying this in April of 2025, but that
(20:58):
team still exists, but it's been drastically cut in size. And the big question is, how quickly can
they respond to complaints? Because they have like 10,000 complaints on the docket, not just
for accessibility issues, but beyond accessibility issues. So how quickly can they respond to those,
that's open to anybody, who knows what's going to happen with that. So I don't know what's going to
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happen. I think it would be misinformed to think that you don't have to worry about this, however,
because, who knows? The bottom line is that, as I mentioned before, we should be doing accessibility
work, regardless of the law, there is tremendous value there. So one of the things I do as a
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consultant is when I come on campus and I meet with senior leadership, is I talk to them about
how important is web and digital accessibility to everything that happens on your campus. It used
to be that we would talk a lot about mission and vision statements, which always included the words
diversity and inclusion, which web accessibility fits right in with that. That's a piece that
(22:03):
I'm concerned about right now, is whether we can connect accessibility to DEI initiatives. One of
the interesting things for me when I was at the University at Buffalo, as the Web Accessibility
Officer, I reported to the Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and that was something
I told the administration I wanted to do, because it sends a much different message about why we're
(22:26):
doing this when it's part of diversity, equity, inclusion, rather than being part of the IT
office, where now it's an IT compliance issue. Now would I take that same strategy right now?
Probably not, because of some of the challenges around DEI. I am hoping that people push back on
this a little bit, because the ADA is federal law. So to me, there's a complete disconnect between
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what's happening around DEI nationally and what the law actually is. Now, how courts interpret
that, how the current administration interprets that, is anybody's guess. I understand why some
people are gun shy about talking about DEI and then adding A into that as well, but I think that
there are federal laws around this, and I think there is solid ground for continuing to do this
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work. So who knows what's going to happen again? It's a very fluid situation. It's an unfortunate
situation, because last year, after waiting for 15 years, we finally got these Title II regulations,
and now a lot of that work is being questioned about how this is going to move forward.
I think, as you mentioned before, about the global context, too, that underscores the idea that it
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doesn't really matter what the current political climate is, that globally, there's an initiative
in this direction, and we're likely to continue seeing it. We're gonna get behind if we're not
doing it here.Absolutely.
Now, when faculty and staff and others creating digital content are creating new material, if you
start from the ground up and are not retrofitting accessibility onto older work. It's pretty easy to
(23:59):
create accessible content, but there are areas, though, in some disciplines, where it's a little
bit more challenging for faculty. That includes areas where there's discipline-specific notation,
such as chemistry, math, or music, or limitations to machine-generated captions
for content that is sung or in multiple languages or spoken by non-native speakers.
(24:21):
How should institutions handle content with these more complex challenges?
This is a very, very important topic. I recently read a statistic that people with disabilities
constitute 10% of our national workforce, but only 2% of STEM professionals. So that
disconnect tells me that this is really an area that we need to think more about and to address.
(24:45):
And as you mentioned, basic accessibility is relatively simple to implement, but there are
places where accessibility can be a challenge, whether you're talking about chemistry notations
and math formulas and those kinds of things. What I recommend that campuses do is that they really
work hard to create awareness among those faculty members in those disciplines to understand what
(25:11):
some of these additional challenges are, and then providing the support and resources to help them
meet those challenges. The good news is that these challenges are not new. So there are a variety of
tools that are being created to help with math formulas and scientific notation and others.
So I think it's really important that the faculty understand, 1. we're going to have to take that
(25:36):
extra step, and 2. that a campus provides those resources. And related to that, I think it's
important that at least one person on a campus really is paying attention to these additional
types of tools. And they're improving every year, and I think it's important to stay up with
how those improvements are happening, and have somebody play point on campus so they can connect
(25:58):
the dots with the vendors who provide these tools and the faculty members who need them. There's
also a lot of good information out there on how to make, for example, STEM materials, accessible. So
if you Google that, a lot of places will come up. I have done some work with the National Center on
Accessible Educational Materials, the AEM, and they have a lot of great resources. They're very
(26:20):
much involved with Universal Design for Learning… bring the accessibility component into that. So
that is a place where you can get a lot of great resources about how to make these more
challenging educational materials accessible.One of the other areas that I know often raise
challenges for faculty, but other folks in higher ed, are third party content
like learning materials, content platforms and services, PDFs of articles with complex charts
(26:46):
and graphs are often a concern. What role does higher ed institutions need to play in moving
the accessibility needle in these other spaces, with these third party vendors.
Third party vendors and procurement is the most challenging aspect when it comes to your digital
accessibility program. The phrase that the Office of Civil Rights always uses is we're going to look
(27:08):
at your program, services, and activities. When you think about a campus’s program services and
activities, they are almost always happening on third-party products, whether it's your
learning management system, whether it's your student information system, your alumni system,
on and on that list goes. But the reality is that it's third-party products where the rubber hits
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the road. So this is really, really important. One of the challenges with the ADA Title II rules
is that they don't apply to vendors. Those are private companies. They don't need to legally make
their products accessible. So what does higher ed need to do to kind of help fix this situation? One
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is to recognize the buying power, the collective buying power of 4500 colleges and universities
across the country, and start to put the appropriate level of pressure onto the vendors.
As I say that, the approach I try to take with vendors is rather than it being adversarial,
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let's think about this as a win-win opportunity. I happen to know the heads of accessibility at many
of the major educational technology companies, and they want us to complain, because in these
big organizations, it's up to the product manager to determine how accessible a given product is,
not up to the Accessibility Officer for that company. So we need to put pressure on vendors,
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and I think there is opportunity for us to do that collectively, rather than individually. This is
something I have been talking about with a number of people nationally, about how do we become more
efficient in terms of how we approach vendors? And two things to think about: one is testing
can be challenging to determine whether a vendor's product is actually accessible or not. So rather
(28:59):
than 4500 colleges doing their own testing, is there a way to combine that and just kind
of share best practices, share results? Good idea in principle, but in practice, many times lawyers
get involved with this and they're concerned about legal risk if I, as Mark Greenfield,
representing the University of Buffalo, say product X is not accessible, the people at product
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X don't agree with that, so we're going to take you to court and question that. So unfortunately,
the lawyers have been involved with that, but there are ways around that, which we continue to
work on. And then the second thing, again, is the collective buying power. I have been pleasantly
surprised over the last couple of years about how serious publishers and the major educational
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technology vendors are taking accessibility. They are making progress with being honest and
objective about what the shortcomings are, and putting resources to address those shortcomings.
So I think it is really important that we continue to do that kind of work. One of the
things I was disappointed with with the new ADA regulations is that they only applied to Title II,
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which is state and local government. I wish they would have also addressed Title III, which is
the private entities, the vendors would fall under Title III. For a whole bunch of reasons,
it would have been nice for them to address both of those at the same time, but unfortunately, that
didn't happen. So I think we really need to be an advocate about why this matters, and kind of use
(30:26):
our collective buying power to encourage vendors to push them kind of in the right direction.
The focus on improving the accessibility work on many campuses have focused on faculty and staff
but had not addressed students in most campuses, probably. What role do our institutions need to
play in moving the accessibility needle in these other spaces for classwork from students or from
(30:50):
student clubs and organizations, for example? I would love to see college campuses be much more
proactive when it comes to training students about the importance of accessibility, why it matters,
and just very quick and easy things that anybody can do to make their content more accessible.
I remember 20 years ago, I taught a general education course at the University of Buffalo,
(31:14):
it was called UB 101, where we basically gave them the components: this is how you kind of survive in
college in your first year, and what all the various offices do, and some other advice and
guidance. I would love to see any campus that has a course like that, you know what? Spend the day,
spend an hour talking about accessibility, what that is and why it matters, and show them the
basics on how to do it. Again, my experience has been students are very happy to take those steps
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to make something accessible, and I think they would just eat that right up. And I think it's
a good service. I am a little disappointed that here we are in 2025, 30 years after the web was
invented, and 35 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, and yet we have made little
progress when it comes to the accessibility of higher education websites and documents,
(32:02):
and that's very frustrating to me. I think one of the ways to start to improve this is let's start
to work with students and have them understand, and not just computer science students.
There is a group called Teach Access, which is working with computer science faculty to make
sure they're incorporating accessibility in their teaching. But I think it needs to go much farther
than just Teach Access and computer science majors to everyone on campus. And again, this is not that
(32:27):
hard to do. A real quick story for you. One of the favorite projects I have worked on in my entire
career was working with a group of third graders to make a blind athlete's website accessible. It
was a fascinating project. The athlete's name was Rachael Scdoris. She runs in the Iditarod,
and she was legally blind. Through the ADA, she actually sued the Iditarod to have a spotter 1000
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feet in front of her, so she had some sense of where she was going in the middle of Alaska. She
won that lawsuit. When my daughter was in second grade, as a class project, they followed the
Iditarod, and my daughter chose Rachael Scdoris to follow. She was young and blonde, and my daughter
identified with her, so when I found out she was blind, I went to her website and found out that it
(33:15):
was completely inaccessible. So I didn't contact Racha el directly. I contacted her agent and told
him, you know, this probably isn't the best look, because Rachael is actually pretty vocal
about accessibility and disability. And at first I said, “You know what? Maybe I'll fix this for
you.” But then I had a better idea, let's train my daughter and some of her classmates how to do
this. So I took a group of third graders, taught them how to code websites, this is back in 2006,
(33:42):
2007 and they recreated Rachael's website and it was perfectly accessible, including captioning the
videos that were on her website. So when people tell me that this is too hard, I tell them, “No,
it's not. I had a whole group of third graders who could do it.” The bigger lesson from that was when
I asked the third graders, “Why does this matter?” It was all about empathy. “Of course, we're going
(34:02):
to do this to help as many people as we can.” So instilling that mindset in the students,
I think, would be a big step forward to help us address why we are still kind of
challenged by making everything accessible.I mean, we are institutions of learning.
Exactly. We're well positioned to educate
an entire generation on how to do this work. And when you think about how important the web
(34:25):
and digital is now compared to a generation ago, I think COVID actually brought this to the forefront
when we moved everything online. Now, all of a sudden, everybody's really paying attention to
what happens online and accessibility as well. But as you think about the program
services and activities, more and more of those are moving online all the time. So it makes the
importance of Web and Digital Accessibility all the greater. And there is an opportunity to train
(34:51):
the next generation to really just be aware of and understand what this is all about.
It's really easy for folks to get hung up on the legal obligations, especially as
we've kind of framed the conversation around Title II. But can you talk a little bit more
about the value of digital accessibility and why we should be doing it anyways?
So again, one of the misconceptions is that it's a small part of the population that
(35:15):
has a disability, when, in fact, it's 20% of the population, and that is just people with permanent
disabilities. We're not talking about somebody with a temporary disability. So for example,
if you broke your arm and couldn't use a mouse anymore, or a situational disability,
whether you're in a library watching a video where you can't have the sound up,
(35:35):
or those kinds of things. So there's a lot of value, just in terms of the percentage of people,
but beyond that, one of my goals is to get people to think about accessibility, not as a cost
center, but as a strategic investment. Forrester Research a few years ago, did a study on the ROI,
(35:55):
the return on investment, of both usability and accessibility together. So this was not just about
accessibility, but usability and accessibility are definitely joined at the hip, and really you
can think about those very similarly, but the ROI they found was 100 to one. For every dollar
invested in usability and accessibility returned $100 of value. So think about it that way,
(36:22):
the value beyond. Again, I was talking before about students who maybe English is their second
language, and the value of having captions on a video. So there's just a lot of opportunity
there. And the thing is that it's really not hard to do the basics of accessibility, and
if you start with that mindset, it is relatively easy to do. Another message for my web development
(36:46):
friends is don't try to make everything as fancy as possible. Simpler is better. So, as an example,
without getting too technical here, there are a variety of ways that you can add alternative
text to an image. The simplest way and the best way is to use the alt text within the image tag
(37:08):
within HTML, instead of trying to get fancy with ARIA and other fancy programming, which you can
kind of accomplish the same thing, but you're much better off keeping it simpler, because,
even as we speak in 2025, the way that web browsers, assistive technology, and the operating
system all interact varies tremendously, and ARIA doesn't always work. So you can get a combination
(37:33):
of things where it's not working on NVDA, where it does work in voiceover because you're using
ARIA. So again, a message I have to developers is, try to keep things as simple as possible.
This is a usability thing as well. There's not a day that goes by that my wife doesn't hear me say,
“What's wrong? This website's awful because of usability issues,” and that's, quite frankly,
(37:54):
still the case with higher education. Part of my consulting business is doing audits, not
just accessibility audits, but doing just general accessibility and usability audits. And I have
yet to find a college or university where I can't write a 20-page report about the usability issues
that a site has, and a lot of that has to do with people just trying to be too complicated.
We always end with the question: “What's next?”
(38:17):
Fascinating question when it comes to technology, and technology changes so fast. So I'm going to
tell this story. Again, I've been doing IT work for 45 years. Gordon Moore was the CEO of Intel
and Moore's law is that computing technology doubles every 18 months. He said that back in
(38:39):
the early 1960s, we're here in 2025 that is still the case. The challenge is that it's difficult for
us as humans to get our arms around exponential change. I like to share the story of the inventor
of the game of chess. So an inventor comes up with this new game called chess. He takes it
to the Emperor, shares this game with the Emperor. Emperor loves the game. The inventor says, “Here's
(39:05):
what I want for a reward on the first square of the chess board, I want one grain of rice, on the
second I want two grains of rice, on the third square I want four grains of rice, eight grains,
16, exponentially. We're going to grow that until we've done all 64 squares of the chess board.
I ask people, “How big of a pile of rice do you have after you've filled all 64 squares?” People
(39:30):
are amazed that that pile of rice is bigger than Mount Everest. When I started working at
the University of Buffalo, 1987, we wanted to buy a Cray II supercomputer, biggest, baddest computer
on the planet. Cost, I believe, $17 million in 1987 dollars. We even, as a research university,
(39:51):
couldn't afford it, so we rented time at Calspan down the street at $10,000 an hour. Anybody who
has a second generation Apple iPhone or newer has more computing horsepower in their hand than
a Cray II supercomputer. That's what exponential change is. So in your mind, you're saying, “That's
(40:12):
great. Over the last 30 years or 40 years, we've made that much progress. In another 40 years,
we're going to also make that much progress.” That is not exponential thinking. In the next
three or four years, we're going to make that much progress again. So to loop this back to kind of
where technology is going and where accessibility is going and what's next, one of the things I'm
paying attention to is voice technology. I gave a talk at an international voice conference a few
(40:38):
years ago and talked about how voice could improve accessibility, and it's really interesting about
what the application of voice technology can do, because it can free us from the interface
of having to use a computer and a mouse, where now you don't have to worry about a lot of the
disabilities that come into play right now. So the future is multimodal, multi-surface interfaces,
(41:06):
which can take into every combination of things and really address accessibility. I was very
encouraged that at this voice conference, people are taking accessibility very seriously and trying
to build some tools into the voice interface. Related to that is artificial intelligence,
and many people are predicting that ultimately the user interface for AI is going to be voice. Now I
(41:30):
go back to watching a Space Odyssey and thinking about HAL, and that interface with HAL was a voice
interface, so I can see a lot of that coming, and there is real opportunity to address accessibility
issues with that. We need to take caution in terms of how quickly we use AI to improve accessibility.
(41:52):
One of the big controversies in the accessibility world now is the use of accessibility overlays,
which are products and tools where they tell you a single line of code can be installed on
your website and immediately address all of your accessibility issues. In the last couple of years,
they've been talking about AI as the driver of that, the reality is they don't work.
(42:15):
And I am very disappointed in most of the overlay companies who are, quite frankly,
telling lies about what these products can do. And for anybody who's thinking about using an overlay,
or currently using an overlay, know that that that can get you sued. There are actually a
number of court cases right now specifically addressing the use of overlays on websites, so
(42:42):
be very cautious about that. Also, a lot of talk now about how artificial intelligence can be used
to remediate documents and remediate websites. I think there is a lot of opportunity there,
but it is too early to have that working the way it should be working. For example, in Microsoft
Word right now, AI will generate alternative text for you. My experience has been that's good,
(43:05):
maybe one out of 10 times. So you really need to pay attention to that. There's an old quote. It's
known as Amara’s law, and it says we tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the
short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. And I think that is the case with AI,
where everybody's kind of running out to say AI is going to fix everything today. Not the case. But
(43:28):
I am very encouraged down the road about what AI can do. And let me just kind of close this with,
I would be remiss if I didn't mention a book in this talk. I have a tendency to mention lots
of books, and a book I would recommend everybody learns is called Haben: the Deaf Blind Woman who
Conquered Harvard Law. It's written by a woman by the name of Haben Girma. I've actually interacted
(43:52):
with her a few times online. She is just awesome and such a passionate advocate for people with
disabilities. People are amazed that she could graduate from Harvard Law School being deaf blind,
but she did, and she is a huge advocate for that. If you get the opportunity to hear her speak,
she always is talking about how there is an opportunity for innovation when it comes and
(44:18):
she's encouraging all of the technology people to really think about innovation and how we can use
technology to improve people's lives. And that certainly is something I hope we see again, even
as educational institutions going forward, how can we provide that platform for this innovation?
Yeah, that's a great book. Thanks for recommending it. Thanks so much for joining us today. It
(44:40):
was great to talk about accessibility, a topic I never get sick of talking about.
Thanks for having me.And it's a topic that all
institutions need to be addressing to a much greater extent as we approach that deadline.
So thank you again. Thank you.
(45:00):
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible,
specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title
II of the ADA. In this episode, we discuss the new regulations and what that means
for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.
(00:28):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:58):
Our guest today is Mark Greenfield. Mark retired as the University at Buffalo's Web Accessibility
Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital
accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S.
Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about
(01:20):
digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US. Welcome, Mark.
Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. Today's
teas are:... Mark, are you drinking any tea?I am drinking tea. It is a Blackberry sage.
That sounds nice. I have just some decaffeinated breakfast tea,
(01:40):
thanks to John making me some hot water. I have a peppermint, spearmint, and tarragon
tea today. I've already had a lot of caffeine today.
So Mark, we've invited you here today to discuss new regulations in the U.S. related to Title
II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and digital accessibility. In order to ground our
conversation today, though, can you share a definition of digital accessibility?
(02:03):
Sure. So when we're talking about digital accessibility, the goal is to make sure
that everything we're doing online works for people with disabilities. And it's interesting,
as I kind of explain, over the last few years, what I do for a living, how many people don't know
that that's a thing, when, in fact, not only is it a thing, it's a very important thing. And I like
(02:25):
to also use the words digital accessibility rather than web accessibility, for a couple of reasons.
One is that with web accessibility, you're talking about a very specific technology where,
with how technology has changed over the years, it really is much more than just websites. The other
reason I like to use the word digital rather than web is that it lets people know that this just
(02:48):
isn't the purview of web developers. It actually impacts anybody who's creating content online.
So when I have a lot of conversations with faculty, if I talk about web accessibility,
they're assuming this is IT, and IT compliant, without realizing the impact that a faculty
member has when it comes to making sure that their materials are accessible.
(03:09):
You mentioned that digital accessibility requires that the needs of people with disabilities be met,
but are those the only people that benefit from digital accessibility?
So there is a lot of myths around how many people are impacted when it comes to digital
accessibility. Most people, in their mind, automatically default to somebody who is
(03:30):
blind or somebody who is deaf, when in fact, there's a number of different indices on how
many people have a disability. The number I use is 20%; about 20% of the population
has a disability that impacts their ability to use technology. And when you're thinking about
the different kinds of disabilities, it's visual disabilities, people who are both blind and have
(03:54):
low vision and are colorblind. I think the number is 8% of the male population is color blind,
so if you're using color to provide information and using red and green as your color combination,
somebody's not going to be able to differentiate that. Then beyond visual disabilities,
you have auditory disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, motor disability,
(04:15):
somebody who can't use a keyboard or can't use a mouse, and also cognitive disabilities. And this
is something I think is important for educators when you think about dyslexia and other types of
learning disabilities, this falls into the realm of digital accessibility. But the other thing to
remember is that, even though we're talking specifically about people with disabilities,
(04:36):
almost everything you do related to digital accessibility, improves the user experience for
everyone. What can be frustrating for the general population can be a barrier for somebody with a
disability. I've always been a huge advocate of user-centered design usability, and there's a
direct correlation to accessibility with that. And my message to web developers always has been, when
(05:01):
you're addressing accessibility issues, you are improving the overall experience for everyone.
Can you talk a little bit as we're kind of framing this idea of digital accessibility, what
some of the specific skills are related to digital accessibility, especially for content creators?
Sure. So there are a lot of things that make a website or a document accessible. Some of it does
(05:25):
get complicated, but much of it is very simple to do, and something that I think everybody should
just build into their workflow, whether you're creating a web page or creating a document. So
some of those include (05:35):
color contrast, so the difference between the color of the text and
the color of the background, there are specific contrast ratios you should be thinking about,
but understanding to make that contrast workable for people who have low vision, and think about
using your cell phone out in the sun. That would help in that situation as well. Related to colors,
(05:58):
making sure that you don't use color to convey information. I see a lot of schedules where an
available time slot is green and an unavailable time slot is red, red/green is the most common
color blind combination. So if somebody can't see that difference because you're relying solely on
color to reflect that information. So another thing that everybody should think about is what
(06:20):
I call semantic markup. And what semantics mean is that you're describing the function of the
information rather than what it looks like. So think about a heading. What you don't want to do,
whether you're in Microsoft Word or using Google Docs or making a web page, is take your heading,
make it a larger font and bold it, because that's just addressing what it looks like, but not what
(06:44):
the function of that content actually is. So when it comes to headings, when it comes to lists, when
it comes to links, those are all things that can be marked up in a way that assistive technology
understands what that is and will work properly with that. Again, very easy to do. Another thing
is with images, making sure that you have provided alternate text, which allows a screen reader or
(07:08):
other assistive device to be able to know the content of what's in that image. Again, very
easy to do. Another thing related to that is with videos, making sure that they're captioned. Again,
the tools are such now that you can do captioning much quicker than you could even five years ago.
So really, no reason not to caption all your videos. And one of the things when I talk with
(07:30):
faculty about captioning is that this really can be part of Universal Design for Learning.
When I was working at the University of Buffalo, we had a large international student population,
and they benefited from having captions on the videos, because they could understand the content
much better. Making sure that when you are using a form, whether it's a PDF form or whether it's
(07:53):
a web-based form, that you have labels for the input, again, important for assistive technology
to understand how that form is working. I also want to make sure that when it comes to web pages,
that your content will work with just a keyboard, not relying on the mouse. This is a skill that
I recommend everybody learn. It takes about five minutes to learn how to navigate a web page using
(08:18):
just the keyboard. Push your mouse to the side, and there are just a handful of keys you need to
learn to be able to navigate a web page. This is very important for two reasons. One is most
automated testing tools cannot determine whether the keyboard is working correctly or not. The
second is that when it does not work correctly, that can be a complete barrier for somebody
(08:43):
with a disability. One of the examples I use is that there was some administrative software at
the University of Buffalo that we used, once you were into the software, it was fairly accessible,
the problem was to log into it with your name and password, required the use of a mouse. So
anybody who needed to use a mouse, it was a complete barrier; that tool was unusable. So
(09:06):
really a good skill for everybody to learn.You used assistive technology a lot in your last
description, can you just describe what that is for folks that might not be familiar?
Sure, so assistive technology is developed specifically for people with disabilities.
The most common assistive technology are screen readers, and there's a variety of screen readers.
(09:28):
Many of them are free. In fact, I recommend that people use free screen readers. On the Windows
side. NVDA is a free screen reader, which is really powerful; on the Macintosh side, VoiceOver
is included on both the iPhone and on a Mac, so again, very easy to learn how to use those. Those
work for people who are blind. And one of the things about screen readers is that there are
(09:52):
people who use those who can see but have other disabilities. So it's not just somebody who has
a visual disability. Another type of assistive technology is known as a mouth stick. So this
is somebody who does not have use of their hands, but can still use a keyboard by just putting the
stick in their mouth and then pressing on the keys instead of using their hands to do that.
(10:16):
More sophisticated assistive technology is something like a Braille keyboard. So there are
keyboards that allow you to type and get feedback using just Braille. So pretty advanced technology.
And one of the things we're starting to see is, I'm wearing AirPods right now, and those AirPods
can be used as a hearing device as assistive listening, and that's one of the things I'm
(10:39):
happy to see is that a lot of mainstream devices now can be used as assistive technology.
The history of legislation related to disabilities is fairly recent, beginning with
the Americans with Disability Act (or the ADA) that was enacted in 1990. At the international
level. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the UN General
(11:02):
Assembly in 2006. In it is the explicit claim that accessibility is a human right. The first version
of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released in 1999 with a 2.0 version adopted by
the International Standards Organization in 2012. More recently, laws have been updated
(11:22):
throughout the world to more explicitly address issues of digital accessibility. As one example,
can you talk about the recent updates to Title II of the ADA in the US?
Sure, so Title II of the American with Disabilities Act had rules established
last April, and this was, in my opinion, a really important event in the history of how the web and
(11:46):
disability come together. The important thing to remember about the American with Disabilities Act
is that is a civil rights law. So that should be the message. This is about human rights and
about civil rights. As you mentioned, the ADA was adopted in 1990, which predates the web.
So the web went public in 1993. I was fortunate enough that I was there like a week after that
(12:08):
it went public, and guessed that the web might be a thing. I taught myself how to program and away
I went. But it's always been case law, rather than regulations from the government about what
does disability actually mean. And it was a long process. The real start to the current regulations
was in 2010. That rule making was then dropped in 2016, picked back up and finally adopted last
(12:35):
year. So this has been a long time coming, and one of the things to remember about the ADA Title II
is that now we have a specific technical standard that we can reference. And for the ADA Title II,
it is WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, level AA, and we can
(12:59):
talk more about what all that means if we want to talk more about what all that means. But anyways,
this was the first time that there was a specific technical standard that people could reference.
There was an interesting case with Domino's Pizza. This was like four or five years ago.
Domino's was sued because somebody who was blind could not order a pizza online, so they took
(13:22):
Domino's to court, and one of Domino's defenses was, “Tell me what it means to be accessible,
and I'll make it accessible. There's no standard. How do I know if I'm making it accessible or not?”
For me, that was an interesting argument. However, eventually that case did go to the Supreme Court,
and the Supreme Court chose not to hear it, so Domino's didn't win on that argument,
but it raised a really legitimate point (13:43):
that having a technical standard would be so helpful,
and this is why the ADA Title II regulations are so important. A couple other things about the ADA
Title II regulations. This is specifically for state and local government. That is what Title
II is. And all public colleges and universities fall under Title II. Private colleges, however,
(14:10):
are not part of Title II, and some people who work at private colleges may think, “I'm off the hook.
I don't need to do this,” when, in fact, that is not the case at all. For anything outside of state
and local government, it's business as usual. That means that you still absolutely can be
sued in court, if you have accessibility issues, but they're not going to use the WCAG standard
(14:35):
necessarily as the measuring stick. It's going to be up to the court to decide what are we going to
use as a measuring stick. In fact, there was just a case in Louisiana in February where the state
of Louisiana said we don't have to do this until next April. And the courts are saying, “Oh, yes,
you do. This is still in effect, even though the deadline for Title II isn't until next year.”
(14:57):
So, Mark, you're talking a little bit about the laws in the U.S.,
but this isn't just a U.S.-specific thing. Can you talk a little bit about what's been
happening globally, in a general sense? Yes. So, globally, there has been a tremendous
increase in legislation specific to Web and Digital Accessibility. In the European Union,
(15:18):
they're actually a little bit ahead of the United States, because their accessibility
laws deadline is this June, and pretty similar in terms of what the expectations are technically,
but they're again a year ahead of where the United States is. Ontario, same thing. Ontario
has had a pretty strong accessibility law in place for quite a while. So, in many ways,
the US is catching up to this. One of the things that is nice about the WCAG standards is that they
(15:45):
are internationally recognized. So almost every law that you see specifically references the WCAG
standard, which I think makes it much easier for consistency, to understand what is expected when
it comes to web and digital accessibility. How do the changes in Title II impact our
educational system, specifically higher ed, in terms of its effect on institutions,
(16:07):
students, and faculty and staff?So, Title II regulations are actually a major
change with the way that colleges and universities need to think about Web and Digital Accessibility.
And that major change is that the ADA Title II regulations move to a model of full accessibility,
(16:29):
rather than accommodations. For anybody who is familiar with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation
Act, that is an accommodation model. If someone has a disability, it is very specific to their
situation. This person is blind, is trying to access this information, and we're going
to create an accommodation that will help that specific person. The expectation with Title II is
(16:56):
that everything is fully accessible from the get go. So this, for institutions is a major change
philosophically in terms of how you need to think about meeting your accessibility goals… huge,
huge change. For faculty and staff at a university, I think the Title II regulations
bring the importance of this to the forefront. I am a longtime advocate for accessibility
(17:22):
beyond legal requirements. In fact, I would do everything that I normally do when it comes to
creating a website if there was no law, because it just is best practice and usability and all
of those kinds of things. But with law, that gets people's attention, and I think with the Title II
regulations, this is getting people's attention because you are breaking federal law if you
(17:46):
are not making your sites accessible if you're a public university. So I think that changes things
for faculty and staff, where there's a level of seriousness now and a level of training that's
needed that perhaps wasn't there before. When it comes to students, I think this is an opportunity
for students to learn about accessibility and why that matters. One of the questions I get is that,
(18:09):
technically, students posting information onto a class website or a class activity within their
learning management system, that needs to be accessible. And a lot of administrators, faculty
and staff, are kind of pushing back against that, saying, “How are we going to make that happen?”
Well, the answer is, you train students how to do it. It's not that hard to do the basics. Every
(18:30):
student I've ever talked to has been fascinated by the fact that you can make things accessible
for people with disabilities. There's a level of empathy there that perhaps isn't there with
people in my generation. So I think this is a great opportunity to train students on what
accessibility means and give them the basic tools to make their content accessible.
(18:50):
I've heard some conversations with decision makers across higher ed about whether or not
these regulations will be enforced because of current executive orders related to DEI,
the dismantling of the Department of Education and the reduction of the federal workforce.
What is your sense of the stability of the law and the momentum of the work on
(19:10):
digital accessibility in higher education?So that is a great question, and my answer may
change an hour from now than what it is right now. That's fair. It is very, very fluid. That being
sai, one thing about the Title II regulations is that the current administration cannot legally
(19:31):
just throw those out. They were established in April of 2024. I believe it's 180 days have to go
by, and then it's kind of written in stone at that point. So the current administration can't say,
“Never mind. We're going to just ignore these.” That's legally not what they can do. Now,
whether they do that anyways, we'll see what happens. So that's one thing to think about.
(19:52):
The second thing to think about is that much of what happens in the courts around accessibility
are private lawsuits. That has nothing to do with the Department of Justice and how they prioritize
Title II. Anybody can bring a lawsuit against you at any time, and now you're in the court system,
and it has nothing to do with the administrative branch of the government, so you are always
(20:15):
exposed to a lawsuit, and that's where most of this activity happens. The other thing to
keep in mind is that most states also have laws around accessibility. For those who are in New
York state, there are pretty strong laws around web and digital accessibility. So even at the
federal level, you may not think you need to worry about this, but at the state level, you absolutely
(20:38):
do. As far as the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, I'm actually pretty good friends
with a lot of people who currently and formerly work there, unfortunately. What has happened with
the OCR is that the central team still exists, and again, I'm saying this in April of 2025, but that
(20:58):
team still exists, but it's been drastically cut in size. And the big question is, how quickly can
they respond to complaints? Because they have like 10,000 complaints on the docket, not just
for accessibility issues, but beyond accessibility issues. So how quickly can they respond to those,
that's open to anybody, who knows what's going to happen with that. So I don't know what's going to
(21:19):
happen. I think it would be misinformed to think that you don't have to worry about this, however,
because, who knows? The bottom line is that, as I mentioned before, we should be doing accessibility
work, regardless of the law, there is tremendous value there. So one of the things I do as a
(21:40):
consultant is when I come on campus and I meet with senior leadership, is I talk to them about
how important is web and digital accessibility to everything that happens on your campus. It used
to be that we would talk a lot about mission and vision statements, which always included the words
diversity and inclusion, which web accessibility fits right in with that. That's a piece that
(22:03):
I'm concerned about right now, is whether we can connect accessibility to DEI initiatives. One of
the interesting things for me when I was at the University at Buffalo, as the Web Accessibility
Officer, I reported to the Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and that was something
I told the administration I wanted to do, because it sends a much different message about why we're
(22:26):
doing this when it's part of diversity, equity, inclusion, rather than being part of the IT
office, where now it's an IT compliance issue. Now would I take that same strategy right now?
Probably not, because of some of the challenges around DEI. I am hoping that people push back on
this a little bit, because the ADA is federal law. So to me, there's a complete disconnect between
(22:51):
what's happening around DEI nationally and what the law actually is. Now, how courts interpret
that, how the current administration interprets that, is anybody's guess. I understand why some
people are gun shy about talking about DEI and then adding A into that as well, but I think that
there are federal laws around this, and I think there is solid ground for continuing to do this
(23:14):
work. So who knows what's going to happen again? It's a very fluid situation. It's an unfortunate
situation, because last year, after waiting for 15 years, we finally got these Title II regulations,
and now a lot of that work is being questioned about how this is going to move forward.
I think, as you mentioned before, about the global context, too, that underscores the idea that it
(23:35):
doesn't really matter what the current political climate is, that globally, there's an initiative
in this direction, and we're likely to continue seeing it. We're gonna get behind if we're not
doing it here.Absolutely.
Now, when faculty and staff and others creating digital content are creating new material, if you
start from the ground up and are not retrofitting accessibility onto older work. It's pretty easy to
(23:59):
create accessible content, but there are areas, though, in some disciplines, where it's a little
bit more challenging for faculty. That includes areas where there's discipline-specific notation,
such as chemistry, math, or music, or limitations to machine-generated captions
for content that is sung or in multiple languages or spoken by non-native speakers.
(24:21):
How should institutions handle content with these more complex challenges?
This is a very, very important topic. I recently read a statistic that people with disabilities
constitute 10% of our national workforce, but only 2% of STEM professionals. So that
disconnect tells me that this is really an area that we need to think more about and to address.
(24:45):
And as you mentioned, basic accessibility is relatively simple to implement, but there are
places where accessibility can be a challenge, whether you're talking about chemistry notations
and math formulas and those kinds of things. What I recommend that campuses do is that they really
work hard to create awareness among those faculty members in those disciplines to understand what
(25:11):
some of these additional challenges are, and then providing the support and resources to help them
meet those challenges. The good news is that these challenges are not new. So there are a variety of
tools that are being created to help with math formulas and scientific notation and others.
So I think it's really important that the faculty understand, 1. we're going to have to take that
(25:36):
extra step, and 2. that a campus provides those resources. And related to that, I think it's
important that at least one person on a campus really is paying attention to these additional
types of tools. And they're improving every year, and I think it's important to stay up with
how those improvements are happening, and have somebody play point on campus so they can connect
(25:58):
the dots with the vendors who provide these tools and the faculty members who need them. There's
also a lot of good information out there on how to make, for example, STEM materials, accessible. So
if you Google that, a lot of places will come up. I have done some work with the National Center on
Accessible Educational Materials, the AEM, and they have a lot of great resources. They're very
(26:20):
much involved with Universal Design for Learning… bring the accessibility component into that. So
that is a place where you can get a lot of great resources about how to make these more
challenging educational materials accessible.One of the other areas that I know often raise
challenges for faculty, but other folks in higher ed, are third party content
like learning materials, content platforms and services, PDFs of articles with complex charts
(26:46):
and graphs are often a concern. What role does higher ed institutions need to play in moving
the accessibility needle in these other spaces, with these third party vendors.
Third party vendors and procurement is the most challenging aspect when it comes to your digital
accessibility program. The phrase that the Office of Civil Rights always uses is we're going to look
(27:08):
at your program, services, and activities. When you think about a campus’s program services and
activities, they are almost always happening on third-party products, whether it's your
learning management system, whether it's your student information system, your alumni system,
on and on that list goes. But the reality is that it's third-party products where the rubber hits
(27:30):
the road. So this is really, really important. One of the challenges with the ADA Title II rules
is that they don't apply to vendors. Those are private companies. They don't need to legally make
their products accessible. So what does higher ed need to do to kind of help fix this situation? One
(27:50):
is to recognize the buying power, the collective buying power of 4500 colleges and universities
across the country, and start to put the appropriate level of pressure onto the vendors.
As I say that, the approach I try to take with vendors is rather than it being adversarial,
(28:10):
let's think about this as a win-win opportunity. I happen to know the heads of accessibility at many
of the major educational technology companies, and they want us to complain, because in these
big organizations, it's up to the product manager to determine how accessible a given product is,
not up to the Accessibility Officer for that company. So we need to put pressure on vendors,
(28:35):
and I think there is opportunity for us to do that collectively, rather than individually. This is
something I have been talking about with a number of people nationally, about how do we become more
efficient in terms of how we approach vendors? And two things to think about: one is testing
can be challenging to determine whether a vendor's product is actually accessible or not. So rather
(28:59):
than 4500 colleges doing their own testing, is there a way to combine that and just kind
of share best practices, share results? Good idea in principle, but in practice, many times lawyers
get involved with this and they're concerned about legal risk if I, as Mark Greenfield,
representing the University of Buffalo, say product X is not accessible, the people at product
(29:21):
X don't agree with that, so we're going to take you to court and question that. So unfortunately,
the lawyers have been involved with that, but there are ways around that, which we continue to
work on. And then the second thing, again, is the collective buying power. I have been pleasantly
surprised over the last couple of years about how serious publishers and the major educational
(29:43):
technology vendors are taking accessibility. They are making progress with being honest and
objective about what the shortcomings are, and putting resources to address those shortcomings.
So I think it is really important that we continue to do that kind of work. One of the
things I was disappointed with with the new ADA regulations is that they only applied to Title II,
(30:06):
which is state and local government. I wish they would have also addressed Title III, which is
the private entities, the vendors would fall under Title III. For a whole bunch of reasons,
it would have been nice for them to address both of those at the same time, but unfortunately, that
didn't happen. So I think we really need to be an advocate about why this matters, and kind of use
(30:26):
our collective buying power to encourage vendors to push them kind of in the right direction.
The focus on improving the accessibility work on many campuses have focused on faculty and staff
but had not addressed students in most campuses, probably. What role do our institutions need to
play in moving the accessibility needle in these other spaces for classwork from students or from
(30:50):
student clubs and organizations, for example? I would love to see college campuses be much more
proactive when it comes to training students about the importance of accessibility, why it matters,
and just very quick and easy things that anybody can do to make their content more accessible.
I remember 20 years ago, I taught a general education course at the University of Buffalo,
(31:14):
it was called UB 101, where we basically gave them the components: this is how you kind of survive in
college in your first year, and what all the various offices do, and some other advice and
guidance. I would love to see any campus that has a course like that, you know what? Spend the day,
spend an hour talking about accessibility, what that is and why it matters, and show them the
basics on how to do it. Again, my experience has been students are very happy to take those steps
(31:39):
to make something accessible, and I think they would just eat that right up. And I think it's
a good service. I am a little disappointed that here we are in 2025, 30 years after the web was
invented, and 35 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, and yet we have made little
progress when it comes to the accessibility of higher education websites and documents,
(32:02):
and that's very frustrating to me. I think one of the ways to start to improve this is let's start
to work with students and have them understand, and not just computer science students.
There is a group called Teach Access, which is working with computer science faculty to make
sure they're incorporating accessibility in their teaching. But I think it needs to go much farther
than just Teach Access and computer science majors to everyone on campus. And again, this is not that
(32:27):
hard to do. A real quick story for you. One of the favorite projects I have worked on in my entire
career was working with a group of third graders to make a blind athlete's website accessible. It
was a fascinating project. The athlete's name was Rachael Scdoris. She runs in the Iditarod,
and she was legally blind. Through the ADA, she actually sued the Iditarod to have a spotter 1000
(32:54):
feet in front of her, so she had some sense of where she was going in the middle of Alaska. She
won that lawsuit. When my daughter was in second grade, as a class project, they followed the
Iditarod, and my daughter chose Rachael Scdoris to follow. She was young and blonde, and my daughter
identified with her, so when I found out she was blind, I went to her website and found out that it
(33:15):
was completely inaccessible. So I didn't contact Racha el directly. I contacted her agent and told
him, you know, this probably isn't the best look, because Rachael is actually pretty vocal
about accessibility and disability. And at first I said, “You know what? Maybe I'll fix this for
you.” But then I had a better idea, let's train my daughter and some of her classmates how to do
this. So I took a group of third graders, taught them how to code websites, this is back in 2006,
(33:42):
2007 and they recreated Rachael's website and it was perfectly accessible, including captioning the
videos that were on her website. So when people tell me that this is too hard, I tell them, “No,
it's not. I had a whole group of third graders who could do it.” The bigger lesson from that was when
I asked the third graders, “Why does this matter?” It was all about empathy. “Of course, we're going
(34:02):
to do this to help as many people as we can.” So instilling that mindset in the students,
I think, would be a big step forward to help us address why we are still kind of
challenged by making everything accessible.I mean, we are institutions of learning.
Exactly. We're well positioned to educate
an entire generation on how to do this work. And when you think about how important the web
(34:25):
and digital is now compared to a generation ago, I think COVID actually brought this to the forefront
when we moved everything online. Now, all of a sudden, everybody's really paying attention to
what happens online and accessibility as well. But as you think about the program
services and activities, more and more of those are moving online all the time. So it makes the
importance of Web and Digital Accessibility all the greater. And there is an opportunity to train
(34:51):
the next generation to really just be aware of and understand what this is all about.
It's really easy for folks to get hung up on the legal obligations, especially as
we've kind of framed the conversation around Title II. But can you talk a little bit more
about the value of digital accessibility and why we should be doing it anyways?
So again, one of the misconceptions is that it's a small part of the population that
(35:15):
has a disability, when, in fact, it's 20% of the population, and that is just people with permanent
disabilities. We're not talking about somebody with a temporary disability. So for example,
if you broke your arm and couldn't use a mouse anymore, or a situational disability,
whether you're in a library watching a video where you can't have the sound up,
(35:35):
or those kinds of things. So there's a lot of value, just in terms of the percentage of people,
but beyond that, one of my goals is to get people to think about accessibility, not as a cost
center, but as a strategic investment. Forrester Research a few years ago, did a study on the ROI,
(35:55):
the return on investment, of both usability and accessibility together. So this was not just about
accessibility, but usability and accessibility are definitely joined at the hip, and really you
can think about those very similarly, but the ROI they found was 100 to one. For every dollar
invested in usability and accessibility returned $100 of value. So think about it that way,
(36:22):
the value beyond. Again, I was talking before about students who maybe English is their second
language, and the value of having captions on a video. So there's just a lot of opportunity
there. And the thing is that it's really not hard to do the basics of accessibility, and
if you start with that mindset, it is relatively easy to do. Another message for my web development
(36:46):
friends is don't try to make everything as fancy as possible. Simpler is better. So, as an example,
without getting too technical here, there are a variety of ways that you can add alternative
text to an image. The simplest way and the best way is to use the alt text within the image tag
(37:08):
within HTML, instead of trying to get fancy with ARIA and other fancy programming, which you can
kind of accomplish the same thing, but you're much better off keeping it simpler, because,
even as we speak in 2025, the way that web browsers, assistive technology, and the operating
system all interact varies tremendously, and ARIA doesn't always work. So you can get a combination
(37:33):
of things where it's not working on NVDA, where it does work in voiceover because you're using
ARIA. So again, a message I have to developers is, try to keep things as simple as possible.
This is a usability thing as well. There's not a day that goes by that my wife doesn't hear me say,
“What's wrong? This website's awful because of usability issues,” and that's, quite frankly,
(37:54):
still the case with higher education. Part of my consulting business is doing audits, not
just accessibility audits, but doing just general accessibility and usability audits. And I have
yet to find a college or university where I can't write a 20-page report about the usability issues
that a site has, and a lot of that has to do with people just trying to be too complicated.
We always end with the question: “What's next?”
(38:17):
Fascinating question when it comes to technology, and technology changes so fast. So I'm going to
tell this story. Again, I've been doing IT work for 45 years. Gordon Moore was the CEO of Intel
and Moore's law is that computing technology doubles every 18 months. He said that back in
(38:39):
the early 1960s, we're here in 2025 that is still the case. The challenge is that it's difficult for
us as humans to get our arms around exponential change. I like to share the story of the inventor
of the game of chess. So an inventor comes up with this new game called chess. He takes it
to the Emperor, shares this game with the Emperor. Emperor loves the game. The inventor says, “Here's
(39:05):
what I want for a reward on the first square of the chess board, I want one grain of rice, on the
second I want two grains of rice, on the third square I want four grains of rice, eight grains,
16, exponentially. We're going to grow that until we've done all 64 squares of the chess board.
I ask people, “How big of a pile of rice do you have after you've filled all 64 squares?” People
(39:30):
are amazed that that pile of rice is bigger than Mount Everest. When I started working at
the University of Buffalo, 1987, we wanted to buy a Cray II supercomputer, biggest, baddest computer
on the planet. Cost, I believe, $17 million in 1987 dollars. We even, as a research university,
(39:51):
couldn't afford it, so we rented time at Calspan down the street at $10,000 an hour. Anybody who
has a second generation Apple iPhone or newer has more computing horsepower in their hand than
a Cray II supercomputer. That's what exponential change is. So in your mind, you're saying, “That's
(40:12):
great. Over the last 30 years or 40 years, we've made that much progress. In another 40 years,
we're going to also make that much progress.” That is not exponential thinking. In the next
three or four years, we're going to make that much progress again. So to loop this back to kind of
where technology is going and where accessibility is going and what's next, one of the things I'm
paying attention to is voice technology. I gave a talk at an international voice conference a few
(40:38):
years ago and talked about how voice could improve accessibility, and it's really interesting about
what the application of voice technology can do, because it can free us from the interface
of having to use a computer and a mouse, where now you don't have to worry about a lot of the
disabilities that come into play right now. So the future is multimodal, multi-surface interfaces,
(41:06):
which can take into every combination of things and really address accessibility. I was very
encouraged that at this voice conference, people are taking accessibility very seriously and trying
to build some tools into the voice interface. Related to that is artificial intelligence,
and many people are predicting that ultimately the user interface for AI is going to be voice. Now I
(41:30):
go back to watching a Space Odyssey and thinking about HAL, and that interface with HAL was a voice
interface, so I can see a lot of that coming, and there is real opportunity to address accessibility
issues with that. We need to take caution in terms of how quickly we use AI to improve accessibility.
(41:52):
One of the big controversies in the accessibility world now is the use of accessibility overlays,
which are products and tools where they tell you a single line of code can be installed on
your website and immediately address all of your accessibility issues. In the last couple of years,
they've been talking about AI as the driver of that, the reality is they don't work.
(42:15):
And I am very disappointed in most of the overlay companies who are, quite frankly,
telling lies about what these products can do. And for anybody who's thinking about using an overlay,
or currently using an overlay, know that that that can get you sued. There are actually a
number of court cases right now specifically addressing the use of overlays on websites, so
(42:42):
be very cautious about that. Also, a lot of talk now about how artificial intelligence can be used
to remediate documents and remediate websites. I think there is a lot of opportunity there,
but it is too early to have that working the way it should be working. For example, in Microsoft
Word right now, AI will generate alternative text for you. My experience has been that's good,
(43:05):
maybe one out of 10 times. So you really need to pay attention to that. There's an old quote. It's
known as Amara’s law, and it says we tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the
short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. And I think that is the case with AI,
where everybody's kind of running out to say AI is going to fix everything today. Not the case. But
(43:28):
I am very encouraged down the road about what AI can do. And let me just kind of close this with,
I would be remiss if I didn't mention a book in this talk. I have a tendency to mention lots
of books, and a book I would recommend everybody learns is called Haben: the Deaf Blind Woman who
Conquered Harvard Law. It's written by a woman by the name of Haben Girma. I've actually interacted
(43:52):
with her a few times online. She is just awesome and such a passionate advocate for people with
disabilities. People are amazed that she could graduate from Harvard Law School being deaf blind,
but she did, and she is a huge advocate for that. If you get the opportunity to hear her speak,
she always is talking about how there is an opportunity for innovation when it comes and
(44:18):
she's encouraging all of the technology people to really think about innovation and how we can use
technology to improve people's lives. And that certainly is something I hope we see again, even
as educational institutions going forward, how can we provide that platform for this innovation?
Yeah, that's a great book. Thanks for recommending it. Thanks so much for joining us today. It
(44:40):
was great to talk about accessibility, a topic I never get sick of talking about.
Thanks for having me.And it's a topic that all
institutions need to be addressing to a much greater extent as we approach that deadline.
So thank you again. Thank you.
(45:00):
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other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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