Provocations: Individualized accommodations for digital accessibility issues pull disabled learners out of community.
When we talk about digital accessibility in education, we aren’t just talking about one person’s crummy experience.
An individual learner may experience digital inaccessibility in a learning environment or activity, or in materials and assessments.
They may be the only learner in a class to experience a specific issue.
They may choose to champion the issue, alone. They may choose to work around it, alone. They might get stuck, alone.
However, that individual is experiencing digital barriers as an individual in a community of learners. In that context, the learner experiencing barriers to access is not alone. They are marginalized.
“Accommodation usually involves procedural changes and modifications in teaching and academic evaluation practices that are individualized according to each disabled student’s unique needs…
…the individualization of accommodation – ostensibly to meet each student’s unique needs – shifts the obligation for change to individual students and instructors and forecloses opportunities for the university to become more genuinely accessible and inclusive.”
Jung, K. (2003). Chronic Illness and Academic Accommodation: Meeting Disabled Students’ “unique needs” and Preserving the Institutional Order of the University. The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 30(1).
What if the onus was on the institution to support all members of the learning community – educators, TAs, and learners with and without disabilities – to adapt their digital workflow and normalize digital accessibility practices?
Adapting workflows and building digital accessibility fluencies and practices will not do away with all accommodation needs. It won’t even do away with all of the digital accessibility issues students with disabilities face, not yet anyway.
It will more firmly situate learners with disabilities in their learning communities.
And it will better prepare the post-secondary community to recognize and resist the marginalization of people with disabilities in the digital commons.
What if accessibility, digital or otherwise, was regarded as a dynamic, functional experience of education, shared between multiple, equitable beings?
