“Undue hardship” and the use of Academic Accommodations to Redress Digital Inaccessibility

The relationships between academic institutions and the disability community – and the broader context for inclusive education in K-12 – have evolved. However, the Academy holds firmly to the need for a medical intermediary, a validator, to vet which learners are sufficiently deserving of accessibility services, such as accommodations, and which are not.

Deficient Digital Accessibility Practices Impair Academic Institutions and Disable Learners

In medicine, a deficiency is a lack or shortage of a functional entity, by less than normal or necessary supply or function.

Currently most schools deploy the old-fashioned, ad hoc accommodations model that was adequate in the print world but fails miserably in the digital world…”

McLarney, L. (2015, January). The TEACH Act: Frequently Asked Questions. Braille Monitor.

Lauren McLarney, speaking in 2015 on behalf of the US National Federation of the Blind, draws attention to the problematic taken-for-grantedness of academic accommodations.

For decades academic institutions have enjoyed access to more and more digital learning materials, learning technologies and learning environments. Few of the current generation of learners were alive when institutions were limited to print and analogue materials.

And yet, the current generation is limited – as in held back – by an academic accommodations system and ethos that was born of the analogue era and stopped developing there.

Technology evolves at break-neck speed. Developmentally delayed institutions lag behind.

A developmental delay is a relative diagnosis, typically made when a patient – child – is not achieving developmental milestones at pace with peers. (Choo et al., 2019)

Educational technologies have accessibility features. Educational materials are sourceable in formats that are, or can be made to be, digitally accessible. Our ongoing reliance on one-off accommodations to redress digital accessibility issues is more than outdated. It is oppressive.

Why should learners with disabilities have to request accessible formats on a course-by-course, reading-by-reading basis when accessible formats could be the curated norm?

Decades into the digital age, any academic campus community can – as in has the ability to – learn to:

• Curate, create and share digitally accessible course materials.
• Move society toward a more accessible digital commons by engaging in digitally accessible scholarship and communication.
• Use their buying power to require academic publishers and educational technology developers to normalize digital accessibility in all of their product offerings.

So why don’t we? It’s not a tech issue.

Historically, the ethos of the academy has been to amplify learner disabilities and obscure institutional impairments.

Institutions’ ability to deliver digitally accessible and inclusive learning experiences is impaired by deficient know-how across faculty and staff, deficient will across leadership, and deficient policies and programs.

Rather than educating the campus community to adopt digitally accessible practices for the benefit of all learners, institutions perpetuate a legacy of ableism and marginalization by operationalizing accessibility through academic accommodations to address a “deficit issue” for an individual learner.

Rather than commit to providing digitally accessible learning materials, environments, activities and assessments for all learners, institutions put the onus on students with disabilities to demonstrate need. Time accommodations, due date extensions, or alternative text accommodations, too often function as a bandage over digitally inaccessible teaching and learning practices, and are only provided for individual learners with medically validated and vetted disabilities.

An access-within-limits theme prevails across many accommodation policies.

Despite legislation and/or litigation, the academy has been slow to change accessibility-related policies and practices. Typically, an individual student with a medically documented disability will be accommodated to the point of “undue hardship” to the institution.

“Undue hardship” is codified in law. The term is utilized to protect an institution’s ability to ensure accommodations are financially viable for the institution, pose no health or safety risk and do not provide advantages to disabled students over others in the class, or in any way dilute the curriculum, credentials or the University’s standards and reputation for academic excellence. Pause here for a moment. Breathe in. Breathe out. This is a topic that needs more oxygen. Imagine…

• What if an institution’s reliance on academic accommodations to redress digital inaccessibility was an indicator of the standards the institution sets for learners and faculty alike?
• What if the degree to which digital accessibility/inaccessibility affected program completion for students with disabilities was an indicator of academic excellence?
• What if contributions to digitally accessible and inclusive scholarship, and digitally accessible and inclusive commons could make or break an institution’s reputation?

Equitable, meaningful educational experiences are not codified in academic accommodation policies.

Interestingly, “undue hardship” language is not reciprocal. It is not utilized to protect disabled learners from institutions that design learning environments, course materials, curriculum and assessments that advantage learners who are enabled (the ones whose bodies and minds fit the Academy’s historically contrived “norm”) over students who are disabled in their institution’s learning environments.

Reading across the grain, an uncomfortable narrative emerges: the Institution’s academic standards and practices are infallible but can be adjusted to a degree for students with medically abnormal bodies or minds.

Perhaps this jarring phrasing is useful to demonstrate the underlying message that students with disabilities hear loud and clear. “There’s nothing wrong with the way we in the Academy do things. We don’t need to change anything for normal learners. We just need to make exceptions for people who aren’t like us. Our standards and practices aren’t inaccessible to anyone but you.” That master narrative is made clear to learners over and over again, even if they never read the official accommodations policy.

It is important to acknowledge that developing an institution’s ability to practice digitally accessible and inclusive scholarship will not do away with the need for all academic accommodations. But it would improve learning experiences and outcomes for many learners who are currently, unnecessarily, and thoughtlessly disadvantaged.

What if accessibility was regarded as a dynamic experience of education, shared across multiple, equitable beings?

Institutions in some juristictions are beginning to take a more proactive approach to accessibility, including digital accessibility, thanks to legislation such as the Accessibility for Ontarions Act (AODA) that sets standards. However, Insitutions are slow to adapt and rely on loopholes in legal language that require them to provide digitally accessible services for learners

Reflection #1: Accommodations are intended to mitigate inequities in post-secondary. In what ways do they perpetuate inequities?

Reflection #2: In what ways does the accommodations model, built in part to address accessibility issues experienced in the analogue print world, hold educators and learners in a time warp relative to the pace at which technology becomes integrated into learning?

Reflection #3: Does the taken-for-grantedness of accommodations impair faculty and leadership from pursuing more transformative levers for equity and inclusion?