There’s been an uptick in lawsuits by students with disabilities against colleges and universities since the coronavirus pandemic shifted higher education online.
This July and August, digital accessibility suits increased 17 times compared to the first half of the year, according to AudioEye, a digital accessibility software company.
“We would expect to see more of these in the coming months,” said AudioEye Co-Founder Sean Bradley. “… The actual litigation does call out COVID and does speak to the urgency around online education for individuals with disabilities.”
Online education, if designed incorrectly, can pose all kinds of educational hurdles to students with disabilities, who make up about a fifth of college students, according to a 2016 report from the National Center for Education Statistics.
A lack of descriptive alt text, or alternative text, can make it impossible for blind students to know what information the images on a worksheet are supposed to convey. Faculty rely heavily on standard PDF files, which aren’t readable by the technology used by students with vision impairments. While it’s possible to make these documents accessible, professors don’t necessarily know how without training. And the list goes on. Materials for class can include redundant links or empty links that trip up students’ assistive devices and make the work more confusing for them to navigate. Sometimes, even a school’s colors can be an obstacle if the color contrast on a university’s website makes the text harder to read.
Meanwhile, not all colleges and universities are consistent in their web accessibility across offices and departments. There can be “a lot of disparity” within a single institution, Bradley said.
He stressed that these issues aren’t new, with roughly 30 lawsuits leveled against online higher education institutions for similar issues last year. He’s seen individual lawsuits and digital accessibility investigations by the Office of Civil Rights increase as awareness of the problems grew over the last decade. These kinds of cases are “par for the course” now, he said.
