Sarah Horton

Organizations that deliver online learning must be strategic and holistic in their accessibility approach, ensuring all necessary structures are in place to support accessible and equitable experiences for learners with disabilities. Responsibility for accessibility must be distributed appropriately across all stakeholder groups. By adopting stewardship activities common in physical campuses, a more strategic approach can be applied to the digital campus. Masterplanning the digital campus means addressing near-term activities with a long view—one that takes into account the underlying infrastructure as well as the surface-level structures where people engage more directly in the learning process. This paper presents foundational activities around policy, process, programs, and practice that are necessary to support the creation of a sustainable, accessible online learning environment.

Can we rethink accessibility in more effective and sustainable terms—ones that generate a positive return on investment for providers and a pleasurable user experience for everyone?

Improving web accessibility can be challenging, particularly for organizations with large, complex digital estates and internal organizational structures. Efforts can be guided by technical standards, but there are shortcomings with treating accessibility for people with disabilities as a compliance effort. Using the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design as an approach to remediation of accessibility barriers in the built environment as a parallel, we explore an approach to improving digital accessibility that places value on conscious, pragmatic decision-making and sharing of evidence of progress.