4 Other accessibility issues in academic settings

Framing story: At university or college

Making barriers known: experiences of blind academics

What does it mean to feel like you belong in academia or higher education? Laura Bulk asked that question of blind members of university communities for her doctoral dissertation. Take some time to engage with her  3-minute thesis challenge and learn about some of her findings.  A common message her participants reported experiencing was: “you don’t belong here.”

But across Canada, the blind are changing that. Dr. Cynthia Bruce, a blind faculty member at Concordia University in Montreal, has critically described the heavy burden of self-advocacy for disabled students^[2]. The constant combination of self-advocacy and system navigation required of students who are blind is characterized by Jen Goulden as an extra part-time job, a sentiment echoed by Laetitia Mfamobani, in a panel presentation about braille in post-secondary settings.

Conferences are a great example of a space where more inclusive practice is called for. In an effort to specifically address accessibility and inclusion within the spaces at scientific meetings and conferences, the International Network of Researchers with Vision Impairment and their Allies (INOVA) have put together a toolkit to help the organizers of these events incorporate accessibility into their design.

Accessing and citing research materials is a challenge raised by many. Dr. Daniella Levy-Pinto’s presentation experiencing inaccessible PDF provided an overview of the barriers posed by inaccessible books and articles. And in their presentation “Ensuring the World’s Knowledge is Accessible by All” at a conference hosted by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, blind students, researchers, and a faculty member described the difficulties involved in working with tables, citing page numbers, and seeking remediation. Panelist Melanie Marsden also reminded librarians to reach out to Indigenous scholars, editors, and publishing teams with offers of support in creating accessible reading experiences^[3].

These voices, and many others, are advocating for accessible and equitable education and calling for allies to join in. Laura Bulk, now Dr. Bulk, shared this message in her address to her graduating class and distinguished guests:

“I encourage each of us to move into the next chapter, finding ways to do justice to bring kindness, to be humble and to co-create spaces of belonging for everyone.”

The challenge to co-create spaces of belonging for everyone is found taken up amongst a growing number of allies. Sighted educators, staff and librarians in universities and colleges have been learning to co-create these spaces. For example, Dr. Mandy Wintink created a tactile neuron out of candy with psychology student Christopher Schiafone. In BALANCE for Blind Adults’ Living Blind Podcast, Christopher and his brother Brandon characterized their experiences with educators who created tactile learning experiences (including using cookie sheets, magnets, and silly putty!) in very positive terms.

When post-secondary educators are asked to approach something from a new perspective, they will likely experience some confusion at some point. But adapting environments, creating things, and building new relationships are all options on the table.  With the help of these educators, universities will accelerate the transition from a reactive model of inclusion to a proactive one. This new model needs to be built on the premise that blind students can and will enter academia and so it is important to invest in infrastructure that supports the daily presence of blind and disabled students, faculty, and staff.

Demo: Word document

A common experience is reading a course syllabus. Accessibility guidelines don’t just apply to web content. They can apply to Microsoft Word documents too. In this demonstration, Mark shows how using a few Microsoft Word features can make a course syllabus more accessible. This demo includes the use of headings, lists, and tables.

Microsoft Word has lots of helpful accessibility features built into it, so learning the features is a good investment.  However, no technology is perfect. We have seen situations where Word documents don’t work well with the VoiceOver screen reader, used with Apple products, which are quite popular.  In those situations, users may want the file to be exported to another format, like HTML.  We have found a reliable tool for doing this is the WordToEPUB extension, developed by the DAISY Consortium for Windows environments.  The extension provides an option to export to HTML.

Other academic obstacles to consider

1.      Expecting students to be experts on their needs

When working out accommodations for someone with a disability, we are often reminded that the person knows their own needs and capabilities. While this is certainly true to an extent, and centring the student’s perspective is essential, we need to allow students to be students. The types of courses and content they’ll be engaging with are probably new to them, and at the outset they may have limited information about the course’s requirements and materials. Putting all the responsibility for determining what they need to succeed onto the student is neither fair nor effective in this situation.

The program or courses might be new to a student. The experience of having a disability, or changes in their disability, could also be new. In this clip from a student panel at the 2019 York University Accessibility Summit, Jessica Watkins expresses how hard it can be for students to explain their needs. Ben Ho Lung also explains the difficulty of knowing needs because one’s level of sight changes. And Tyee Fellows explains that being formally diagnosed with dyslexia is new to him. These testimonials illustrate that understanding needs can be complex and difficult.

To succeed, a collaborative approach between the student, educators, and support faculty or staff is best. Instructors and course designers know what the essential requirements of a course or program are, and those in support roles know the types of resources and solutions that are available. These roles can work together with the student to anticipate challenges and address others as they arise, rather than expecting the student to know everything they’ll need before the course even begins.

Please don’t blame students if they are in the process of learning about their needs! To reframed that in a positive way, please continue to listen to students and be open to what they are drawing to your attention as revealing something important.

2.      All students are different

As we discussed in the overview of learning to use a screen reader, people who are blind are not all the same. Each of us has different skills, interests, aptitudes and experiences, not to mention the myriad of social, cultural, racial, economic and other factors that make each of us unique.

For instance, you may have worked with a blind student in the past who had never learned to read braille. The student you’re working with in the present may need materials in braille in order to be successful. Telling your current student that a previous student didn’t need something is unhelpful and dismissive.

Making materials as accessible as possible from the beginning will free you up to address individual differences in student needs as these arise. For instance, well-formatted documents that are accessible using a screen reader will be easier to produce in braille when necessary.

3.      Technologies differ

As we discussed earlier, different screen readers are designed for different operating systems. If all of a student’s prior experience is in one operating system, transitioning to a new one will require learning an entirely new screen reader, which takes time and effort on top of the student’s existing workload. If someone has always used Windows, but is taking a course on using software in a different operating system, they will need to learn a new screen reader on top of learning to use the software covered in the course.

The most accessible format options may also differ depending on the screen reader and operating system being used. For instance, the syllabus Mark walked us through was created in a Microsoft Word format and may work for someone using Windows 11 with a Windows-based screen reader. However, this may create problems for someone using Microsoft Word on Mac with the VoiceOver screen reader. In such a case, converting the Word document to a different format, like HTML, may be needed.

4.      Page numbers for citations

It is often the case that accessible format versions of books and journal articles do not contain page numbers accessible to the screen reader.  This point was drawn to the attention of a national conference of Canadian librarians during a panel talk of blind students and faculty. Dr. Cynthia Bruce told the librarians attending:

“page numbers are another significant issue and I know that seems small but it’s actually monumental for us.”

If your discipline uses a citation method requiring that page numbers be referenced under certain circumstances, recognize that blind students may not always be able to provide these page numbers. Blind students have often had a grade penalized or faced a lack of cooperation from instructors when we explain that we aren’t able to access page numbers for some content.

Work-arounds, such as counting paragraphs and using a paragraph number for a citation, take a great deal of time and are not an equitable solution. Instead, it’s important to recognize that the problem is with the current reading environment, which can be improved.  Better options are possible! For example of an article from the journal Alliance for African Partnership Perspectives. When the Project Muse platform provides PDF versions of the article with page numbers, it also provides these page numbers in the HTML versions of articles.

Until more publishers and other content producers provide solutions of their own, this remains an academic challenge for blind students, researchers, and educators. It can be intimidating for students to raise this issue with instructors, especially in environments where warnings about academic integrity are often repeated. The difficulty raising it can be compounded when educators are not familiar with digital formats or screen reading technologies and so have difficulty understanding why the page number issue is such an obstacle.

For educators with course assignments that require page numbers, the best strategy is probably to welcome the opportunity to collaborate with blind students to find a workable solution. Meanwhile, librarians can tell academic publishers to adopt better techniques for creating online reading materials, like the one described above.

5.       Reading material that isn’t proof-read

Another major obstacle is that reading material provided to blind students is often not proofread for accessibility or accuracy. There are rigorous proofing processes involved in publishing a book or journal article, but when materials are remediated for accessibility, often no one verifies the material thoroughly. Remember that just because someone tells you content is accessible, doesn’t mean it is. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who verified that this content is accessible and accurate?
2. How did they verify it?

If answers to these questions are vague, incomplete, or rest on untested assumptions, then there’s a real risk that errors could be passed on to blind readers. When materials are not verified, there can be serious consequences for students and researchers. In this panel presentation at the conference of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Dr. Bruce explains how inaccuracies of data tables can affect the integrity of her scholarship. Constantly needing to wonder whether the names and terms you’re learning about are spelled correctly in your reading material, whether you’re looking at the same data as your colleagues, and why a string of words don’t have any spaces between them is a needless and ongoing source of cognitive demand for blind researchers.

People have sometimes told us that no students have reported problems with their material before, but quality control isn’t the student’s responsibility. Students may also be burnt out from the responses received when they’ve reported issues in the past. More than once when Ashley brought accessibility issues to a creator or publisher’s attention, the response has been that someone told them the material is accessible, so the problem must not exist. Ask yourself whether you are really prepared for and open to feedback from your users. If you are knowledgeable about whether the material was verified, by whom, and how, you can respond to feedback in more constructive and productive ways.

6.      In-text citation structures

When reviewing books or journal articles using a screen reader, long strings of in-text citations can break up the flow of sentences and paragraphs. This means the reader has to keep the words from before the citation in working memory, navigate through the citations, determine where the text resumes, and stitch the words from their working memory into the new text they’re reading. This process can make reading comprehension more difficult, and research suggests that such difficulties extend to less skilled print readers as well^[4].

Here’s an example. This is a compound sentence from an article published in an academic journal^[5]:

The concept of intelligence (structure and evaluation) is still debated among experts; however, it gathers some consensus in research as a significant predictor of quality of learning (Almeida et al., 2008, Spinath et al., 2006, Sternberg, 2012, Sternberg et al., 2001, Strenze, 2007) and is considered, par excellence, a variable that differentiates levels of academic achievement (Deary et al., 2007, Lemos et al., 2011, Primi et al., 2010).

Sighted readers may be surprised to know that when we listened to it with JAWS 2024 (verbosity mode lowest) in the Edge browser using a down key technique to move through the sentences, the HTML version of the sentence required 11 key presses and listening to approximately 40 more words:

• The concept of intelligence left paren structure and evaluation right paren is still debated among experts; however, it gathers some consensus in research as a significant
• predictor of quality of learning left paren
• same page link ‑ Almeida et al., 2008,
• same page link ‑ Spinath et al., 2006,
• same page link ‑ Sternberg, 2012,
• same page link ‑ Sternberg et al., 2001,
• same page link ‑ Strenze, 2007 right paren
• and is considered, par excellence, a variable that differentiates levels of academic achievement left paren
• same page link ‑ Deary et al., 2007,
• same page link ‑ Lemos et al., 2011,
• same page link ‑ Primi et al., 2010 right paren.

The general issue that this example illustrates has been drawn to our attention by multiple blind readers. It may not be raised as frequently as other issues because there are so many urgent challenges to address. However, it’s important to be aware of how in-text citation conventions can be a source of extraneous cognitive load for students. It’s also a good example of something that probably isn’t contemplated by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. As we have established though, it’s essential that we look for solutions to accessibility barriers above and beyond WCAG.

As far as we know, there is not currently an obvious working solution for this experience. On the one hand, readers need to be able to access citations, for a variety of reasons, such as verifying claims or following threads of research. But on the other hand, readers need a reading experience that flows smoothly and doesn’t disrupt their attention to the material. We have drawn this issue to the attention of the Chief Innovation Officer with the DAISY Consortium, and hopefully a growing number of readers, developers, and publishers will join in the quest for a solution. As educators and librarians, we probably are best served approaching challenges such as this not with an attitude resigned to defeat but rather filled with curiosity and optimism.

Beyond access: Disabled ways of knowing

Accessibility is not necessarily about getting access to visual culture or abled-bodied ways of knowing. We are not doing favours for students with disabilities by making our content and learning environments accessible to them.  Blind and disabled ways of being and knowing are equal gifts of creation, so improving accessibility helps us all reach our collective potential.

As educators and librarians, we have a responsibility to support the common good of society in the search for knowledge, in all the ways it manifests, not just the way it manifests most frequently. For instance, those who are sighted frequently analyze data by generating images. Those who are blind may analyze some types of data through sonification. Analyzing images leads to important insights and discoveries, but analyzing sound leads to others.

For example, here is a famous  image of the Pillars of Creation, which is part of the Eagle Nebula:

And here is an example of the sonification of Pillars of Creation (courtesy of NASA/Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory).

According to the Chandra X-ray Observatory:

“In the ‘Pillars of Creation’ piece, the sounds are generated by moving horizontally across the image from left to right as seen in both optical and X-ray light. As with the sonification of the Galactic Center, the vertical position of the recorded light controls the pitch, but in this case it varies over a continuous range of pitches. Particular attention is paid to the structure of the pillars which can be heard as sweeps from low to high pitches and back. The two different “melodies” of optical and X-ray light can be enjoyed individually or simultaneously.”^[6]

For more discussion and examples of sonification and astronomy, here is a TED talk given by a blind astronomer: Wanda Diaz Merced: How a blind astronomer found a way to hear the stars