Digital Accessibility On College Campuses—Is Berkeley The Beginning Of A Broader Call To Action?

Historically, considerations about accessibility on college campuses have largely revolved around the physical accessibility of campus buildings—the width of doorways, the accessibility of elevators, and the allotment of wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. More than thirty years after the institution of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, concerns about the physical ADA compliance of college campuses persist. Notably, on the law’s 30th anniversary in 2020, a coalition of members of the University of California (UC) school system community, UC Access Now, published a “Demandifesto,” urging UC schools to treat ADA standards as “a floor not a ceiling” and calling for design alterations to UC campus buildings to create a more welcoming and accessible physical space for disabled students, among other improvements.

However, in the midst of continued calls to re-evaluate university standards for physical accessibility, the increasing digitization of campus communities (which, though not a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic, was accelerated by it) has led to calls for increased accessibility in online campus spaces as well. As universities continue to offer digital content in the form of lectures, recordings of class sessions, and livestreams of commencement (among other ceremonies), disabilities rights advocacy groups continue to hold universities accountable for producing verbal descriptions for visually-impaired students, providing transcripts and captions for those with hearing disabilities, and enabling assistive technology for those with manual disabilities. UC Berkeley’s consent agreement with the Justice Department last week, which was eight years in the making, underscores the hard-fought battle that many disabilities rights advocacy groups face when addressing the digital divide for disabled students.

Years before the Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to re-envision their offerings inside and outside of the classroom for digital environments, UC Berkeley had amassed hundreds of thousands of video and audio resources, many of which were not posted with the means for deaf, blind, and manually-disabled students to access them. In 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) published a report stating that Berkeley’s vast cache of online resources did not meet the requirements outlined in Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Looking particularly at the university’s BerkeleyX, YouTube, and iTunes U videos, the DOJ found that only a small percentage offered closed captioning, keyboard accessibility, or visuals that met the standard of accessibility for those with low vision. While all of these features for accessible online resource design are described in the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE) and the Office of the President’s Information Technology Accessibility Policy, the DOJ reported that at the time only 75 of UC Berkeley’s 543 YouTube videos had closed captioning not generated by YouTube’s (highly faulty) automatically-generated system, and that none of the 16 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) sampled by the DOJ met all of the requirements for accessible digital resources. Perhaps most significantly, the report found that “UC Berkeley’s administrative methods have not ensured that individuals with disabilities have an equal opportunity to use UC Berkeley’s online content” due to the fact that the MOOCs and other online resources were merely encouraged, rather than required, to meet the accessibility standards outlined by the BRCOE.

In response to the DOJ’s allegations, the university chose to promptly remove over 20,000 resources rather than make the online content more accessible to students with disabilities. In a statement to the community about the decision, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Cathy Koshland stated: “In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access.”

However, six years later, UC Berkeley reversed their decision. On November 21, 2022, the university agreed to make “all future and the vast majority of its existing online content accessible to people with disabilities.” As U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds for the Northern District of California states in the DOJ’s press release: “Through this consent decree, the Department of Justice demonstrates its commitment to ensuring compliance with the ADA by providing individuals with disabilities a full and equal opportunity to participate in and enjoy the benefits of UC Berkeley’s services, programs and activities in equal measure with people without disabilities.”

The years since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic have seen an increased awareness of the digital divide, producing a wealth of resources for educators and administrators seeking to produce fully accessible online content for their campus communities. The UC Berkeley agreement is a landmark decision in disability rights for a new landscape of digital access to university offerings, and serves as a call to action for colleges and universities to regard the basic requirements for accessibility—in physical and digital spaces alike—as “a floor not a ceiling,” as UC Access Now so aptly stated. However, while UC Berkeley is an example of a school that can afford to allocate the financial resources necessary to ensure their digital content meets the requirements for accessibility, the question remains whether community colleges and small private universities can rise to the occasion as they try to enter the increasingly competitive world of online offerings.