“As you can see from this slide …” may not be an uncommon expression used at lecterns to introduce an image.

But in classrooms or online, not every student may be able to see what’s on a screen well enough — or even at all — to learn from it.

To help overcome such problems, Katie Healey, an education specialist at the Center for Educational Effectiveness on campus, is designing and leading a Canvas-based professional development course to share best practices and equip instructors with the tools to make their materials for the classroom and online courses accessible to students with disabilities. She is creating video modules, publishing a monthly newsletter and hosting monthly meetings for about 120 instructors from all 10 UC campuses and beyond.

Healey’s A11Y Project is supported with a grant of $45,000 from the UC Office of the President’s Online Fund focused on digital inclusion. The project’s name references the shorthand for accessibility in tech circles: There are 11 letters between “A,” the first letter, and “Y,” the last. 

According to the 2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, nearly 21% of undergraduates have disabilities. 

Healey, who specialized in disability history for a Yale doctorate in the history of science and medicine, said she proposed the A11Y project because being inclusive is the right thing to do. “We try to frame this as disability justice,” she said.

Mandate creates urgency

The effort has taken on new urgency with the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 mandate that universities make new and existing web and mobile app content accessible to all students. The language of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act has been updated with technical standards for web and mobile app content that public colleges and other government entities need to meet in 2026 or 2027, depending on their size. The UC Davis Office of Compliance and Policy is hiring a contract employee to help the campus meet what is an April 2026 deadline.

UCOP offers e-courses on accessibility geared to web developers, designers and marketers, and procurement staff. However, Healey said, many instructors, who often lack coding backgrounds or digital accessibility expertise, are not adequately equipped to ensure their digital course content is accessible to students with disabilities.

Course content

Healey, who hosts the Disability Daily Podcast to highlight key people and moments in disability history, provides rich context for the A11Y course. “I think a disability history- and disability justice-approach to accessibility training is crucial to actually changing the ableist culture of academia and higher education.”

The course integrates techniques for digital accessibility with principles of universal design for learning, or UDL, which provides different ways for students to access materials, engage with them and show what they know. Healey said UDL benefits all students by putting accessibility ahead of compliance-based accommodations.

Launched in August, the course is addressing topics such as designing for diverse learning needs, creating accessible course content, implementing accessible multimedia, and legal compliance and ethical considerations.

Speakers at meetings have included leaders from the UC Berkeley Disability Lab; Audio Description Associates, which trains describers and provides audio descriptions for major cultural centers; and the UC Berkeley Neurodiversity Initiative for students; as well as a mental health services researcher on how to support students with psychiatric disabilities; and document accessibility specialists. 

Low-hanging fruit, heavier lifts

Miriam Markum, an associate professor of teaching in microbiology and molecular genetics, is a course participant. “I’ve had a longstanding interest in teaching well to everyone,” she said, adding that more of her students are seeking accommodations for disabilities. 

“The course is really interesting to me,” said Markum, who also is a member of the campus Disability Issues Administrative Advisory Committee. “The more I learn, the more I realize that I don’t know. I’m at a really humbling part of my journey.” 

Markum said she’s discovered that Canvas, the campus learning-management system, offers a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve accessibility. For example, when instructors activate the immersive reader, students can customize the appearance of text or have content read aloud to them. Also, turning on SensusAccess enables students to convert documents to more accessible formats.

Other improvements for accessibility, Markum said, are a heavier lift at the start: adding alt text descriptions to figures in digital materials, designing documents for screen readers or narrating slide content during a lecture. 

Tool inventory, task force

As part of the project, Healey and colleagues from UC Berkeley are meeting with representatives of each campus to determine what accessibility tools are available and how aware instructors are of them.

Through the course participants, Healey is also proposing to establish a UC resource group on disability justice and accessibility and a task force to challenge ableism. “When we want to make recommendations, we’ll have a lot more power,” Healey said.