Accessible learning during COVID-19

Students with learning disabilities are facing additional difficulties in adapting to online and remote learning. With the increase in difficulty, some students are resorting to dropping out of school. Universities have become more concerned with making sure everything is capable of being online that they put accessible education in the rearview.

Chris Danielsen told Inside Higher Ed that the worry is that the rush to move everything online will cause universities to worry less about the accessibility of these classes.

This past summer alone, 35 lawsuits were filed against universities for failures in making online materials accessible. “The pandemic has amplified what has already been a problem for years,” Heath Thompson told edscoop.com. It is imperative at this point to embrace the disabled population.

Students resort to dropping out of school because of the difficulties they face with online and remote learning. Meredith Boyce, a blind student, said to edscoop.com, she dropped out because of issues with accommodating things like text to speech. She said, “it is very difficult to be a disabled student in the era of online learning.”

According to a 2018 study done by NCES, the National Center for Education Statistics, 19.4 percent of students have some form of disability.

Samantha Swift, a non-disabled Iowa State University student, talked about having a deaf ASL professor and its difficulties. “Things would lag, and the class would miss something, but it is hard to relay the message to her. You could tell that there were times she was frustrated with us, and we were frustrated with her.”

Swift said, that there wasn’t any change to the class requirements required of the class; it just got put online, making it more difficult than it needed to be.

Some things universities could do to help students with vision impairments in this case; According to Amelia Pang at EdTech, instructors can create text versions of presentations and simplify them, ask at the beginning of the term what accessibility tools they have, and even something as simple as using high contrast backgrounds.

The University of Southern California is one of the schools providing students with additional resources to better adapt to this new learning environment. USC has a specialist to help students with virtual drop-in sessions and workshops to transition.

As we move towards another term of remote education, the hope is that there will be more accessible options for students with disabilities. “There needs to not be only suggestions and guidelines but mandates in place from university administrators,” Deanna Ferrante said to Inside Higher Ed. Ferrante also hopes that some of the accessibility that comes from the pandemic can be transitioned into the physical classroom when things get back to normal.