One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic was that many families didn’t have reliable internet access at home. As schools closed and classes moved online, educators rushed to improvise solutions for families without robust connections, setting up mobile Wi-Fi access points in school buses, sending home portable hot spots to those who needed it and more.
And even before the pandemic, educators were working to close the “homework gap,” the divide between students who can easily log on at home to access critical school materials and those who lack reliable home internet.
Now that schools are back open and pandemic relief funds are expiring, there’s a risk this gap will quickly widen unless policymakers take a fresh look at the nation’s connectivity. And it’s one that disproportionately affects students of color and those in underserved communities.
“The truth is that most of these programs created during the pandemic relied on philanthropic and private sector support and continue to do so,” she writes of efforts to make sure students have online access for schoolwork. She calls for new federal legislation to “make these programs less vulnerable to political changes.”
The largest federal program offering support for school districts and libraries for internet connections, the E-rate, was created nearly 30 years ago. Back then much of today’s crucial technology for living and learning had not yet been invented — including smartphones, social media and AI chatbots. “It's been too long that we've kept these same policies in place,” Turner Lee told EdSurge. “We need ways we can guarantee support to schools for the type of infrastructure they need.”
EdSurge connected with Turner Lee for this week’s EdSurge Podcast. The sociologist shared her experiences traveling around the country — to stops including Marion, Alabama, West Phoenix, Arizona, and Hartford, Connecticut — asking people to share how they get connected and the challenges to digital access they face.
When Jacob, a 10th grader with vision impairment, signed up for an AP class, it made him feel like a castaway.
His ambitions to learn were thwarted because his teacher had assigned handouts and a three-week-long lesson plan that relied on a website that wasn’t easy for him to navigate. So he felt frustrated, isolated: “I am stranded on this desert island because that site doesn't work [with my screen reader],” Jacob later told a researcher, also adding, “You can't just re-change your whole teaching plan, especially when you've distributed it.”
Like Jacob, many students with disabilities are forced to work extra, advocates argue. They have to learn just like other students, but they can also have to deal with assignments they can’t access and other digital hurdles. That’s particularly the case in K-12 classes, where teaching materials may be hard to parse, according to the preprint of a research article that argues that many of these students have to figure out how to access basic documents on their own, outside of school. (The article cites Jacob’s story, though the author declined to provide further details to EdSurge, citing ethical concerns.)
But there’s a push to change that.
In April, the U.S. Department of Justice published its final rule for web and mobile accessibility. It updated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the law that requires state and local governments to supply equal opportunity — including in services like public schools, community colleges and public universities — for people with disabilities. The update is meant to expand access by spelling out specific technical standards government entities must follow.
This latest update was crucial because it set a clock for when schools' digital materials have to be accessible and specifies standards for how to measure whether they are, according to some observers.
Ticking Clock
Under the new guidelines, digital text, images, audio, videos, documents, controls and animations must meet a series of “success criteria.” Per reporting from Community College Daily, these include:
“Content should not be limited to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape.
Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media.
Captions are provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media.
Audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media.
Non-text content should have an equivalent text alternative.
Colors used are bold enough to be seen on the screen.”
It’s historic that the law now clearly signals the way for public institutions to measure digital accessibility, says Glenda Sims, the chief information accessibility officer for Deque Systems, a company focused on digital accessibility. These sort of requirements have been known about for years, she adds, but now there’s a “ruler” in law for measuring if they’ve been met.
Some disability advocates say they appreciate that the Justice Department shifted the burden away from students. Until now, students — and sometimes teachers — have had to work to make digital content accessible, says Natalie Shaheen, an assistant professor of blind education at Illinois State University’s College of Education.
But under the rule, educational institutions are responsible for the websites and materials they use for education. So now, schools have to worry about purchasing inaccessible materials, according to Elizabeth Barker, a senior technical assistant and project director for CAST, a nonprofit that created the Universal Design for Learning framework.
While not new, the obligations in the rule have become pressing.
“Most public colleges and universities are facing a two-year compliance clock that started ticking a few months ago,” wrote Jarret Cummings, a senior advisor for policy and government relations at Educause, in an email to EdSurge. It’s vital that they “quickly engage their corporate providers” to figure out how they will meet these standards in time, Cummings wrote.
That applies to K-12 as well: Districts should be vetting accessibility as part of their procurement process, says Barker, of CAST.
For private edtech companies, it’s slightly more complicated. Vendors are “indirectly responsible” for these rules, according to experts. The weight of the rule falls on public institutions themselves — K-12 schools, colleges and universities — but if vendors want to keep working with these educational institutions, they also need to become compliant, according to Sims, of Deque Systems.
Right now, it seems like families can’t sue the vendors directly, she says. But that doesn’t mean they can ignore this. In fact, she adds, contracts with schools can mean there could be “legal pressure” on vendors if they don’t also follow the guidelines. Eventually, they could even face lawsuits from families. For example, in California, there’s a proposal for a law that would allow people to directly sue companies whose websites aren’t accessible. Sims says she is closely watching the bill.
There’s also a “business case” for considering accessibility during the design of products, Sims says. As it dawns on schools that they are responsible for the digital accessibility of the companies they purchase from, companies that can prove accessibility will benefit. What’s more, the cost of fixing accessibility issues is significantly higher once a product is released rather than in the design phase, argues Sims, stressing the need to carefully consider these issues early on. Cost can climb quickly, she says, especially when some reviews have detected multiple accessibility problems across home pages.
On the Hook
Accessibility has become a major focus area in education policy. The revised national edtech plan from the U.S. Department of Education flagged “access” as one of three major technological divides — access, design and use — that can prevent students from fully engaging with education. At the time it was released, experts said they hoped the revision would move the national conversation beyond mere access to edtech and into how effective tech is for learning. But funding lapses this year have threatened to reduce access, including the end of the Federal Communications Commission’s “Affordable Connectivity Program,” which was key in connecting many families to the internet.
Will all this translate to greater access for disabled students? Advocates are optimistic, especially in the wider context of pro-accessibility legislation.
“This is certainly the most we’ve seen — ever,” says Shaheen, of Illinois State. There may be more to come. The Education Department is planning an update to its IT accessibility regulations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, for which these latest changes provide a template, according to Cummings, of Educause. That rule would apply to private institutions, he wrote, adding: “So, private colleges and universities should consider getting a head start on the accessibility requirements most likely heading their way.”
To Shaheen, removing barriers for disabled students in reality relies on schools grabbing for the obvious. Schools aren’t taking full advantage of what's known about building digital interfaces that are easier for disabled students to use, she says. But, she adds, the most common barriers to disabled K-12 students are the easiest to fix. For example: One common hurdle is that images don’t have “alternative text,” she adds. This is an alternative representation of the image for blind and low-vision people, and it can usually be added without special expertise in programming because many content creation platforms already have the capability as a built-in feature, she says. So whoever is creating the content simply would need to right-click on the image and add the alternative text.
Still, to really help disabled students, schools need to be more “proactive,” Shaheen argues. That involves devoting resources and people to delivering greater accessibility, she says.
Yet resources may be hard to come by, since the K-12 and college sectors are under enormous pressure right now. They are facing a number of stark challenges that include slumping student academic scores coming back from the pandemic, declining enrollments and the end of ESSER funding.
Another wrinkle: Unless they’ve been following it, K-12 schools might not even know that they are on the hook for their vendors, says Barker, of CAST. It hasn’t received enough attention, she adds.
Still, for advocates like Shaheen, there are many teachers and families around the country dedicated to increasing accessibility, and the formal rule gives them extra muscle, she says: “Sometimes it’s hard to make social justice things happen. But it's pretty amazing what some teachers can get done.”
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