Three Vignettes in Pursuit of Accessible Pandemic Teaching

In the past year, I have been reminded of the fragility of personal and institutional commitments to access. U.S. colleges and universities leapt into “emergency remote teaching” in response to COVID-19, employing online technologies like videocalls as replacements for in-person instruction (Hodges et al. 2020). These platforms increased access in many ways. But as disability accessibility became more necessary than ever, higher education largely failed to prepare for it, leaving access work to faculty, staff, and students and revealing the ongoing ableism of the academy. What follows are three vignettes of such work—and its implications—from my own experience.

April 2020: Better than nothing?

My university has gone remote; my young children’s schools have closed. We have received little information about online teaching and many of my colleagues are teaching in synchronous (uncaptioned) Zoom meetings.

My class is “Media and disability”: I retain a flexible, asynchronous format; I eliminate deadlines; I thank past-me for crafting this large class around open-book take-home exams. But I need captioned lectures, both for the needs of my students and the visible commitment to access that is foundational to this class.

I could use YouTube’s captions and edit them for precision. I could caption material by hand and sync it using video editing software. But I am recording at midnight, and I am exhausted. I rely on the decidedly imperfect automatic speech recognition (ASR) captions within Google Slides, displayed and captured in recordings of solo Zoom rooms. I save these recordings locally and post them on YouTube to facilitate students’ access from phones, parking lots, or other less-than-ideal circumstances.

Prior to 2020, I had made and edited clips, integrated multimedia content in class activities, and assigned media production tasks. Furthermore, as a researcher in critical media access studies with a commitment to access to and through media (Alper, 2021), I had captioned materials myself, ensured documents’ accessibility, and provided multiple formats and means of engagement in alignment with universal design for learning.

These tasks constitute both media work and what Louise Hickman describes as “access work.” They are forms of skilled labor involving care, maintenance, and relationships that support the production and distribution of information, meaning, and affect (Hickman, 2019). The pandemic intensified the need for media access work, but few institutions offered material support for learning these skills. Called upon to do increased access labor on top of my own work, on top of caregiving, on top of pandemic anxieties, even I cut corners. It could be said that my efforts were “better than nothing,” and certainly I did more to proactively create access than some others. But something is not always better than nothing; bad accessibility is, in fact, not accessible.

August 2020: Optional responsibility

The local elementary school will be remote; so, then, will my fall classes. No recorded lectures this semester, as I am teaching small, upper-level courses.

I use Zoom for ease of integration with our learning management system and for the sake of familiarity. Zoom does not offer live captions at this point; it is possible to pay a third party for these services, but these costs would be borne by my department and subject to institutional approval, which relies upon having individual, documented needs for disability accommodation in order to minimize costs.

I demonstrate scores of accessibility options for my students. I show off stand-alone captioning platforms that can run alongside a Zoom call. I demonstrate PDF conversion software that can perform OCR or convert text to audio, explaining varied contexts for use (you could do your reading in the car!). I launch Slack workspaces for multimodal and asynchronous class discussions. I have no idea if any students use the accessibility solutions and use of the Slack runs hot and cold.

By providing options, I hoped to facilitate access for students regardless of their official disability status or mandated accommodations. COVID-19 made higher education’s reliance on individual accommodations farcical. My students were participating in their classes from new or atypical surroundings, with new social and economic pressures, amid a global health crisis. My students’ official disability accommodations—or lack thereof—were no longer reflective of their actual needs (if they ever were).

Despite my best intentions, providing options ultimately offloaded access work to students, requiring them to take responsibility for their own access needs or preferences. I hoped that the availability of these options would address their needs in the absence of more direct support. But “options” can be ignored or forgotten, and accessibility solutions often involve a significant learning curve that can lead to abandonment in the absence of support.

Winter 2021: Workflow

I am teaching an accelerated course online, three credit hours in ten days. I spend a week puzzling over the scheduling of readings, meetings, and hands-on activities before settling on a syllabus. I create an infographic illustrating our daily workflow for the course and place it in the center of our course site. I convert the graphic to an accessible PDF—I am teaching a digital media accessibility course, after all. No one says anything, but the class stays afloat for a week and a half.

I make a similar weekly workflow graphic for my spring class, hoping that it will help them plan their semester, and we begin class by reading about physical maladies exacerbated by working from home. A Zoom poll about students’ experiences is stunning: 68% had recurrent headaches or migraines; 74% had back, shoulder, or neck pain; and an astonishing 89% reported experiencing inattention, lack of focus or poor memory since moving to remote classes. My workflow graphics may help with these and other executive function hurdles, but it is clear that students are facing old and new issues as emergency remote teaching drags on, and so are faculty and staff.

The pandemic upended student disability accommodations. Many of the accommodations offered for in-person learning—such as a quiet room for test-taking—cannot be guaranteed in remote learning contexts. Simultaneously, many students encounter new needs online, and may not know that accommodations are possible or how to access them. Other students likely face “access fatigue” (Konrad, 2021), giving up on having their needs met because of the rhetorical exhaustion of repeatedly explaining disability and accessibility in a new context.

Students are not alone in struggling. Disability support offices face their own challenges addressing old and new accommodations, and often supporting campus pandemic measures as well as performing their usual access work. Faculty, too, are contending with new access needs and opaque accommodations processes. My own incidence of migraines has dramatically increased in the past year, tied to long days of video meetings, but I haven’t bothered entering the bureaucratic process to access accommodation.

Conclusion

These vignettes from my own experience illustrate the fragility and frustrations of accessible online teaching. As we moved online, why didn’t we see institutional support for access work? Why can’t we have full-time, paid digital accessibility professionals evaluating our course sites, providing captioning services, or assisting in identifying students’ needs? Why, in short, was providing media accessibility made an additional, invisible responsibility of instructors, staff, and students themselves?

Over a decade’s worth of interviews with accessibility professionals and disabled Internet users have shown me that accessibility is not often recognized as work. Disabled people are asked to solve their own online accessibility problems and voluntarism has characterized accessibility labor, as recently revealed by Twitter’s failure to hire dedicated accessibility staff until 2020. Accessibility may be described as “everyone’s job” or “for everyone” (Hamraie, 2017), but it is not valued enough to be recognized as an actual skilled job that contributes value to the educational mission of higher education.

While academia may be “paying for its ableism” (Shew, 2020) as it embraces remote access during the pandemic, it has not yet prioritized disability access or dismantled ableist framings based in normalcy. Allowing access work to remain invisible, unsupported, and optional is disrespectful to accessibility professionals, disability services staff, faculty instructors, and ultimately to disabled students themselves. Availability is not accessibility, and emergency remote teaching has not been accessible. I offer these stories because if we can remember the access challenges faced during the pandemic, we have an opportunity to expand, fund, and reimagine access work in academia.

Conflict of Interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest.

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