Inside Blackboard

August 28, 2026

What We Actually Get Asked About Accessibility

# Accessibility

12 minute read

We recently hosted an "Ask an Accessibility Expert" session at our annual conference Building Blackboard Together, and the questions that came in told us more than any survey could. Nobody asked "what is WCAG" or other compliance-related questions; instead they asked how to reach a colleague who never opens the email, how to talk about a Blackboard Ally score without setting off alarms, and how to prioritize amid a growing backlog. These are the real questions campuses are sitting with in 2026, and they cluster into a handful of problems worth answering honestly.

Presenters: Dr. Amy Lomellini, Director of Accessibility, Blackboard; Darren Denham, Assistant Director of Digital Accessibility, University of Central Oklahoma; Dr. Carolyn Schoenian, Technology Accessibility Coordinator, Wor-Wic Community College; Dr. Rachel Hart, Instructional Designer, El Paso Community College; and Dr. Wendy Torres, Senior Instructional and Digital Accessibility Specialist, Coppin State University.

The real blocker isn't knowledge, it's culture

Ask ten accessibility professionals what's holding their campus back, and most won't say "faculty don't understand alt text." They'll say faculty don't yet see this as part of their job, or don't realize they have students who need it. That's rarely indifference. More often it's a full plate and no clear place to start.

One assumption worth retiring: that accessibility is a problem you fix once and move on from. It's closer to a teaching practice, something you build into a course the same way you build in a syllabus or office hours each term. Seen that way, accessibility becomes part of how faculty design their course, not a separate task handed off to someone else. A course built around varied ways to participate, submit, and be understood is accessible by design.

That's also why the faculty who most need support are often the hardest to reach by email. A compliance reminder with no context just reads as one more mandate on a busy schedule. What works better is a narrow, specific ask tied to something they already care about: "let's clarify the instructions on this assignment so you get fewer repeat questions."

Department competitions and small prizes come up a lot as engagement tactics, and they can work, but only when the metric behind them is clear to everyone. The trouble is treating one number as the whole story: legal wants 100%, faculty aren't sure what's realistic, and the conversation stalls. Try separating the compliance target (what the institution is legally obligated to reach) from the working target (what's realistic this term, and which files matter most). Blackboard Ally's course accessibility score is built around that idea: a gauge from Low to Perfect meant to show direction and surface priorities, not to grade anyone. Leadership is easier to convince once you can show the score improving over time, not just where it stands today.

That same instinct for framing applies to language, too, since some people wonder whether to call it "inclusive design" or "accessibility." The latter reads as compliance to many faculty; "inclusive design" reads as pedagogy, which instructors already own. Neither term is more correct — lead with whichever one invites your audience in, and it's fine to use both depending on your audience.

Prioritize before you remediate

Nearly every campus with a remediation backlog asks the same next question: where do we even start? The short answer: where it matters most — and that looks different depending on your seat. For individual faculty, it means opening the Blackboard Ally course report and fixing the content items with the highest impact first. Soon, faculty will also see where each file lives, so they can work through modules in order if they prefer. You can also start with the easiest to fix. The goal is to just start somewhere.

For instructional designers and admins, the institutional report offers a wider view: start with high-scoring departments to learn what's working, then use those lessons to partner with departments that need more support. And sometimes the best signal comes from students themselves. Disability services know in advance which courses registered students will be taking. Working with those faculty first can become the model for preparing everyone else.

The toolkit is changing faster than the training

PDF tagging is the question that never goes away, and for good reason: manually tagging a complex PDF is slow, and trusting an automated tagger without checking its work is its own risk. Two things can be true at once. Automated tagging (whether from Acrobat or Blackboard Ally ) gets the reading order and basic structure right most of the time, and it still needs a human pass on tables, multi-column layouts, and anything with figures or math. "Trust but verify" isn't a cop-out here, it's the actual workflow.

The most future-facing question we received from attendees was about AI: if a tool can auto-tag a PDF in a single prompt, what's still worth teaching faculty? The tools will keep getting better at fixing structure, but they can't decide what content should say or how it should be organized. The skill worth investing in is judgment: recognizing when a document is inaccessible, understanding why, and knowing what "good" looks like well enough to check a machine's work. That skill transfers no matter which tool does the tagging next year.

Running this without a full team

In practice, digital accessibility rarely sits where the org chart puts it: day to day it most often lands on instructional designers and faculty, and many campuses have no dedicated expert at all. That raises an honest question: how do you run an accessibility committee or initiative without an expert? But the committee doesn't need to become the expert. It needs a clear, written standard to point to (WCAG 2.2 AA, plus your institution's own priority list) and a channel to an outside expert, a consultant, a regional consortium, or a vendor's accessibility team, for the questions that go beyond the basics.

Just as essential: invite disabled students, faculty, and staff onto that committee in a genuinely participatory role, not as an afterthought. Their presence is the most reliable way to know whether the work is meeting real needs. Imagine trying to serve students you've never met or understood.

That points to what training should cover: less time on tool mechanics (which change every year, and which Ally increasingly automates), more time on the judgment calls that come up constantly like writing alt text that conveys information, knowing when a PDF needs to be rebuilt rather than patched, and talking with a colleague who doesn't yet see how this applies to their course. For that conversation, the most persuasive resource is usually a specific example from a peer department (a chemistry lab that captioned its demo videos, a nursing program that restructured a clinical PDF) alongside the students that it serves.

Online and hybrid courses raise a few rules worth stating plainly, since they don't map cleanly onto a physical classroom: live sessions need real-time captioning or a captioned recording available immediately, timed assessments need the same extended-time accommodations they'd get in person, and any third-party tool embedded in the course (a publisher's homework platform, a proctoring tool) needs its own accessibility conformance report on file, since the institution is still accountable for a vendor's interface.

Some questions don't have clear answers

A few of the questions we heard resist a tidy rule, and it's more honest to say so.

If a local construction company supplies copyrighted blueprints to an online architecture course, remediating them isn't as simple as adding alt text, since the institution doesn't own the right to alter or redistribute the file. The realistic path is usually a substitute assignment or an accessible equivalent built by the instructor, developed with legal counsel and your accommodations office. And while it's fair to wish other industries were held to the same bar, that doesn't change a school's own obligations under the ADA and Section 508.

When a professor believes a requested accommodation would "fundamentally alter" their course, that deserves a real process, not a reflexive yes or no. The accommodations office and the department chair or curriculum lead should evaluate it together: does the adjustment touch something essential to the course's objectives, or just how it's always been taught?

Mental health accommodations get treated with more hesitation than physical or sensory ones, often because the need is invisible and harder for faculty to "see" as legitimate. The standard is the same either way: prepare ahead of time with inclusive course design and work from the documented accommodation, not a judgment about how real the condition seems.

The part that's easy to forget

Somewhere in the middle of all this was a parent asking how to help her adult daughter, whose accessibility needs are invisible, work up the nerve to even contact her campus's accessibility office. That's not a policy question, but it's the reason the policy exists. Every score, checker, and tagging rule in this post ultimately serves someone who, right now, isn't sure it's worth reaching out. The most useful thing any of us can do locally is make first contact as low-stakes as possible: a form instead of a required meeting, an email instead of a phone call, a named person instead of a department.

That's also the best filter for every question above. Not "does this satisfy WCAG 2.2 AA" (though it should), but "does this make it more likely someone actually asks for what they need."

Looking for more practical steps to embed a culture of accessibility that lasts? Check out our Title II Strategy Guide and Playbook to map out the next steps for your institution's accessibility journey.

FAQs

How can colleges improve digital accessibility?

Start with the content that gets the most engagement — core course materials, syllabi, and widely-used templates — rather than trying to fix everything at once. Combine three things: tools that flag issues automatically, clear remediation guidance for the people creating content, and institutional buy-in so accessibility isn't left to a handful of volunteers.

How can institutions build a culture of accessibility?

Culture shifts happen when accessibility is treated as a shared responsibility rather than a compliance checkbox owned by one office. That means visible leadership support, accessibility built into course design workflows from the start, recognition for staff who improve their content, and regular, low-friction feedback so people can see their own progress.

How should faculty prioritize accessibility remediation?

Fix high-impact, low-effort issues first — missing alt text, unclear headings, poor color contrast — since these are quick wins that affect the most students. Then prioritize by reach: fix the files used across multiple sections or terms before one-off materials. Severity should also guide order: content that's completely inaccessible to assistive technology (e.g. unstructured scanned PDFs) should outrank minor formatting issues.

What is a Blackboard Ally accessibility score?

It's a score Ally assigns to each piece of course content, shown as a number with a color-coded gauge (Low, Medium, High, Perfect), based on criteria including document structure, tagging and order, alternate text for images, and color contrast. A low score means the file has severe or multiple accessibility issues, while a high score means the issues are minor. Scores are only visible to instructors, not students.

How does Blackboard Ally help improve course accessibility?

Ally works in three ways: it scans course content and gives instructors specific, guided feedback on how to fix issues, and it automatically generates alternative formats of files — like audio, HTML, and electronic braille — so students can access content in the way that works best for them. It also rolls scores up into an institution-wide accessibility report so administrators can track progress over time.

Can AI help make PDFs more accessible?

Yes — AI can meaningfully speed up remediation tasks like generating alt text for images, suggesting heading structure, and tagging reading order in untagged PDFs, which are traditionally the most time-consuming parts of manual remediation.

Does AI-generated PDF tagging still require human review?

Yes. AI-generated tagging and alt text are a strong starting point, not a finished product — AI can misread complex layouts, misinterpret images that need contextual meaning (e.g. a chart vs. decorative image), or get reading order wrong in multi-column documents. Human review is still needed to confirm accuracy before the file is considered fully accessible — and that's by design: Ally keeps the instructor in the loop so nothing reaches students until they've approved it, keeping them the final authority on their own content rather than handing that judgement to AI.

What is WCAG 2.2 AA?

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.2 is the current version of the internationally recognized standard for digital accessibility, published by the W3C. "AA" refers to the middle of three conformance levels (A, AA, AAA), and is the level most commonly required by law and institutional policy. It covers things like text alternatives, keyboard navigation, contrast ratios, and predictable navigation.

How can colleges improve accessibility without a dedicated accessibility team?

Lean on automation to do the detection work (so no one has to manually audit files), give instructors clear, in-the-moment guidance rather than a separate training requirement, and designate accessibility "champions" within departments. Alternative format generation also reduces the burden, since it doesn't require anyone to manually remediate every file — just make the source file reasonably clean.

What accessibility considerations apply to online and hybrid courses?

Online and hybrid courses put more weight on digital content than in-person courses do, since materials often are the primary — or only — way students engage with the course. Key considerations: captioned video, accessible document structure, sufficient color contrast in slides and interfaces, keyboard-navigable tools, and alternative formats for students using screen readers or other assistive technology. Live sessions also need captioning and accessible chat/breakout functionality.

What is the difference between accessibility and inclusive design?

Accessibility is about removing specific barriers so people with disabilities can use content and tools — it's often measured against a standard like WCAG. Inclusive design is broader: it's a design approach that considers the full range of human diversity (disability, language, device, connectivity, learning preference) from the outset, rather than retrofitting fixes afterwards. Accessibility is a required outcome; inclusive design is the proactive practice that tends to produce accessible outcomes — and more besides.

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