Overview
Digital accessibility has been a major priority for us at RTL Commons in the past year, and we’ve been working on different ways to support instructors in this work. Our accessibility ecosystem continues to grow, from workshops to our Accessibility in Teaching & Learning Resource Hub.
One of the newest pieces is OPEN, our asynchronous digital accessibility teaching program, which is in pilot mode this semester.
While we were building OPEN, we sat down with four Berkeley faculty and asked them about their own experiences with digital accessibility. What has been difficult? What has become easier? What did they wish they had known earlier?
Early in our conversation, Laura Riley, Assistant Dean of Clinical Education at Berkeley Law said: “If you know someone with a disability, you know one person with a disability.” In other words, two students with disabilities may experience the same course very differently. She explained that students come into our classrooms with a much wider range of experiences than we can ever fully anticipate. For her, that means trying to keep materials and interactions as accessible and open as possible, paying attention when something doesn’t seem to be working, and being willing to adjust.
That perspective also shapes how she thinks about the more technical side of accessibility. Laura talked about the “nitty gritty pieces” of the work, like paying attention to heading structure or color contrast. But she said those tasks make more sense when she can connect them to larger questions about disability justice, students’ intersecting identities, and who is able to participate meaningfully in a class. For her, "those things are connected” and are an anchor for making time and space to make her materials accessible.
We heard similar reflections from the other faculty that we spoke with. Below, three of them share what helped the work click and what they learned along the way.
The Moment It Clicks
Robin Ball, who teaches human physiology in the Integrative Biology department, traces her accessibility work back to one moment in a workshop, years ago. During the workshop, the facilitator demonstrated what an inaccessible PDF sounded like through a screen reader.
Robin remembers hearing what she described as “a lot of gibberish” and thinking, “Oh, this is terrible.” After that, she started working on the accessibility of her bCourses pages, adding things like headings and alt text.
Kathleen Ryan, Associate Teaching Professor in the Plant and Microbial Biology Department and Associate Dean of Instruction and Student Affairs, described a similar experience. She described faculty in her department as “problem solvers.” But a problem is difficult to solve when you don’t yet understand what is going wrong: "Once someone tells you how and it's this huge list of things, you're not very motivated to fix it until you really get what it's like on the other end."
Then someone explained to her what an unstructured document sounds like on a screen reader; no reading order, no headings, and the reaction was immediate: "Oh well, that's obvious. That's a problem. Let's fix that."
Behind every accessibility rule might be a student simply trying to get to the same course materials, information, and learning experience.
The White Whale
When we asked Austin Hedeman, Lecturer and Academic Coordinator in the Physics department, about making scientific and mathematical materials accessible, he laughed and said his “half joking, half not” answer was that sometimes he wanted to bang his head against the computer and cry a little. He uses LaTeX, and for a decade, LaTeX PDFs were notoriously inaccessible. Making those PDFs accessible was, in his words, "my white whale for years."
In the meantime, he used the built-in math editor in bCourses, which gets most of the way there and lets students zoom in on the math or peek at the code underneath. And you can enter your LaTeX code directly there.
If you work with equations, LaTeX, or other STEM-heavy materials, our guidance on accessible STEM content has more on some of the approaches Austin describes.
Digital accessibility work is never a straight line. So, if you’re somewhere in the middle of this work right now, maybe the next step is simply to start with the next thing you touch. The next time you open a document, update a slide or choose a reading, pause and ask: is there one accessibility barrier I can address here?
And if you’re not sure what to look for or how to fix it, our Accessibility in Teaching & Learning Resource Hub is a good place to start. It brings together guidance, tools, and support for making course materials and learning experiences more accessible.