Digital Accessibility Practices in Post-Secondary Education: A Transformative Path Toward Socially Just, Digitally Accessible Education
Date
2025
Authors
Ashbourne, Kim
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Abstract
Educators, learners, librarians, and publishers don’t mean to cause pain to me and my disabled peers, but they do. Digital accessibility and inaccessibility in education is viscerally material to learners with disabilities; it touches our bodies, minds, and our sense of self-in- community. Guidance and tools to support the adoption of digital practices that would enable rather than disable people who use assistive technologies have been around for 20 years and yet post-secondary leadership, education scholarship, and educator training programs have yet to normalize them (Dolmage, 2017; Oswal & Melonçon, 2017; Palmeri, 2006; Seale, 2020a; Zdenek, 2019). That too is painful. Universal Design for Learning, arguably the most popular pedagogical approach to inclusive education in post-secondary, at an institutional level, regularly omits discussion of digital accessibility; leaving educators unaware there are problems or solutions to explore. This research project draws on 1) learners’ lived experiences, 2) scholarship on digital accessibility as sociocultural phenomena (Das et al., 2019; Palmeri, 2006; Seale, 2013; Treviranus et al., 2019) relative to pedagogy and praxis, and 3) on the liberatory, anti-oppression work of activists and artists leading the Disability Justice movement (Clare, 2015; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Sheppard, 2019; Sins Invalid, 2016). Using a transformative inquiry approach, this research offers educators multiple entry points to expand their understanding of digital accessibility, and of how learners with disabilities use technology to participate in post- secondary learning communities. This is offered in service of supporting fellow educators and researchers to learn and model a transformative digital accessibility praxis, one that includes and enables learners with disabilities in both our learning communities and in the digital commons.
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Keywords
digital accessibility, post-secondary education, students with disabilities, Disability Justice, assistive technology, liberatory padagogy