Anonymous wrote:What will art/art history professors do? In college I remember slide decks with hundreds of images….. if “a picture is worth a thousand words”, must a slide now contain lengthy descriptions for every single image? How will that even happen? And if you create a slide deck full of work by a single artist working in a series, say for example abstract artist Jackson Pollock, how does one describe one artwork in a manner that distinguishes it from another when they contain repeated elements? How much text would you need to differentiate between two Jackson Pollocks when they are all a bunch of splatter paint ?!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son told me that a professor mentioned they will no longer have access to class recordings from the past and no classes will be recorded going forward in order to prepare for new federal regulations. His professor also said links are being removed and there will no longer be notes available that are posted by the professor. He was confused so I was curious and looked it up.

There is a new federal rule referred to as the Title II Web Rule (long version "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities"). This means that anything that is on a website such as a university canvas class website has to be completely accessible.

So any scanned pdf from a book that has been uploaded is not accessible, so it is just easier to delete.

Recordings must have closed captioning that has at least 99% correct captioning including spelling and punctuation, so it is just easier to not post any recordings. Links to previous class recordings will be deleted.

PowerPoint's have to have manually written "Alt-Text" descriptions for every single visual including pictures, charts, and graphs explaining exactly what the data means and every single slide must have a unique title so a student can navigate the deck. Additionally, the order the powerpoint was created is important because screen readers for the blind don't read text in the order it appears visually. Instead they read it in the order the elements were added to the slide. So many professors won't be posting their powerpoint slides.

Recordings of lectures that are uploaded have to have Audio Descriptions (narration of what is seen). Let's say a professor posts a video clip explaining an example problem or a homework problem by showing a graph and saying"As you can see by this line here, the trend is upward". That is no longer allowed. There has to be a clear explanation so anyone who is blind can understand. So the professor has to say something like "Looking at the line graph for quarterly sales, the blue line represents the 2025 data. It starts at 10 units in January and climbs steadily to 50 units by June, showing a clear upward trend." If they have clips from previous years it is way to time intensive to fix them. So it is just easier to delete.

Many math professor write in LaTeX. That is no longer allowed because screen readers can't access it so anything posted online written in LaTeX needs to be deleted. A math professor is no longer going to post a video of a math lecture because there is no effective way to describe everything being written in the same time frame as a class. For a Calculus professor, "compliance" means re-typing every single equation they've ever written into a new, coded format. Many are deciding that it’s easier to just point students to a (compliant) digital textbook and delete their personal notes.

Students will be able to individually sue so professors and universities are leery that there are going to be tons of opportunistic lawyers at the ready. So the easiest solution is to delete, delete, delete.

Your college is engaging in malicious compliance.

The rule only applies to content that is required for current/future courses, not archived content, and certainly not video recordings, since the recorded class itself would be a violation of the same rule!

https://about.citiprogram.org/blog/new-doj-ada-rule-what-you-need-to-know-about-web-mobile-accessibility/

Anonymous wrote:Why is Trump admin pushing the DEI?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yet another example of unintended consequences of seemingly supportive “equity” policy. The intention here was make things more accessible for everyone. The impact is that if some can’t get it then no one can. This is the same for almost every type of equity policy they put in place. That old graphic of the kids trying to see over the fence… instead of tearing down the fence we’re building the fence higher so no one can see…

That is a cynical view. Why not just do it right?

Because resources are and will always be finite. Unless you provide the money to do it right, the easier route is to not do it. Just look at our K-12 system…

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I fully support accessibility. People will just need to adjust.

Sure, the students will have to adjust to no longer being able to access supplemental materials, because faculty will simply remove them rather than engage in hundreds of hours of unpaid labor.

Everyone wants full accessibility for students. But further abusing adjuncts by adding a Herculean unpaid administrative task to their plate is not the answer. Faculty needs support here, and at institutions where they aren’t getting it, students will see a decrease in the additional materials their professors provide (as OP noted).

+1 like another PP said, where is the Trump administration when you need it?

The amount of money, effort in time spent on this and the amount of reduced content available for 99.5 percent of students in the name of assisting the 0.5 percent is just ridiculous.

Many of these accommodations such as generating descriptions for every single picture, chart or graph that only someone who is blind needs is not .05 percent of the population, it is less than .1. Being completely blind is really rare and at a very large public institution there might be at most 10 students.

It makes more sense for staff members at the disability office to make whatever classes they are in compliant. Is a blind student really going to be majoring in chemistry? Yet every chemistry online class resource needs to be compliant.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Where is AI when you really need it.

this sounds like a good business opportunity for AI app to translate those documents.

Anonymous wrote:My son told me that a professor mentioned they will no longer have access to class recordings from the past and no classes will be recorded going forward in order to prepare for new federal regulations. His professor also said links are being removed and there will no longer be notes available that are posted by the professor. He was confused so I was curious and looked it up.

There is a new federal rule referred to as the Title II Web Rule (long version "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities"). This means that anything that is on a website such as a university canvas class website has to be completely accessible.

So any scanned pdf from a book that has been uploaded is not accessible, so it is just easier to delete.

Recordings must have closed captioning that has at least 99% correct captioning including spelling and punctuation, so it is just easier to not post any recordings. Links to previous class recordings will be deleted.

PowerPoint's have to have manually written "Alt-Text" descriptions for every single visual including pictures, charts, and graphs explaining exactly what the data means and every single slide must have a unique title so a student can navigate the deck. Additionally, the order the powerpoint was created is important because screen readers for the blind don't read text in the order it appears visually. Instead they read it in the order the elements were added to the slide. So many professors won't be posting their powerpoint slides.

Recordings of lectures that are uploaded have to have Audio Descriptions (narration of what is seen). Let's say a professor posts a video clip explaining an example problem or a homework problem by showing a graph and saying"As you can see by this line here, the trend is upward". That is no longer allowed. There has to be a clear explanation so anyone who is blind can understand. So the professor has to say something like "Looking at the line graph for quarterly sales, the blue line represents the 2025 data. It starts at 10 units in January and climbs steadily to 50 units by June, showing a clear upward trend." If they have clips from previous years it is way to time intensive to fix them. So it is just easier to delete.

Many math professor write in LaTeX. That is no longer allowed because screen readers can't access it so anything posted online written in LaTeX needs to be deleted. A math professor is no longer going to post a video of a math lecture because there is no effective way to describe everything being written in the same time frame as a class. For a Calculus professor, "compliance" means re-typing every single equation they've ever written into a new, coded format. Many are deciding that it’s easier to just point students to a (compliant) digital textbook and delete their personal notes.

Students will be able to individually sue so professors and universities are leery that there are going to be tons of opportunistic lawyers at the ready. So the easiest solution is to delete, delete, delete.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yet another example of unintended consequences of seemingly supportive “equity” policy. The intention here was make things more accessible for everyone. The impact is that if some can’t get it then no one can. This is the same for almost every type of equity policy they put in place. That old graphic of the kids trying to see over the fence… instead of tearing down the fence we’re building the fence higher so no one can see…

That is a cynical view. Why not just do it right?

Anonymous wrote:Wondering how this will play out for universities with degrees and certificates that cater to non-traditional students by having asynchronous or hybrid classes?

My daughter's (large public) university does this, and some of the classes for her major fall into this bucket (annoyingly, as she prefers in person).

It seems almost like entire classes will need extreme rewriting and support, or they'll need to be cancelled?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yet another example of unintended consequences of seemingly supportive “equity” policy. The intention here was make things more accessible for everyone. The impact is that if some can’t get it then no one can. This is the same for almost every type of equity policy they put in place. That old graphic of the kids trying to see over the fence… instead of tearing down the fence we’re building the fence higher so no one can see…

That is a cynical view. Why not just do it right?

Anonymous wrote:Yet another example of unintended consequences of seemingly supportive “equity” policy. The intention here was make things more accessible for everyone. The impact is that if some can’t get it then no one can. This is the same for almost every type of equity policy they put in place. That old graphic of the kids trying to see over the fence… instead of tearing down the fence we’re building the fence higher so no one can see…