Guide to Digital Accessibility

The volume opens with a foreword by Deb Adair, executive director of Quality Matters, who points to the authors' deep and long-standing work in moving accessibility practice forward. Her position is that a course cannot count as high quality unless everyone can take part in it, and she presents the book as evidence of how the Quality Matters community is acting on that belief. The structure lays out both the work still ahead and the reasons it matters.

Roughly 8.5 percent of the general U.S. population has a disability that affects their use of computers and the internet, which amounts to more than 28 million people in the country whose disability shapes how they reach digital content. Around 19 percent of undergraduates report a disability, a figure with major consequences for colleges and universities. Whatever their abilities or circumstances, educators have both a legal and an ethical obligation to design online learning that every student can reach and use.

Written for higher education administrators, instructional designers, faculty developers, and classroom faculty, this edited collection draws on the experiences of Quality Matters member institutions. It organizes its material around the core principles of digital accessibility, covering policy, workflows, instructional practices, tools, and staff training. The contributors come from a deliberately varied set of institution types and classifications, so readers can adapt the ideas to their own campus.

The early chapters place the accessibility movement within federal law, including the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and trace how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have been applied to online course design and training through the Quality Matters framework. Later chapters examine how accessibility policy can shape an institution's culture and set out a continuum of course design practices for building inclusive instructional materials ahead of time. The closing section surveys ways to build accessibility knowledge and skills among staff, including asynchronous workshops, micro-credentials, and train-the-trainer models, along with evaluation protocols for continuous improvement. The authors work in this field themselves, and the guide addresses compliance concerns while mapping practices that have been tested in real settings to improve learning for everyone in digital environments.