This does not need to be the case, and if accessibility is included in new and updated products and services, the higher education community can better live up to its ideals of being a pathway to discovery, learning, improvement, and employment for so many, regardless of background. It's disappointing yet unsurprising when technology providers release new products or features without accessibility in mind, requiring them to go back and "fix" the issues after the fact, unnecessarily excluding students and other users in the meantime. But the technology that is used to facilitate nearly all education modalities has changed significantly, and all too often new iterations have failed to provide equal access to disabled students and staff from the outset. With decades of precedents demanding equal access, why do so many challenges remain? It's a bit cliché to blame it on times of great change. In the United States, this expectation dates back nearly fifty years to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, well over thirty years for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and other lengthy periods of time for other regulations, including state and local requirements. Beyond the goals for inclusion, legal imperatives demand that programs, services, and activities do not discriminate based on disability. Most would acknowledge we have a long way to go to reach desired outcomes for diversity, and accessibility is no different. One of the often overlooked dimensions of inclusion is people with disabilities, including students, faculty, staff, and the public with whom our institutions engage as part of teaching and research missions. Making higher education more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming has been an increased focus in recent years. Accessibility Challenges in Technology Acquisition The resulting assessment questions for vendors have been incorporated into the 2021 updates to the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT), a widely used tool that previously focused on assessing risk for security compliance (see the appendix for the full set of accessibility questions that were added to the HECVAT). Higher education accessibility experts from fifteen colleges and universities synthesized best practices across many institutions. Postsecondary institutions have obligations to ensure the accessibility of electronic content, especially content purchased from third parties. Consensus best practices for evaluating the accessibility of vendor products are now incorporated into the HECVAT, a tool for product security, streamlining vendor risk assessment.
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