NPR

Miranda Lacy and Harold Rogers became fast friends during their undergraduate years. They both shared their dreams with one another: Rogers wanted to use his education to become a psychotherapist, and Lacy wanted to become a social worker. So, they were delighted to be reunited for graduate school – at an online Master’s in Social Work program at West Virginia University (WVU). Little did they know, their journey there would be much harder. Both students are blind and say that learning materials, from course modules to class readings, have been inaccessible to them at WVU. Many documents are not compatible with screen readers, which are software programs that translate what’s visually represented on a webpage into speech. “It’s been like going down a ski slope without any assistance,” says Rogers, 34.

Digital accessibility is a major concern for students with blindness and other disabilities — an ever-changing landscape that often isn’t designed with disabilities in mind. Now, that could change: An update to regulations in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), set to take effect at the end of April, will require public institutions to meet new standards that dictate what accessibility should look like