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Home Blog The Accessibility Gap in Higher Education — and What Institutions Must Do About It
More than 60% of students with disabilities go without the support they need — not because the support doesn’t exist, but because the process of obtaining it is prohibitively difficult.
Andy Bailey
May 14, 2026
For blind and low vision learners, this failure is especially stark. Support may exist on paper, yet arrive too late, depend on individual goodwill, or require students to repeatedly make the case for access that should have been guaranteed from day one.
Higher education institutions have both a legal and moral obligation to do better. The question is how.
Blind and low vision students are not navigating a system that is entirely closed to them. That, paradoxically, is what makes the problem so easy to overlook.
Some lecturers describe visual content clearly. Others race through slides and diagrams without a word of context. Some digital platforms integrate smoothly with assistive technology. Others demand workarounds that consume hours a student could have spent learning.
This inconsistency is its own form of exclusion. When access is unpredictable, students must simultaneously manage their studies and engineer the conditions required to access them. Their academic progress becomes contingent not on ability, but on whether the systems around them happen to work that week. That is not a reasonable burden to place on any learner.
Michal Nowicki, who studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago before attending its College of Law, experienced this directly. His professors were willing to accommodate him — but willingness and reliability are not the same thing.
“When I relied on Braille, teachers occasionally forgot to send handouts in advance for transcription,” he recalls. “Throughout college and law school, I also received documents in inaccessible formats, most notably image PDFs. I used OCR software to make these documents accessible.”
This is the core weakness of ad hoc accommodation: exclusion requires no intention to occur. When access depends on individual memory, timing, and awareness, it will always be inconsistent. Each failure may seem minor in isolation. Cumulatively, they create a learning environment in which blind and low vision students spend their academic careers solving problems that should have been resolved before the first lecture.
The expectations placed on institutions have fundamentally shifted. Students with disabilities are no longer simply asking for a response when things go wrong. They expect accessibility to be embedded in how learning is conceived, designed, and delivered from the start.
This means moving accessibility upstream — into platform procurement, course design, assessment development, staff training, and quality assurance. It means a lecturer knowing how to structure a document properly. A course team understanding why image PDFs create barriers. A digital learning team testing platform compatibility with screen readers before adoption, not after complaints. A department establishing a consistent approach to describing diagrams, charts, and visual teaching materials.
None of this requires every staff member to become an accessibility specialist. It requires clear expectations, practical guidance, and systems that make accessible delivery the path of least resistance.
When accessibility is treated as a component of course quality — not a separate compliance exercise — every student benefits.
Education shapes more than knowledge. It shapes confidence, expectations, and career trajectory.
This matters acutely for blind and low vision people, for whom the employment picture remains troubling. More than 70% of working-age blind and low vision people are out of work. Of those who want employment, 75% consider it unlikely they will find a job within the next year. Even among those who are working, fewer than half feel confident about their prospects for progression.
These are not workplace problems alone. The barriers students encounter in employment rarely appear from nowhere on their first day. They are, in many cases, familiar — having been rehearsed throughout years of navigating inaccessible learning materials, unreliable accommodations, and digital systems not built with them in mind.
Students who graduate having repeatedly experienced institutional indifference carry that experience with them. Institutions that invest in genuinely accessible education help students build not just skills, but the confidence and expectations that determine how they move through the professional world.
Systemic change must come first. Accessibility needs to be built into the fabric of how institutions design courses, select platforms, create documents, and train staff.
But even in well-designed environments, students need access in real time — to interpret a chart mid-lecture, navigate an unfamiliar platform, or read a PDF that has been formatted without accessibility in mind. This is where assistive technology can serve as a meaningful bridge.
Be My Eyes Workplace, developed for professional environments, addresses precisely the kinds of barriers familiar in higher education. It brings together three layers of support:
Workplace AI offers real-time visual interpretation on the desktop. It can describe slides during a live lecture, explain screenshots shared in class, and provide context for visual content a screen reader cannot fully capture — helping students stay with the pace of learning rather than waiting to catch up.
Workplace Reader tackles one of the most persistent problems in academic settings: inaccessible documents. Scanned PDFs, image-heavy lecture packs, complex research papers — Workplace Reader can summarise lengthy materials, interpret visual elements, and allow students to ask follow-up questions about the content in front of them.
Workplace Connect adds a human layer when technology alone is not sufficient. If a platform proves difficult to navigate or a live workflow requires visual confirmation, students can connect in real time with a trusted person or trained agent — with screen sharing and remote support available.
If you are exploring how to improve accessibility for blind and low vision learners at your institution, you can learn more about Be My Eyes Workplace or request a free demo.
