Switch color mode
Home Blog Accommodations for Blind and Low Vision Students: A Practical Guide for Higher Education Providers
When it comes to accommodations for students who are blind or have low vision, there’s a lot of advice out there, and it typically includes Braille materials, audio recordings, tactile diagrams, preferential seating, access technology (AT) and more. However, most of it misses the harder question that higher education providers actually face…
Matthew Tudge
August 3, 2026
“How to actually deliver the accommodations consistently, across a student’s entire course or degree, when instructors, modules and settings can change every semester”
This short practical guide is aimed at the people who own this problem within a higher education facility – specifically disability services offices, accessibility and inclusion leads, and the faculty and IT staff who support them.
It covers the core accommodations blind and low-vision students commonly need, a repeatable process for delivering them across a multi-year program, where technology fits and common gaps that are often missed.
Every provider needs a working knowledge of the standard categories, adapted to how a degree or course is actually structured.
Materials: Braille, audio, and electronic text versions of lecture slides, handouts, and assigned texts. In higher education specifically, journal articles and course readers are a recurring problem. For example, publisher-supplied PDFs are often scanned images with no underlying text layer, making them invisible to a screen reader regardless of how accessible everything else on a reading list is.
Lectures and teaching spaces: Preferential seating, raised-line or tactile versions of diagrams and graphs used in lectures, and, increasingly relevant, accessible lecture capture, since a recorded lecture with an inaccessible slide deck or unlabeled visual content is still a barrier.
Labs and practical settings: Braille lab signage and equipment labels, auditory lab warning signals, and adaptive equipment such as talking thermometers or tactile timers, for science, engineering, and health-related courses.
Assessment: Extended time, alternative formats for exam papers, and accessible exam software. Plus, coursework and dissertation formats that work with the software a student actually uses. A student may be well supported day-to-day but hit barriers at exam time because assessment tools weren’t built with the same accommodations in mind.
Placements and fieldwork: Clinical placements, internships, and study-abroad periods sit partly outside the institution’s own buildings and systems, working with an external host organization. This is often where accommodations quietly fall through because they’re outside the disability service’s direct line of sight.
Mobility and orientation: Navigation support across large, multi-building campuses and dorms, ideally from an Orientation and Mobility specialist, particularly at the start of a first year or when moving to a new site.
These categories are necessary groundwork. But a list like this is where most guidance on this topic stops, and it’s usually not where the real difficulty lies for providers. The difficulty is in the system behind the list, especially one that has to reset every semester.
The institutions that handle this well don’t treat each semester’s accommodations as a fresh problem to solve. They run a process with clear stages, ownership, and review points.
In most universities, this runs through a disability services office: a student registers, provides evidence (or confirms an existing accommodation assessment), and receives a formal accommodation letter or learning support plan. The key operational point is what happens next, as that letter has to reach every relevant instructor, every semester, not just once at enrollment.
A short conversation involving disability services and, where needed, the student and relevant faculty, to translate the accommodation letter into specifics for a particular class (especially where a course includes labs, fieldwork, or placements that a generic letter won’t fully cover).
Someone needs to own each accommodation, with a deadline. Braille or audio versions of course readers can take weeks to prepare, so materials-related requests should have the longest lead time in the process, ideally triggered as soon as a student’s course choices are confirmed. Implementation is also where technology decisions get made: which tools are used for document conversion, note-taking, and in-the-moment support during classes.
Because classes and instructors can change each semester, reviews should happen at least once a semester. What worked in one with one professor may not translate automatically to the next, and a new instructor may not know an accommodation letter exists unless someone checks.
This four-stage structure is what turns “a list of accommodations” into an actual program that endures through changes in courses, instructors, and buildings every few months.
Screen readers and Braille displays remain the baseline for most students who are blind or have low vision, and any accommodation process should assume they’re already in use. The harder problem is everything that sits outside a screen reader’s reach: scanned journal PDFs with no text layer, complex charts and diagrams in a lecture slide deck, or a moment in a lab or seminar where a student needs a quick answer about something in front of them rather than a full re-format of a document.
This is the layer where AI-assisted and human-backed tools have become genuinely useful additions to an accessibility toolkit, rather than a replacement for existing ones. Be My Eyes Workplace for Education Providers is one example. It features three core functionalities:
Workplace AI: gives students on-demand descriptions of on-screen content (lecture slides, images, graphs) without waiting on a member of staff to convert it first.
Workplace Connect: where AI description isn’t enough, a one-click option connects the student to a trusted staff member or trained agent for real-time support, with screen sharing and remote control.
Workplace Reader: built specifically to make PDFs, presentations, and other inaccessible file types usable, working alongside a student’s existing screen reader rather than in place of it, which directly addresses the course-reader problem described above.
Learn more about Be My Eyes Workplace for Education Providers here.
A few patterns show up repeatedly, even in institutions that take accommodations seriously:
None of these is particularly difficult to fix once they’re visible. They’re easy to miss precisely because they only show up when you look at the whole process across a full degree or course, rather than at a single semester’s accommodations list.
If your institution doesn’t yet have a formal process, the fastest place to start is making sure accommodation letters actually reach every instructor, every semester, with a named owner for materials and technology decisions. From there, the assessment, implementation and review stages can be built out one semester at a time, with particular attention to placements and fieldwork.
Additionally, providers who want to offer students extra day-to-day accessibility support, on top of the process above, might consider a tool like Be My Eyes Workplace for Education — layered on top of a formal process rather than a substitute for it.
