The University of Iowa is among a slew of campuses that have hired at least one full-time employee to monitor compliance for students with disabilities.
“It’s becoming very important to universities to make sure everything is accessible for everyone,” Stachowiak said.
California State University (CSU) is among major schools that have chosen computer-based compliance programs to protect the campus against lawsuits and provide required assistance for students with disabilities.
CSU uses HiSoftware’s Compliance Sherriff program, which is used on 23 campuses and helps colleges and universities maintain websites that can be browsed by everyone without difficulty, not just sighted students.
Students who use devices such as screen readers, voice-activated tools, and text readers struggle to understand everything—including photos, charts, and graphs—on a webpage, because those images often aren’t properly tagged with information that would tell students what appears on the computer screen.
Stachowiak said higher education has made a leap in its application of assistive technology over the past decade, and he expects the technology’s use to grow as campus officials, professors, and administrators better understand how to comply with laws designed to make ed tech more easily used by students with disabilities.
“With technology becoming more affordable and people understanding disabilities more and more, you’re going to see more assistive technology used in higher education, especially [by] those with invisible disabilities” such as Attention Deficit Disorder, he said.
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