Accessibility, Safety, and Accommodation Burden in U.S. Higher Education Syllabi for Blind and Low-Vision Students

TL;DR

The paper investigates how U.S. higher education syllabi function as accessibility interfaces for blind and low-vision students and how governance shapes equity. It conducts a structured audit of publicly posted syllabi and master syllabi across five institution types, coding machine-readability, safety content, accommodation framing, governance, and universal-design language. Findings show core logistics and safety content are often machine-readable, but accommodation framing differs by institution type and governance model, with rights-based language common at research universities and burden-based language prevalent in master-syllabus contexts at community/technical colleges. The authors argue that governance—who writes the syllabus and whether a centralized master template exists—is a high-leverage point for scalable accessibility improvements, and they propose an accessible master-syllabus template as an actionable HCI intervention to advance equity in higher education.

Abstract

Course syllabi are often the first and sometimes only structured artifact that explains how a class will run: deadlines, grading rules, safety procedures, and how to request disability accommodations. For blind and low-vision (BLV) students who use screen readers, independent access depends on whether the syllabus is machine readable and navigable. We audited publicly posted syllabi and master syllabi from five U.S. institutions spanning an elite private R1 university, large public R1s (including a UC campus), a large community college, and a workforce focused technical college. We coded each document on five dimensions: (1) machine-readability of core logistics, (2) readability of safety critical procedures, (3) accommodation framing (rights based vs. burden based), (4) governance model (instructor-authored vs. centralized "master syllabus"), and (5) presence of proactive universal design language. Across the sample, logistics and many safety expectations are published as selectable text. Accommodation language, however, shifts by institution type: research universities more often use rights based wording (while still requiring advance letters), whereas community/technical colleges emphasize disclosure, documentation, and institutional discretion in master syllabi that replicate across sections. We argue that accessibility is not only a PDF tagging problem but also a question of governance and equity, and we outline implications for HCI, including an "accessible master syllabus" template as a high leverage intervention.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Accommodation wording by institution type (N=15). Bars show non-exclusive counts of syllabi containing rights language (barrier removal / equal access) and burden language (self-identification, documentation, not-retroactive, or institutional discretion). Research-intensive types (R1-A, R1-B, UC-R1) more often include rights language, while community/technical types (CC-A, Tech-C) feature burden language more consistently.
• Figure 2: Syllabus governance models across institution types. The left side shows syllabi written by individual instructors, common in research universities, where each section may have a different tone or style. The right side shows a shared master syllabus used in many community and technical colleges, where the same policy text is repeated across sections to keep language and rules consistent.
• Figure 3: Accommodation framing by syllabus governance (N=15). The x-axis compares two governance models: Instructor-authored syllabi (R1-A, R1-B, UC-R1; $n=9$) versus Master-template syllabi (CC-A, Tech-C; $n=6$). Each bar stacks mutually exclusive categories of accommodation wording: rights-only (barrier-removal / equal-access language with no burden cues), burden-only (self-identify, documentation, not-retroactive, or institutional discretion with no rights cues), both (contains rights and burden cues), and neither. In this sample, instructor-authored syllabi skew toward rights language (often alongside procedural steps), whereas master syllabi are dominated by burden-only wording replicated across sections.
• Figure 4: File-type mix in the sampled syllabi (N=15). Bars show counts of HTML pages (8), PDF documents (5), and Word documents (2). This provides context for downstream accessibility checks: HTML pages are typically machine-readable by default, whereas PDFs and DOC files may vary in structure and tagging quality.