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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, Lacy 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 learning materials, from course modules to readings for class, have been inaccessible to them at WVU. Many documents are not compatible with a screen reader, which is software that translates what's visually represented on a webpage into audible 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.
"Just as stairs can exclude people who use wheelchairs from accessing government buildings, inaccessible web content and mobile apps can exclude people with a range of disabilities," the rule says.
Public institutions, including colleges and universities, have had two years to prepare for this new era of accessibility. But even those that have prioritized the updates say it poses many challenges.
"I can't let this hold me back"
Miranda Lacy, 43, is a busy single mother of two. She has a rare genetic disease that led to her vision loss.
But three years ago, she had what was supposed to be a hopeful surgery: "It was supposed to improve my vision, and instead I lost the rest of my eyesight."
She has virtually no vision now. Photos hang on her living room wall of her and her sons, holding each other, beaming. Lacy doesn't know the order they're in, but she remembers each with vivid detail in her mind's eye.
Her friend Harold Rogers helped, with the limited vision he has in one eye, to put the frames up. "I tell him a lot of times," she says with a laugh, "his one eye has gotten us through a lot."
Just weeks after her surgery, Lacy found out she had gotten into the master's program at WVU. "I got the acceptance letter and I just remember jumping on my bed, I was so excited."
To prepare, she spent the summer learning how to use technology without vision – screen readers, voiceover programs and smart speakers. "I was like, 'I have to do this, I can't let this hold me back.'"
Knowing that Rogers was in the same program gave her even more resolve: After all, they had both graduated with honors in their bachelor's program at West Virginia State University (WVSU).
"I thought, '[WVU] is going to be even more accommodating because they're a bigger school with more money,'" says Lacy. She says that's not how things worked out.
Students with disabilities are often forgotten
For many assignments – say a PDF document from a professor – most students simply click "download," and read it. But that same assignment is more complicated for students who are blind.
To demonstrate, Rogers sits at a small table in his living room where a green, painted sign reads "one-eyed legend."
He opens his laptop and chooses a PDF from one of his classes. A word in the title has an extraneous gap, so the automated voice of the screen reader says "misspell, misspell, misspell," as if it's repeatedly walking into a virtual wall.
Rogers navigates down to an image of a chart. "Unlabeled text box, unlabeled image, page break," the reader says.
"Could you imagine listening to that all day?" asks Rogers.
Lacy jokes that, by the end of the school day, she often wants to throw her computer out the window.
Both students say they've encountered dozens of inaccessible documents in a single semester. And that they've spent more time troubleshooting their education in the past three years than actually learning.
"A lot of times on the weekends," Rogers says, "it is trying to scramble to see what is broken and how can we navigate through that."
Both say they tried for nearly two years to work with WVU – asking for accommodations and trying to help the university understand what they needed.
After all, Lacy remembers what it's like to be a sighted person. "I understand how it feels to be on both sides, so I'm very understanding and patient when it comes to helping other people understand."
Rogers says he faced disciplinary action after asking for accommodations—action he felt was retaliatory. Eventually, the conversations broke down and Rogers and Lacy, along with the National Federation of the Blind, filed a lawsuit, claiming the university systematically denies blind students equal access to an education.
NPR reached out to WVU to ask about Rogers' and Lacy's experience, about Rogers' claim that he faced disciplinary action and about WVU's campus accessibility policies. A spokesperson responded, "We're not going to comment on pending litigation."
"We tried to negotiate," says Rogers. "My goal was to improve the standard of online learning and higher education with the premier school of social work at the premier institution in my state. Not to be litigious."
Among other things, they are seeking policy changes to make WVU's digital materials more accessible, and compensation for the time they lost trying to access their education.
The problems Lacy and Rogers encountered in their graduate program are exactly the kinds of issues the update to Title II of the ADA aims to fix.
Digital accessibility was "a crisis"
While Lacy and Rogers were waging their battle with WVU, Jennifer Mathis was at the U.S. Department of Justice, spearheading efforts to address digital accessibility.
"It was really a crisis and had become one of the disability community's top priorities to have a rule issued that set standards [for digital accessibility]," says Mathis.
She points out that the ADA has long required web accessibility, but the government had never established specific technical standards.
"And so as a result, even though the ADA still applied, you had widespread inaccessibility in many contexts, including education," she says. "It was incredibly frustrating for blind students, for deaf students, not to be able to access the materials they needed to learn."
Mathis, who is now at the Bazelon Center, a legal nonprofit that represents people with mental health disabilities, contributed to crafting that rule. It requires that all public entities, including colleges and universities, follow a recent version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines known as WCAG 2.1.
"We're talking about things like better color contrast so someone with low vision is able to see things better," says Judith Risch, who spent two decades at the U.S. Department of Education and contributed to the work on the new rule. Other examples include requiring captioning for videos and making a computer navigable without a mouse, for people with motor disabilities.
But Risch says many of these changes make for cleaner webpages that benefit all. "Those alternative formats make a big difference for a lot of users, not just students with disabilities."
Publicly funded institutions like local governments, public libraries and schools that serve 50,000 or more people must meet the new standards by April 24. Smaller institutions have until April 26, 2027.
How colleges are getting ready
At many colleges, it is the norm for disabled students to ask for accommodations, rather than expect materials to be designed with them in mind.
In the past, it might have been commonplace for a math professor to write a formula on a board. Perhaps if a blind student were to take that class, they'd meet with disability services staff to work out a way for them to follow along.
The new ADA rule "is essentially flipping that to say, from now on, everything digital must be born accessible," says Ella Callow, an ADA compliance officer at the University of California, Berkeley. "It often takes years of work and that has to do in part with the fact that higher education institutions are big ships to turn."
Callow, who has disabilities, says digital accessibility is a civil rights issue. Despite her campus having a rich history of disability rights activism, she says this rule is still a "sea change."
In addition to rethinking how materials are made, the new rule also requires resources, says Corbb O'Connor of Level Access, a digital accessibility software company that works with higher education institutions.
"The accessibility teams at universities are frequently the most dedicated to making the institutions a welcoming and inclusive place," says O'Connor, who is blind. "But they have no budget, no people, and no authority."
Several ADA compliance officers at smaller colleges and larger universities told NPR the new digital accessibility rule has been a centerpiece of conversations among campus staff and administrators.
"My phone has been blowing up since January with people who are scared or worried about the regulations," says Risch, who now works as a digital accessibility consultant with various colleges.
Enforcement may still fall to students
Part of what's changing under the new rule is that web accessibility will no longer be solely the concern of disability services staff on campuses.
"The faculty needs to take ownership," Risch says. "The administrators of the websites need to take ownership, the procurement people."
That's because this new rule creates clear guidelines for what makes an institution compliant with the law.
At the same time, Callow at UC Berkeley points out that accountability is complicated. "There's nobody that's coming around annually and checking from the federal government that you have all the things in order and that you're in compliance."
She says the burden often ends up falling on people with disabilities who are facing discrimination. "Disabled people get painted as litigious, when in fact, there are no other options to ensure their civil rights but to seek redress through the courts."
That is exactly the position Miranda Lacy and Harold Rogers find themselves in. "If it's not us to fight, then who's gonna do it?" says Rogers.
As Lacy and Rogers await a resolution in their case, they are excited to walk together at graduation this summer, towards what they hope will be a better future not just for them, but also for other students like them.
Edited by: Steve Drummond
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
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