Will AI Close Accessibility Gaps—or Widen Them?

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to EDUCAUSE Exchange, where we focus on a single question from the higher ed IT community and hear advice, anecdotes, best practices, and more.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we teach, how we support students, and how we design learning environments. But for campus accessibility leaders, it also raises urgent questions: Will these tools expand access to or deepen the digital divide?

A 2023 survey by Fable, a national accessibility platform, found that only 7% of respondents believe people with disabilities are adequately represented in the development of AI tools. And in 2024, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities was roughly double that of those without. These are not hopeful statistics for an AI dominated future.

Still, important work is underway. At the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Speech Accessibility Project is using AI to improve speech recognition for diverse speech patterns and disabilities.

At City College of New York, researchers are developing AI-powered tools, like a real-time, indoor navigation tool for blind and low-vision users, and a system to assist American Sign Language learners by providing immediate, automatic feedback on their signing skills outside the classroom.

These projects emphasize real-world usability, and collaboration with communities of intended users to ensure the technology meets genuine needs. But as large scale developers create tools with AI, users with disabilities are rarely considered. And when accessibility isn't "baked in" to new AI tools, the future for large groups of students and professionals becomes more uncertain.

According to the 2025 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report, student satisfaction with institutional support stands at 55%, a 13-point decline since 2023, and fewer students feel comfortable disclosing accommodation needs to instructors.

Colleges and universities are just beginning to find their footing with AI implementation, so as we look at accessibility in higher education, will AI close accessibility gaps—or widen them?

Lucy Greco: Education has a large responsibility, much larger responsibility for accessibility than anyone else. The people of the future are coming out of our institutions. The engineers, the journalists, the authors, the poets are coming out of our universities today. And these students need to have exposure to people with disabilities. They need to have ideas of accessibility. They need to actually understand it.

Gerry Bayne: Lucy Greco is the Accessibility Evangelist for UC Berkeley. She believes that visibility, exposure, and experience are the foundation of accessible innovation.

Lucy Greco: I hired 10 work study students last year, and I said to them, "What have you done in the past with people with disabilities?" And all 10 of them had never met a person with a disability. I was their first person with a disability they ever met. And if our students are not experiencing accessibility and not experiencing people with disabilities in their worlds, they're not going to know how to fix the problems that's going to happen because disability is becoming wider spread all the time.

Gerry Bayne: Without representation, the tools of tomorrow risk reinforcing the exclusion of today. But speed is also a factor.

Eudora Struble: My colleagues and I feel like we're constantly keeping up with what's changing. So we're always assessing possibilities, and challenges, and opportunities. And it does feel very fast-paced.

Gerry Bayne: Eudora Struble is Director of Technology Accessibility at Wake Forest University. She works with faculty and staff to evaluate emerging tools with accessibility in mind.

Eudora Struble: When you have technology innovating so quickly and everybody is racing each other to put their products out and their new innovation out, their new evolution of their chatbot out, you end up having things that fall through the cracks. And I'm sad to say that accessibility has been for a while.

Lucy Greco: We need to think about this as an accessibility-first or born-accessible idea. AI could potentially really help people with disabilities, but if we're not thinking about it as something that needs to be accessible and we're not working on creating it accessibly, it's going to fail people with disabilities faster and much more regularly than anything that we've done in the past.

Gerry Bayne: Keeping accessibility central isn't just about compliance—it's about designing AI with human needs in mind, from the ground up.

Eudora Struble: We want it to be as thoughtfully considered as security or anything else is considered. There is a lot of energy going into emphasizing AI when you're presenting products now, and also around accessibility, suggesting that it is somehow going to really fix a problem by itself.

Lucy Greco: The biggest problem people say is, I can't make my product accessible because I have nobody to test it for accessibility. I call wrong. There are organizations in your community that work with people with disabilities. Go to those organizations, form partnerships, pay the people with disabilities to help you become better at accessibility.

The lighthouse: throughout the U.S., there's several different lighthouses that serve people who are blind and visually impaired. Organizations that serve people with cerebral palsy. There's a lot of organizations that serve people with Lou Gehrig's disease. Just look up ANYTHING dot org!

Eudora Struble: I love third-party tools. I love vendors. I love working with them to make their products better. But they have a job to sell something. And there is a lot of energy going into emphasizing AI when you're presenting products now. My colleagues and I are a little wary of the promises of everything being solved. And I think it emphasizes to us that what we have to keep doing is that human in the loop.

Gerry Bayne: AI may be built on data, but it still depends on people. And as we shape its future, we face a critical question: Who gets to be part of the process? The answer starts with education­, especially for those designing tomorrow's tools.

Lucy Greco: If our engineers that are graduating today and creating the new tools for the future don't know about disability and accessibility, the tools are going to get worse and worse.

[Gerry Bayne]

Accessibility isn't just a technical challenge—it's a human one. It's about who we include and how we design systems that reflect the diversity of our communities.

Eudora Struble: I think that when we think about things that are helping people with disability, we think of things that ultimately help all of us, but they also are bringing disabled people into the conversation and into contributions, past barriers that we've erected—digital or physical—we're ensuring that people are part of building a stronger community, of building stronger research, of connecting across other kinds of barriers that always intersect with each other.

Gerry Bayne: From classrooms to code, accessibility starts with awareness—and grows through intentional design. To move forward, the higher education community must stay informed, build community around accessibility topics, and take action together.

One resource we recommend is a collaboration between Every Learner Everywhere and Teach Access.  It's titled, "Where AI Meets Accessibility: Considerations for Higher Education." It came out in March of 2025. It includes resources and recommendations for integrating accessible AI across different areas of higher education.

It's also a toolkit with example activities, discussion questions, and reading lists. We'll include the link in the show notes but you also search for, "Where AI Meets Accessibility: Considerations for Higher Education."