Hi everyone, hope you are well. Depending on the size of your institution, you may have begun hearing about ADA Section 508 compliance measures. By April 2026 public entities with a population above 50,000 must ensure that their online content be completely accessible to people with various disabilities (including hard of hearing, vision impairment, colorblind, cognitive disabilities, etc.). This includes educational content from those that contract with federal agencies, which most of our universities do. The minimum bar for our courses to meet is WCAG 2.1 guidelines, Level AA.

There are two items here that impact us teachers specifically:

1. Video instruction - videos must be captioned, captions must follow WCAG guidelines, and transcripts for these videos must be provided. This will assist students who are deaf or hard of hearing.
2. Course notes - all notes, including handwritten notes, should be readable by a screen reader (the most common ones are JAWS or NVDA - Mac already has VoiceOver pre-installed). These notes should also be tagged to ensure a reasonable reading order. All documents should have the appropriate use of contrast, and any instruction that relies on the use of color should utilize certain color palettes. This will assist students who are vision impaired or colorblind.

This impacts our program at Texas A&M (student population 75,000!) pretty heavily. We offer a Distance Master's program in our department whose courses are entirely asynchronous, which means that we are recording videos and posting notes as a way of teaching a course. Our learning management system has some integrated accessibility checkers, but these typically fail to check whether the mathematics we write is screenreader-ready. That means that we are checking each video and every set of notes for every course we teach to ensure that these guidelines are met. What's worse, LaTeX PDFs are generally not accessible, and making them accessible is a whole ordeal. (See the LaTeX Project's most recent updates on accessibility and LaTeX.)

I struggled with all of this at first — especially because I didn't want to give up LaTeX! — but I have found the sacrifices to be helpful to my way of thinking about teaching. One idea behind Universal Design Learning is that we read aloud what is on the page when we are teaching class. Are we providing our students with multiple on-ramps to understand our course content, some of which are more visual while others more audial or more interactive? When our online content is reformatted to follow WCAG guidelines, it gives all of our students more opportunities to see the beauty of the math we teach, just like we do.

Here are some resources we have discovered to create good initial drafts of accessible documents that can be remediated to become fully accessible. For copyright purposes, we are mindful that these methods can be run local to a specific computer so as to be safe from online data mining (such as those used to train AI models).

1. For video instruction: we have used OpenAI's Whisper, which uses transformer-based AI to write an SRT file based on a supplied video file. In my experience it has done a better job translating math than other auto-translators available online. A sample code is written here in Google Colab. (The code runs in on Colab if desired, but be mindful, as Google is not the most transparent on their data collection practices.)
2. For course notes: we have used LaTeXML to convert our LaTeX code directly to HTML, which can then be hosted on a page like GitHub pages. This is what arXiv is currently using to ensure submitted pre-prints fit accessibility guidelines. Here is a set of introductory proof course notes and selected adaptations of Ted Sundstrom's Mathematical Reasoning: Writing and Proof converted using LaTeXML - the page code and assets can be perused by right-clicking on any page and clicking on "Inspect".

This is only the beginning of my journey with accessibility, and soon all of us will begin this accessibility journey together in one form or another. Please feel free to email me if you have any other accessibility stories, strategies, or questions to share! Let us show our students how open and vast their world of possibilities is by being the first to grasp and harness it for ourselves.