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It's easy to think of accessibility as a compliance requirement built for a small number of students with formally documented accommodations. The data doesn't support that framing. Accessible course materials benefit a far larger, largely invisible share of any classroom, most of whom will never file a request through Berkeley's Disabled Students' Program.
What the data says
What the data says
Roughly one in five undergraduates nationally (21 percent) report having a disability (NCES, 2019–20). The majority never formally disclose this to their institution, meaning most instructors are teaching more students with access needs than their official rosters would suggest.
80 percent of people who use captions have no hearing loss at all (Verizon Media / Publicis Media, 2019). A national study of college students found that 71 percent of students without any hearing difficulty still use captions at least some of the time when studying (Oregon State University / 3Play Media, 2015), a study that remains the field's most-cited reference on this question. Captions function less as an accommodation for a few and more as a study tool for many.
The legal timeline
The legal timeline
Title II of the ADA now requires digital content at public institutions like UC Berkeley to meet specific technical accessibility standards. This isn't a new value the university has adopted, it's an existing legal obligation with a compliance deadline. Materials that were acceptable under an informal standard now need to meet a defined one.
A practical framing
A practical framing
Most of the work described in this tool overlaps with routine course maintenance that's already worth doing: replacing an outdated reading, retiring a video that's shown its age, tightening up a slide deck. Treating an accessibility pass as an opportunity to refresh material anyway, rather than as a separate compliance task layered on top of everything else, tends to make the work feel less like overhead.
Common questions
Common questions
“None of my students have told me they need this.”
“None of my students have told me they need this.”
That's expected, and it's not evidence the need isn't there. Most students with disabilities never formally disclose to their institution (NCES, 2019–20), often because they don't want to be singled out, don't know accommodations exist, or have learned the disclosure process isn't worth the friction. A quiet classroom on this topic is the norm, not a sign the materials are already accessible.
“What if this genuinely doesn't apply to my class?”
“What if this genuinely doesn't apply to my class?”
The benefit extends well beyond disability. Multilingual students and English-language learners rely heavily on captions and clearly written alt text to follow along, independent of any disability status. So do students reviewing material a second time, or listening in a noisy environment. Accessible materials tend to help a much wider group than the term “accessibility” suggests on its own.
“What's actually at risk if I don't do this?”
“What's actually at risk if I don't do this?”
Beyond the compliance deadline itself, inaccessible materials are a documented basis for formal complaints under Title II, and those complaints name the individual course and instructor, not just the institution generally. Addressing this proactively is meaningfully less disruptive than responding to a complaint after the fact, for the department and for the individual course.
“This sounds like a lot of extra work.”
“This sounds like a lot of extra work.”
Most individual fixes in this tool take a few minutes each: the library permalink guide runs 3–5 minutes, checking a document in Grackle runs 5–10, writing AI-assisted alt text runs 2–3 minutes per image. The time adds up across a whole syllabus, but each individual item is short, and this tool is built to walk through them one at a time rather than requiring a single large block of work.
Sources
Sources
Last updated: July 2026
Sources
Sources
National Center for Education Statistics. Fast Facts: Students with Disabilities (2019–20 NPSAS data). nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=60
Verizon Media & Publicis Media (2019). National survey of 5,616 U.S. adults on video viewing and captions. Summarized via 3Play Media: 3playmedia.com/blog/verizon-media-and-publicis-media-find-viewers-want-captions
Oregon State University Ecampus Research Unit, in collaboration with 3Play Media (Fall 2015). National study of student caption use across 15 institutions. ecampus.oregonstate.edu/news/closed-captions
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