“Not As Hard As I Thought”: A Framework for Building a Culture of Accessibility

Digital accessibility work in higher education often feels heavy. Weeks of content in thousands of courses in various formats. Faculty hear about scores, standards, and deadlines, but many are still unsure what accessibility actually looks like or how to begin without feeling overwhelmed. In this session, we share what happened when instructional designers at Penn State Commonwealth Campuses approached accessibility from a teaching and learning perspective rather than compliance. We began with small moves to reduce the energy needed to begin the work of accessibility, and together, they formed a pattern. We share that pattern as a transferrable framework: Build It, Practice It, Reframe It, and Surface It. These four interacting strategies are helping us move accessibility from something managed on the margins to something sustainably embedded in academic life, part of “how we do things here.” We will describe how we began reducing friction through flexible infrastructure, microlearning, conversations that prioritized progress over perfection, and a Wall of Fame that encouraged and rewarded participation. We will show how instructional designers participated in regular needs analyses to identify resource and skill gaps and worked to fill those gaps systematically and through partnerships. Faculty began the work of remediating content, surfaced issues as they encountered them, and discussed how they integrated their newly learned practices into their existing pedagogy. Progress was celebrated. We will also discuss how elevating faculty voices strengthened confidence and momentum, leading to accessibility champions and furthering implementation on campuses. This shared, visible skill-building focused on finding the right solution, normalized learning and progress, and led to a reframing of accessibility as a literacy, communication, and career-ready skill that was intellectually compelling and morally necessary. The newest focus of our framework is in building digital accessibility literacy as a key skill that students must learn for their careers. Participants will engage with a realistic case study broken into 4 microlearning activities designed to translate the framework into concrete, actionable strategies through guided reflection. The case study will include contextual details, common challenges, and decision points that require thoughtful application of the framework. Participants will leave with practical examples they can adapt immediately and a scalable framework for cultivating participation and building their own cultures of accessibility.