Comment by Loughla

Putting aside the "So you hate waffles?" non-sequitur, surely the entire topic of this thread should be a bit of a hint that this misguided policy has not, in fact, "[made sure] courses are fully accessible".

Universities do not care if course materials are accessible. They do care about getting sued. And that is what this furor over accessibility is about. Federal law requires accessibility, and the universities perceive that there are lawyers circling the bloody waters just waiting for the deadlines to pass and start filing lawsuits because they found one PDF on a professor's home page that doesn't pass the requirements.

Not GP, Incompetent policy makers are the bad thing.

Accessibility regulations, implemented with feedback from faculty and with the support of university resources, are certainly a good thing. But that is not what is happening in my experience.

It's like the situation with HIPAA rules in electronic health records: It wouldn't be impossible to write your own EHR system but if you do you have to spend a lot of money proving it meets HIPAA regulations or accept substantial liability. So companies just pay Epic $$$ because they promise HIPAA compliance.

Likewise with classroom software if you just use the "industry standard" enterprise crapware you've outsourced the accessibility liability to somebody else. If the software is hot garbage from a usability perspective, that's irrelevant.

And this is why we cannot have nice things in the enterprise space.