ET Talk: Digital Accessibility — Infrastructure Rather Than Request

A different kind of accessibility conversation

Episode 5 of ET Talk looked at digital accessibility from the institutional side — the Title II ruling, the creation of UT's Digital Accessibility Center, and what a coordinated university-wide response looks like. Episode 6 shifts the lens entirely. This time the voice in the room is Jaxsen Day, a PhD student in the School of Information whose research focuses on accessibility and education for students with disabilities — and who brings both an academic and a lived perspective to the conversation.

What makes this episode distinct is that Cole Camplese is not talking to a policy administrator or an IT leader. He is talking to a student who uses the systems, navigates the gaps, and has spent years researching what those gaps actually cost. The result is one of the most honest conversations ET Talk has had about what access means in practice — not as an aspiration, but as a daily reality.

The barriers that persist

Jaxsen Day names three categories of barriers that students with disabilities encounter repeatedly in higher education: inaccessible academic materials, unstructured digital content, and gaps in assistive technology training. These are not edge cases. They are pervasive features of how universities produce and distribute content — and they compound in ways that create significant disadvantages for students who depend on assistive tools to learn.

Inaccessible PDFs, lecture slides without alt text, video without captions, and course materials formatted in ways that screen readers cannot parse are examples the episode returns to frequently. What comes through clearly is that these are not technical problems awaiting technical solutions — they are human choices, made repeatedly, by people who were never required to think about how their content would be experienced by someone using a screen reader, a magnifier, or a voice navigation tool.

• Inaccessible academic materials: PDFs, slides, and course content that assistive tools cannot parse
• Unstructured digital content: documents, websites, and tools that lack semantic markup or proper formatting
• Gaps in assistive technology training: students expected to self-teach the tools they need to access the same content their peers access without thinking

AI as an assistive tool — and what that reveals

One of the most striking threads in the conversation is how Jaxsen Day is using AI — not as a productivity tool in the way it is often discussed at universities, but as an assistive technology. He describes using AI to reduce cognitive load, to interpret and restructure content that was not designed with accessibility in mind, and to navigate institutional systems that were built without him in the room.

That reframe matters. When students with disabilities are using general-purpose AI tools as workarounds for inaccessible institutional infrastructure, the burden of access is being transferred back to the individual — just through a different medium. Jaxsen is clear about what that signals: the problem is not that students need better workarounds. The problem is that the infrastructure requires workarounds at all.

The episode does not frame AI as a solution to the accessibility problem. It frames AI as evidence of what the problem actually is — and as a tool that, if properly integrated into institutional systems with accessibility in mind from the start, could meaningfully reduce barriers rather than reroute them.

Access should not require advocacy

The episode's title — "Infrastructure Rather Than Request" — is the argument at its core. Jaxsen Day makes it plainly: students with disabilities should not have to teach themselves the tools they need to access the same education their peers receive. They should not have to submit requests, follow up on accommodations, explain their needs to each instructor individually, or become advocates for their own access as a condition of participation.

That reframing — from accommodation as exception to access as default — is a significant one. It asks institutions not to respond to disability but to design for it from the start. It positions accessibility not as a service offered to a subset of users but as a quality standard that benefits everyone and is non-negotiable for some.

This is where the student perspective in Episode 6 connects directly to the institutional work discussed in Episode 5. The Digital Accessibility Center, the Title II compliance work, and the shift toward proactive accessibility review are all steps toward the infrastructure Jaxsen Day is describing. The conversation makes clear that the work is not finished — and that the most honest measure of progress is whether students with disabilities are still having to ask.

What ET is building toward

For Enterprise Technology, this episode reinforces why the Digital Accessibility Center exists as infrastructure rather than a help desk — and why accessibility review is embedded into procurement, content creation guidance, and platform evaluation rather than applied after the fact.

The conversation with Jaxsen Day is also a reminder of something that is easy to lose when institutions talk about accessibility primarily through the lens of compliance: the people at the center of this work are not abstract. They are students who are here, right now, doing the same coursework and navigating the same systems as everyone else — and experiencing them differently in ways that matter. Building institutions that work for them is not a special project. It is the standard.