Assistive technology inaccessible university websites

Overview of your legal protection

If a university’s website, student portal or virtual learning environment (VLE, such as Moodle, Blackboard or Canvas) is not compatible with assistive technology like a screen reader, magnification software or speech recognition, you are protected by two overlapping legal frameworks in England and Wales.

The first is the Equality Act 2010. If you are disabled within the meaning of section 6 (a physical or mental impairment with a substantial and long-term adverse effect on your ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities), a university is a body providing education and services under Part 6 of the Act. It must not discriminate against you and, importantly, it owes an anticipatory duty to make reasonable adjustments under section 20. Digital inaccessibility that puts disabled students at a substantial disadvantage compared with non-disabled students can amount to a failure to make reasonable adjustments, and may also be indirect discrimination or discrimination arising from disability.

The second is the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. Universities are public sector bodies for this purpose. These regulations require that their websites and apps are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, meeting the WCAG 2.2 AA technical standard, and that the body publishes and keeps updated an accessibility statement. That statement must set out what parts of the site are not accessible, why, and how to request content in an accessible alternative.

What the university must actually do

Under the accessibility regulations the university should have tested its site with real assistive technologies, including screen readers such as JAWS or NVDA and voice recognition software such as Dragon, not just automated tools. Where content cannot be made fully accessible, the accessibility statement should explain the position and give a route for you to request an accessible alternative.

Separately, and regardless of whether the regulations technically apply to a particular piece of content, the Equality Act reasonable adjustments duty still bites. That can mean providing material in an alternative accessible format, giving you extra time, offering an alternative way to complete a task, or fixing the barrier. A university cannot simply say the platform is a third party product and leave you disadvantaged; the duty is on the institution to ensure you are not placed at a substantial disadvantage.

Key facts that will shape the outcome

The strength of your position depends on some points worth clarifying for yourself. Whether you meet the disability definition, though for most assistive technology users this is straightforward. Exactly which system fails and how, for example a screen reader cannot read submission pages, timed online exams are unusable with magnification, or PDFs on the VLE are unstructured scanned images. Whether you have already registered with the university’s disability or student support service and have any agreed learning support plan. What you have told the university and when, and what response you received. Whether the failure has caused concrete detriment, such as a missed deadline, a lower mark, inability to access lecture materials, or exclusion from an assessment. These points strongly affect both the remedy and any claim.

Practical steps in a sensible order

1. Gather evidence now. Take dated screenshots or screen recordings showing exactly what fails, note the error, the assistive technology and version you use, the pages or tasks affected, and the impact on you. Keep this contemporaneously.

2. Report the specific problem through the university’s disability or IT accessibility route. Most universities have a disability or student wellbeing service and a digital accessibility team. Ask them, in writing, to make reasonable adjustments and to remedy the barrier, and to confirm an interim workaround so you are not disadvantaged in the meantime.

3. Request accessible alternatives expressly. The accessibility statement should tell you how to ask for content in an accessible format. Use it, and ask for a clear timescale.

4. Ask for interim protection. If a deadline, assessment or exam is affected, ask in writing for an extension, alternative arrangement or mitigating circumstances to be applied so that the inaccessibility does not harm your marks or progression.

5. If informal contact does not resolve it, submit a formal complaint under the university’s student complaints procedure, framing it explicitly as a failure to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 and non-compliance with the accessibility regulations, and setting out the disadvantage and the outcome you want.

If the university does not resolve it

Once you have exhausted the internal complaints procedure and received a final decision, referred to as a Completion of Procedures letter, you can escalate to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, the independent complaints scheme for students at most higher education providers in England and Wales. The OIA can consider whether the university acted reasonably and can recommend remedies including compensation and putting things right. You normally have twelve months from the Completion of Procedures letter to complain to the OIA, so watch that deadline.

The accessibility regulations themselves are monitored and enforced through the Government Digital Service (Cabinet Office monitoring) and the Equality and Human Rights Commission in England and Wales. You can report an inaccessible public sector website to the monitoring body, which can prompt enforcement action against the institution, though this does not give you personal compensation.

For the Equality Act itself, you have the option of a claim in the County Court for disability discrimination in the provision of education and services, which can result in a declaration, an order to remedy the barrier, and damages including for injury to feelings. The time limit is generally six months less one day from the act complained of, though the court has a discretion to extend where just and equitable, and continuing failures can restart the clock. Litigation should usually be a last resort given cost, delay and the litigation risk, and because the OIA route and internal remedies are quicker and free.

Consider whether it is a genuine breach or a fixable glitch

Before treating this as unlawful discrimination, it is worth distinguishing a genuine failure to accommodate from an ordinary technical fault. A temporary bug, a browser incompatibility, an out-of-date version of your own software, or a single badly formatted document that the university fixes promptly once told is unlikely to found a discrimination claim on its own. The legal wrong tends to arise where the university has failed to anticipate the needs of disabled users, or where you have flagged a real and continuing barrier and it has not been remedied within a reasonable time, leaving you at a substantial disadvantage. Framing your complaint around that persistent disadvantage, and the university’s response, will be far more effective than treating every technical hiccup as discrimination.

Free sources of help

Citizens Advice and the Equality Advisory and Support Service can advise on Equality Act rights and next steps at no cost. Your students’ union advice service is often very effective at supporting disability and accessibility complaints and navigating the internal procedure and the OIA. If you want, tell me which platform fails, what assistive technology you use, what you have already reported, and any deadline or assessment at risk, and I can help you draft a clear written adjustment request or complaint.