If you've been teaching for any length of time, you're probably familiar with the accommodation process. A student comes to you with a letter from disability services. The letter outlines what they're entitled to: extended time, a reduced-distraction testing environment, a note-taker, captioned media. You sign off, make the arrangements, and move on.

Accommodations are important. They are legally protected, they serve real needs, and for many students they make the difference between passing and failing. But there's something the accommodation model doesn't do—and understanding that gap is what separates instructors who are technically compliant from instructors who are genuinely accessible.

What Accommodations Actually Do

An accommodation is a reactive fix. Something about your course - a timed exam, a reading-heavy assignment, an uncaptioned video - creates a barrier for a specific student. The accommodation removes or reduces that barrier for that student—after they have identified themselves, documented their disability, navigated the disability services process, and chosen to disclose to you.

That's a lot of steps. And every one of them puts the burden squarely on the student.

The student has to know they qualify. They have to seek out the disability services office, often in the first overwhelming weeks of a new semester. They have to provide documentation (which assumes they have a formal diagnosis, which many students don't). They have to approach each instructor individually, hand over a letter, and hope it's received without skepticism or awkwardness. And they have to do all of this while managing the very condition that makes the process harder in the first place.

For a student with ADHD, initiating that multi-step process is genuinely difficult. For a student with anxiety, the prospect of disclosing to a professor they've just met can feel paralyzing. For a student who has spent years learning to hide their disability, asking for help can feel like admitting failure.

The result is that the accommodation system serves students who successfully navigate it—and leaves behind a significant number of students who needed it but couldn't get there.

What Accessible Design Does Instead

Accessible course design - grounded in the framework of Universal Design for Learning, or UDL - starts from a different premise entirely. Instead of asking "How do we fix the course for students who can't access it?", it asks, "How do we design the course so that more students can access it from the start?"

The distinction sounds subtle. The practical difference is significant.

When you post your slides before class, students who use screen readers can prepare. So can students with processing disorders who benefit from previewing structure. So can students who are anxious about keeping up, students who are English language learners, and students who simply learn better when they know where a lecture is going. You didn't build that for any one student - you built it once, and it works for many.

When you caption your videos, students who are deaf or hard of hearing can access the content. So can students studying in a noisy environment, students whose first language isn't English, and students who retain information better when they can read and listen simultaneously. One design decision, multiple beneficiaries.

When you break a large assignment into scaffolded stages with interim checkpoints, students with executive function challenges have a structure that makes starting possible. So does every student who has ever stared at a blank page the night before a deadline. The student with ADHD didn't get a special version of your assignment; they got the same assignment, presented with a structure that helps more students get started, stay engaged, and succeed.

This is the core principle of UDL: flexibility built into the design benefits students with disabilities without singling them out, and it tends to improve the experience for everyone else at the same time.

The Two Models Side by Side

It can help to see the difference concretely:

Situation

Accommodation Model

Accessible Design Model

A student struggles with dense reading

Student requests extended time after disclosing a reading disability

Reading assignments are chunked, key concepts are highlighted, and supplemental formats (audio, summary) are available to all students

A student can't access a video

Student requests a transcript after the fact

All videos are captioned and include a transcript before they're assigned

A student freezes on timed exams

Student requests extended time through disability services

Assessments include low-stakes practice opportunities and varied formats so timed performance is one measure among several

A student can't keep up with lecture

Student requests a note-taker

Slides are posted in advance; recordings are available after class

Neither column is wrong. Accommodations will always be necessary; there are individual needs that no universal design can fully anticipate, and the legal framework of accommodations exists for good reason. But the accommodation column requires a student to act. The accessible design column doesn't.

Designed for More People From the Start

Here's a useful way to think about what accessible design actually does in practice.

When cities started building curb cuts into sidewalks, the goal was to make streets navigable for wheelchair users. What happened next was instructive: parents pushing strollers started using them. Delivery workers with hand trucks. Cyclists. Travelers with rolling luggage. People recovering from a broken ankle. The curb cut solved a specific problem for a specific group of people, and in doing so, it turned out to solve problems for a much wider group that nobody had explicitly designed for.

Course design works the same way. When you build flexibility, clarity, and multiple access points into your course from the beginning, you're not creating a special version of the course for students with disabilities. You're building a course that works better for more people. The students who benefit most visibly may be the ones with documented needs, but they are rarely the only ones who benefit.

That's the practical case for accessible design: it's not a workaround or an add-on. It's just better design.

Where to Start

You don't have to redesign your entire course at once. UDL is a framework, not a checklist, and progress matters more than perfection. A few places to begin:

Strategy

Explanation

Multiple means of representation

Offer content in more than one format where you can: slides and audio, text and visuals, written instructions and a brief verbal walkthrough. Students process information differently. Giving them more than one path to the same content isn't redundant; it's inclusive.

Multiple means of engagement

Vary how students interact with the material. A mix of individual work, discussion, application exercises, and low-stakes practice gives students who struggle with one format a chance to succeed through another.

Multiple means of expression

Where your learning goals allow for it, give students more than one way to show what they know. A student who struggles with timed written exams may demonstrate mastery more accurately through a project, a presentation, or a structured discussion.

Clarity and structure

Clear assignment instructions, consistent course organization, and explicit explanations of what you're looking for reduce cognitive load for all students - and are particularly important for students with executive function challenges, anxiety, or processing disorders.

 

None of these require expertise in disability law or a background in special education. They require thinking about your course from the perspective of a wider range of students—and making small design choices that add up.

Accommodation and Design Together

The goal isn't to replace the accommodation system. It's to reduce how much work that system has to do.

When your course is designed with flexibility and multiple access points built in, fewer students hit barriers that require a formal fix. The students who do need individual accommodations still have that pathway; but they're not the only students being served. The student who never disclosed anything, who never walked into disability services, who has been quietly working twice as hard just to keep up - they benefit, too.

That's what accessible design makes possible. Not a course without standards. A course where more students can actually meet them.