Comment on FR Doc # 2026-07663

As a higher ed instructor in mathematics, I am deeply concerned by the update to ADA. First of all, I want to say that I support access for blind and deaf students. I have firsthand seen the struggles of blind and deaf students in higher ed when their course materials are not accessible to them. There does need to be more support and more accountability for instructors of these students so that they can have equitable access to higher education. At the same time, no one is served, and students will be hurt if instructors are required to make all materials for all of their courses accessible to potential disabled students who are not in their courses. As a higher ed instructor, you are often making course materials for multiple different courses in the same semester. Often these course materials are specific to a class discussion you had with a particular group of students or a particular semester and will never be used again. We were being asked to make course materials on our learning management system accessible for blind students when we already knew that no blind students would ever access this document. When I spoke with my institution, I was told to remove these resources if we could not make them accessible. My colleagues and I spent weeks going through our learning management system deleting resources and documents when every student who had access to them could use them fully as provided because of hypothetical students who were not even in our classes. For example, I am teaching a class of ten students this semester. None of them have any accommodations. I had to delete the handwritten test keys (It is pedagogically important for students to have handwritten mathematics modeled for them) from our math tests this semester because I did not have time to go in and type out alt text for what was written on the page. My students would have had fewer resources when studying for their finals. These keys will never be used in any future semester, as they are specific to the tests I gave this semester. To be clear, no one needed alt text on these. Following the updated ADA rules would only help pretend students I don’t have. My actual students just need me to spend my limited time making as many resources for them as I can. When I have a blind or deaf student, I do spend the extra hours, often beyond my workday, making the classroom materials for that class accessible for them. Now that will be harder to do because I will also be having to make class materials accessible in my other classes that have no blind or deaf students in them. While I know these rules are focused on making higher ed more accessible, they will likely make higher ed less accessible to the great majority of students by decreasing the classroom resources available when there is not the time to make them compliant. What happens when instructors stop making extra help videos for their class because they don’t have time to add accurate descriptions of what they are writing on screen when there are no blind students in their class? What if there where students with other learning disabilities who desperately needed those videos? What happens when instructors have to limit their office hours with students who need tutoring because they are busy adding alt text to images for non-existent blind students? What about the class that actually has a deaf student in it, and the instructor no longer has time to check the A.I. captions to correct the technical jargon because they are busy tagging a PDF that will never be read with a screen reader? For the sake of best serving students who need access in higher ed, I ask that the Title II ADA rules not apply to instructor created course materials that are only disseminated in their own classrooms to their own students when there are not students in their class that need a particular accessibility feature.