Isaac Kingsmith
Director of Business Development,
YuJa
Scaling Accessibility: How Automation and AI are Making Universal Access Achievable
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 | 2:15PM–3:00PM CT | Meeting Room 204, Level 2
Session Type:
Breakout Session
Delivery Format:
Presentation/Panel Session
Steve Varela, director of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Notre Dame, and Isaac Kingsmith, director of Business Development at YuJa, Inc., will co-present a session examining how emerging AI technologies can make universal accessibility realistic for institutions of all sizes. We'll explore frameworks for scaling accessibility services efficiently and providing data-driven insights to improve institutional accessibility practices. The GAO reports that the percentage of college students with disabilities has nearly doubled in the last two decades, with 21% reporting a disability in 2020. The Education Department found that only 37% of students with a disability reported it to their colleges, showing the accessibility gaps pervasive in higher education today. Creating accessible content at scale is critical. Yet finding, prioritizing, and remediating accessibility issues manually consumes countless hours of staff time while still leaving gaps. According to the 2025 WebAIM Million report, 94.8% of the top million websites have at least one WCAG failure, with an average of 51 accessibility errors per page. Even educational websites average 47 errors per page. Furthermore, 94.8% of websites fail to meet WCAG 2 standards, and pages with detectable WCAG failures have only decreased by about 3 percent over six years. With Department of Justice mandates strengthening digital accessibility requirements, institutions must prioritize ensuring access for all learners.
