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Digital Accessibility: How Edmentum Builds Learning for Everyone

May 15, 2025

By Dr. Wendi Tierney

As we celebrate the 14th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), we're reminded of a fundamental truth in education: learning should be accessible to everyone. Established in 2012, GAAD is celebrated on the third Thursday of May each year and has grown into a worldwide movement dedicated to digital access and inclusion. This annual event encourages people to think, talk, and learn about how to make digital technology accessible and inclusive for the more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities and impairments. From its humble beginnings, GAAD has expanded to include hundreds of events across more than 35 countries, bringing together everyone from developers and designers to educators and policymakers. These events—whether virtual webinars, in-person workshops, or community discussions—all share the common goal of raising awareness about digital barriers and how to overcome them.

At Edmentum, accessibility isn't just a compliance checkbox—it's core to our mission of creating innovative, proven learning acceleration solutions, partnering with educators to ignite student potential. We believe that educational technology should open doors rather than create barriers, which is why we've made accessibility a cornerstone of our product development and content creation processes.

Understanding Digital Accessibility in Education

What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility means designing digital content and technology so that people with disabilities can use them effectively. This includes individuals with visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, or neurological differences who may interact with technology in a variety of ways.

For students, inaccessible educational technology can mean the difference between engagement and exclusion. When a visually impaired student can't access an image without alt text, or when a student with motor challenges can't navigate a poorly designed interface, we're not just failing to meet technical standards—we're failing to provide equal educational opportunities.

Rectangular image with dark blue background. Edmentum's multi-colored "color bars" are to the right - they are diagonal lines of different widths, in the colors pink, green, light orange, purple, dark orange, and light blue. The image has the following text, a definition of digital accessibility: Designing digital content and technology so that people with disabilities can use them effectively.

The WCAG Guidelines: A Framework for Inclusion

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide the foundation for digital accessibility. Currently, we adhere to WCAG 2.2, which organizes accessibility principles under four main pillars:

Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This means providing text alternatives for non-text content, creating content that can be presented in different ways without losing meaning, and making it easier for users to see and hear content.
Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable. This includes making all functionality available from a keyboard, giving users enough time to read and use content, and avoiding content that could cause seizures or physical discomfort.
Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This means making text readable and understandable, making content appear and operate in predictable ways, and helping users avoid and correct mistakes.
Robust: Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This involves maximizing compatibility with current and future user tools.

By following these guidelines, we ensure that our educational content works for everyone, regardless of how they access or interact with it.

Universal Design for Learning: A Framework for Inclusive Education

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that guides the design of learning experiences to meet the needs of all students. Developed by CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology), UDL is based on cognitive neuroscience research and focuses on three key principles:

Multiple means of engagement: Providing various ways to motivate learners and sustain their interest
Multiple means of representation: Presenting information and content in different formats
Multiple means of action and expression: Offering diverse methods for students to demonstrate what they know

At Edmentum, we've integrated UDL principles into our product development process, recognizing that designing for variability from the start benefits all learners. UDL and digital accessibility work together hand-in-hand—while accessibility ensures that content can be technically accessed by users with disabilities, UDL expands on this foundation to create learning experiences that are engaging and effective for everyone.

For example, providing closed captions on videos not only makes content accessible to deaf or hard-of-hearing students (an accessibility consideration) but also helps English language learners, students in noisy environments, and those who process information better through reading than listening (a UDL approach).

How Does Edmentum Make Digital Products Accessible?

Commitment to Born-Accessible Content

At Edmentum, we've embraced a dual approach to accessibility: ensuring all new content is "born accessible,” and remediation of existing content.

Born-accessible content means designing with accessibility in mind from the start, rather than retrofitting it later. This approach not only creates better experiences for users with disabilities but also typically results in improved usability for everyone. When we design for diverse needs from the beginning, we create more thoughtful, flexible, and user-friendly educational experiences. For example, our product development teams consider how a student who may be visually impaired would interact with our products while also keeping the level of engagement high for students with no visual impairments. This results in an equivalent experience that is usable for all learners.

Here are some examples of born accessible content in Courseware and Exact Path:

Transcripts with Scene Descriptions

All new videos include a transcript that provides scene descriptions for content presented in the background of the video that may not be discussed in narration.

Screen capture image from the Edmentum Courseware course, Forestry and Wildlife Management, for grades 9-12. The image has a still show of a video from the course. The video shows a female professional in a greenhouse. She is wearing protective eyewear and inspecting the planters. To the right of the image, there is a transcript with scene descriptions of the video. The scene descriptions include details not included in the narration. — Edmentum Courseware, Forestry and Wildlife Management, Grades 9-12

Videos with Closed Captioning

All new videos have narration and include synchronized closed captioning files.

Screen capture image from the Edmentum Courseware course, Forestry and Wildlife Management, for grades 9-12. In the top right corner, the male narrator is displayed. The still image of the video shows a hand holding up a green plant. Surrounding the plant are icons representing various topics related to natural resources: wind energy, carbon dioxide, electric vehicles, green energy, and solar. The screen shows an example of the closed captioning that appears at this point in the video. — Edmentum Courseware, Forestry and Wildlife Management, Grades 9-12

High Contrast Image and Text

Images used within videos and alongside content provide high contrast between the background, image, and text (where needed).

Image depicting the use of a number line to determine equivalent ratios. The math problem demonstrates how to represent the ratio of 5 cups of cranberry juice to 2 cups of soda water on a double number line. — Exact Path, Ratio and Ratio Language, Grade 6

LaTeX (with MathJax)

Math content is made compatible with screen readers and zooming functionality by using MathJax, an engine that displays mathematical notation in web browsers as text instead of images of text.

Image depicting a math problem on determining equivalent ratios in a format that is compatible with screen readers and zooming functionality by using MathJax. Rather than depicting images and a number line, the problem is represented as text. — Exact Path, Ratio and Ratio Language, Grade 6

Highlighters

Students are able to use highlighters within instruction to help with high contrast, as well as note-taking.

Still image of a video from Exact Path with a math lesson on interpreting remainders. The video image is an illustrated picture, with a young male standing in front of a mountain range. In the background is a gondola ride on a cable to take travelers up a mountain. The image shows highlighted text and to the left demonstrates the highlighter function in Exact Path, enabling students to highlight text for high contrast. — Exact Path, Division of Whole Numbers, Grade 6

The Remediation Effort: Scale and Impact

Our commitment to accessibility has required significant investment in remediating our extensive content library. Some key achievements include:

Adding descriptive alt text to over 200,000 images, ensuring that visually impaired students can access the same visual information as their peers
Remediating thousands of pages of PDFs to make them fully accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies
Replacing tens of thousands of images of mathematical equations with MathType (LaTeX), making complex mathematical content accessible to students using screen readers or other assistive devices
Added closed captioning and transcripts with scene description files to hundreds of hours of videos

This massive undertaking represents not just technical compliance, but our dedication to ensuring that every student can engage with our content on equal terms.

Measuring Success: Edmentum’s Accessibility Evaluation Process

Creating accessible content represents only half the equation—we also verify the effectiveness of our efforts. We take a comprehensive approach to evaluating our accessibility:

Third-Party Validation

Edmentum partners with Level Access to leverage their digital accessibility platform and 25 years of experience to achieve and sustain conformance to accessibility standards. We use Level Access’ digital accessibility platform to evaluate our digital properties in accordance with best practices and, supported by a representative team of accessibility professionals, including users with disabilities.

VPATs for Transparency

For each of our core products, we leverage our partnership with Level Access to publish Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) every year. The VPATs document how our products conform to accessibility standards. These detailed reports allow educators and administrators to make informed decisions about which tools will best serve their diverse student populations.

Continuous Improvement

Accessibility isn't a one-time achievement but an ongoing commitment. We regularly review and update our content and platforms to address new accessibility challenges and incorporate emerging best practices by providing ongoing training and documentation to our product and technology teams.

Learn More About Accessibility at Edmentum

We're proud of our accessibility efforts, but we recognize that this work is never complete. We continue to learn, improve, and adapt to meet the diverse needs of all learners.

To learn more about our commitment to accessibility:

Visit edmentum.com/about/accessibility to access VPATs for Exact Path, Courseware, and Apex Courses, and information about accommodations and modifications for each product.
Explore our product-specific accessibility features in the support documentation for individual programs.
Contact our support team with specific accessibility questions or needs.

Conclusion: Digital Accessibility Creates Opportunity

Global Accessibility Awareness Day reminds us that digital accessibility isn't just about technical compliance—it's about creating equal opportunities for all learners. At Edmentum, we're committed to building educational technology that empowers rather than limits, that includes rather than excludes.

By making our content accessible, we're not just following guidelines; we're affirming our belief that every student deserves the chance to learn, grow, and succeed. As we continue to innovate in educational technology, accessibility will remain at the heart of everything we create.

About the author

Dr. Wendi Tierney has over a decade of experience in education. With a broad range of experiences within education, accessibility became her passion throughout her time in the classroom as well as her time here at Edmentum.

She has expertise in literacy and social studies teaching, from grades 4-12, where she worked in many roles over her years in public education. These roles included ELA teacher (grades 4-12), Social Studies Teacher (grades 4-12), Teacher Technology Coach, Mentor Teacher, Certified Teacher Evaluator with NIET, and Professional Learning Leader through a Special Education grant with the state of Louisiana.

At Edmentum, she has worked in a variety of roles including Content Designer, Content Specialist, and Accessibility Strategy and Implementation Manager. Each of these roles has included product expertise in every Edmentum product.

Her academic research explored ways to make digital curriculum accessible for all students. This research, training, and follow-up surveying was conducted within the Edmentum organization. After completing her Doctor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction, she pursued leading the Accessibility Program for Edmentum by working with the ad hoc Accessibility Working Group that consisted of multiple stakeholders across departments.