The COVID-19 pandemic permanently reshaped how colleges and universities deliver coursework, conduct exams, and share resources. The shift toward hybrid and blended learning that it accelerated has become the new standard. For many students, this transformation has unlocked greater flexibility and access. For others, it has quietly introduced a more insidious set of barriers; less visible and, therefore, less likely to be addressed.
According to the Ministry of Education’s All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-2022, India’s Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education rose to 28.4% in 2021-22, with total enrolment nearing 4.33 crore students. Now, most of that learning runs through Learning Management Systems (LMS), online repositories, and online or proctored exam portals. Within that expansion, students with disabilities remained a small fraction. Roughly 79,000 were enrolled in 2020-21, a figure that likely reflects access barriers as much as actual demand.
Gaps in e-learning
For students with disabilities, for whom school and university buildings remain inaccessible, the inclusion gap shows up in the everyday mechanics of e-learning and coursework as well: Lecture videos without captions, LMS dashboards and PDFs not readable by screen readers, and timed exam interfaces that assume a mouse-driven sighted user with little room for keyboard navigation or assistive input. Assistive technology — screen readers, text-to-speech tools, screen magnification software, alternative input devices, and captioning tools — is only as effective as the platform it operates on.
Students end up depending on makeshift solutions or compromises like a peer reading content out aloud or a family member navigating a portal on their behalf. This doesn’t benefit students but runs counter to what digital learning was supposed to deliver: the ability to study independently on one’s own terms.
Universities and colleges sit at the centre of this problem since they are the ones choosing the LMS platforms, digital libraries, and exam software. Students are required to use these, often, with little say in the matter. Most institutions evaluate these tools on cost, functionality, and ease of administration. Accessibility is treated as a secondary concern, if it features at all. The gap further widens when the responsibility for accommodating a student with a disability is left to individual faculty members, special educators, or specific disability cells. These bodies are also rarely equipped with the specific knowledge to resolve common accessibility issues leading to different fixes across institutions rather than establishing a single standard. This is where the conversation needs to move from individual accommodation to systemic design because the tools and the standards they are built for and the policies that govern their procurement are aspects that ultimately decide whether a student can study independently or not.
Reframing accessibility
Accessibility compliance is not yet a consistent benchmark in how Indian higher education institutions are evaluated, even as frameworks such as NAAC and NIRF assess quality on other dimensions. Accessible design also benefits the students beyond those it is built for. Captioned lectures help non-native English speakers and students in noisy or shared environments and well-structured content can load faster on low-bandwidth connections. The concept of Universal Design, or designing physical or digital infrastructure keeping everyone in mind, benefits more people than accessibility conversations typically acknowledge. For example, ramps built for wheelchairs eventually help strollers, senior citizens, or people with luggage as well.
Further, it is important to shift how accessibility is framed. Built-in accessibility, such as WCAG-compliant platforms, properly labelled content, captioned video, and screen-reader-compatible navigation functions differently from accessibility retrofitted at a later stage. It is not accommodation layered onto an existing system, but a design principle that determines whether the system works for all segments of users.
India already has the legal scaffolding for this. Section 42 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 mandates accessible ICT services. In 2023, the government notified an ICT accessibility standard aligned with WCAG 2.1. Therefore, the gap is less about the absence of a standard and more about implementation, particularly in higher education, where institutions retain significant autonomy over their own platforms.
A screen reader cannot parse content that isn’t structured to be read, and magnification software cannot compensate for interfaces with no logical navigation order. This is the layer where India’s assistive technology ecosystem is doing quiet, consequential work, pushing for the underlying digital architecture to be built so those tools are usable in the first place.
What needs to be done
The task ahead for Indian higher education is not to retrofit accessibility onto systems built without it but to make accessibility a baseline design requirement from the outset: in procurement, content standards, and platform architecture alike. Many organisations already doing so show that it is achievable. The next step is for the country and institutions to build it in from the start. In practical terms, this means every LMS and exam portal being screen-reader compatible and keyboard-navigable, every lecture video embedded with accurate captions and transcripts, every document structured with proper labels, and every interface tested for compatibility with common assistive tools before it is deployed and not after complaints arise.
When these requirements are built in as standards rather than bolted on as exceptions, the gains extend well beyond the students they are designed for and benefit anyone learning on a slow network, in a noisy area, or in a language that is not their first. Independence in learning, then, stops being the exception for students with disabilities and becomes the default for everyone.
Arman Ali is Executive Director, National Centre for Promotion Of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP). Deepa Nagaraj is Senior Vice President and Global Head-ESG, Sparkle Innovation Ecosystem and Communications, Mphasis Foundation.
Published – August 22, 2026 10:00 am IST
