Real-Time Accessibility Dashboards for Higher Education
Beatriz Patatas, Carlos Duarte, Leticia Seixas Pereira · 2026 · Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26) · doi:10.1145/3772363.3799363
Summary
Patatas, Duarte, and Seixas Pereira (University of Lisbon and University of Porto) present an open-source Moodle plugin that integrates real-time PDF accessibility evaluation into the content-upload workflow and aggregates results into an institutional dashboard. The system has two complementary layers. At the instructor level, when an educator uploads a PDF to a course, a traffic-light block appears beside the file with pass/fail results across eight automated checks — language declaration, OCR application, image alt text, document title, list tagging, link validity, table headers, and document tags — each linked to the relevant W3C PDF Technique and WCAG 2.2 criterion. A course-level dashboard summarises the module's overall accessibility score and shows historical trends. At the institutional level, a second dashboard aggregates results across departments, programs, and courses, classifies each program as critical, warning, or good, and surfaces the most frequent failure types. The authors motivate the design by arguing that commercial tools like Blackboard Ally and the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit rely on asynchronous post-hoc scans, which decouples feedback from authoring and limits remediation. A formative user study (N=3) with two professors and one additional participant acting as both professor and coordinator used a think-aloud protocol, followed by semi-structured interviews analysed through inductive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke).
Key findings
Three themes emerged. First, 'What you see is not what you get': educators conflated visual formatting with accessibility, assuming that bolded or large text functions as a heading. When the system flagged a missing table header, one participant justified the failure entirely in visual terms ('I just go there, increase the font size, and put it in bold'), revealing a deep disconnect between authorial intent and semantic document structure. Similar surprise greeted the 'Missing Title' check, which inspects internal PDF metadata invisible from the filename. Second, 'A barrier to breaking barriers': even when motivated to fix issues, educators struggled to translate detection into remediation. The WCAG-based help documentation was rejected as 'too technical' and non-actionable ('I just want a small summary'), and participants ignored the provided help links in favour of trial-and-error in their authoring tool. Third, 'Empowering Institutional Oversight': the coordinator-level dashboard reframed accessibility from a hidden technical concern into a managerial responsibility. The coordinator participant emphasised that having program-level data made inaction visibly harder to justify ('Without this, I do nothing. With this I would email the professors... it would be negligent') and noted the reports were suitable for formal quality-assurance processes with higher administration.
Relevance
This is a directly actionable paper for anyone running or advising on digital accessibility in higher education. The core design insight — coupling synchronous, inline feedback at upload time with aggregated institutional dashboards — is transferable to other LMS platforms (Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard) and to content-management systems in government and healthcare. The finding that WCAG documentation is a significant barrier for non-expert authors is consistent with long-standing critiques of the specification and reinforces the case for plain-language remediation guidance tied to specific authoring-tool actions. The coordinator finding — that aggregated, comparable, exportable metrics convert accessibility from an invisible individual concern into institutional accountability — is a practical lever for accessibility officers seeking executive buy-in. Limitations: the study is tiny (N=3), conducted on a staged Moodle instance with curated PDFs rather than in a live semester, and evaluates only PDFs (Word, PowerPoint, LaTeX, and HTML course pages are listed as future work). The reliance on automated checks also inherits their well-known limits: alt-text presence is detected but not its quality, and equal weighting of all WCAG levels can hide critical barriers behind many minor warnings.
Tags: higher education accessibility · learning management system · Moodle · PDF accessibility · accessibility monitoring · accessibility dashboard · inclusive education · WCAG · remediation · organisational accessibility
Standards referenced: WCAG 2.2 · ATAG · W3C PDF Techniques