2What is owed
May, the same week. Before the reply to the office is written.
- The Duty to Accommodate in Learning Design — the procedural duty and the substantive one, the unified test for a standard, and accommodation to the point of undue hardship, in the Canadian frame.
- The Case Law Behind Accommodation in Education — six decisions in plain language. Three carry this stop: Eldridge, in which a government’s failure to provide sign language interpretation in a public service was held to deny equal benefit of the law (source 1); Moore, in which the service owed is described as meaningful access to education (source 2); and Meiorin, which places on the institution the burden of showing that further accommodation would be undue hardship (source 3).
- Canadian Accessibility and Accommodation Law for Learning Designers — two separate instruments in plain language: the Human Rights Code, which creates the duty to accommodate, and the Accessible British Columbia Act, which requires a plan. A platform is subject to the first whatever the second says.
- Accessible Procurement and Vendor Accountability — the decisions made before anything is built. An inaccessible platform, once licensed, sets the ceiling on everything designed inside it.
- Selecting Materials, Textbooks and Platforms — reading a conformance claim against what a person meets: what “supports”, “partially supports”, and “does not support” mean, and what a report does not say.
The reply to the office opens a process rather than promising an outcome. It says what the faculty will establish and by when, what it needs from the office, which is functional requirements and the lead times for interpreting and testing rather than anything about the learners, and that the laboratory technicians will be part of it. The duty it answers is the institution’s duty to accommodate under the provincial Human Rights Code (source 6), which the institution cannot license away: a contract can allocate work to a vendor, and the duty to the learner remains with the institution that requires the module. The duty is a positive one (source 1), and it calls for individual assessment rather than a blanket rule (source 4), which is why the reply does not say “the platform is accessible” and does not say it is not.
The conformance report is read for what it is. A completed Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is a vendor’s own statement, criterion by criterion, using the terms supports, partially supports, does not support, and not applicable (source 22). “Partially supports” is a claim that there are exceptions, and the report is expected to say what they are. At the associate dean’s request, the learning design unit writes to the vendor for the exceptions in writing, for the version tested, and for the assistive technologies tested with. Conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is defined in terms of what is accessibility supported, which means working with the assistive technologies people actually use (source 23), and the report is evidence about the vendor’s testing, not about the module as the three learners will meet it.
Where practice disagreesWhether a vendor’s conformance report is the institution’s evidence. Many institutions treat an attached report as due diligence done. This path treats it as a self-report that narrows the testing, not a substitute for it: the learning design unit tests each “partially supports” criterion with a screen reader and with the keyboard before anything is accepted or rejected, and records the result beside the vendor’s claim. The procurement standard Canada has adopted sets out the requirements a report should be measured against, clause by clause, for web content, documents, and software (source 24), and that is what the test is written to.