This month, NPR published a story about a ninth grader named Soraya. She has dyslexia. Text-to-speech, dictation tools, the ability to photograph a whiteboard before a teacher erases it—these are what made school work for her. Then a blanket screen ban arrived, and the tools disappeared with it.

Soraya’s story is being told as a policy story. But it is really a design story. The question it raises is not whether screens belong in classrooms. It is whether the learning we put on those screens was ever built for the students who depend on it most.

Just last month—four weeks before this national story ran—704 instructional designers, faculty developers, and learning experience leaders gathered for a webinar to work through the same problem from the inside. Not a screen ban. Not a policy brief. A room full of people asking: how do we actually build courses that reach every learner, without burning out the people responsible for creating them?

Paula McDougald runs design and development at Virtual Arkansas, an extension of the Arkansas Department of Education that serves students statewide through a catalog of over 180 courses. Every teacher on staff completes Quality Matters accessibility training in their first year. Accessibility is not aspirational at Virtual Arkansas. It is the job.

McDougald brought data to the May 7 session that reframed the burden argument entirely. Over the year, Virtual Arkansas processed 2,700+ images using CourseArc’s AI alt text tool, saving more than 102 hours of design time—with time reductions of up to 80% on complex instructional visuals like charts and infographics.

“Good alt text isn’t just describing what you see. It’s actually communicating meaning.”
-Paula McDougald • Virtual Arkansas

That line is the thread connecting Soraya’s story to what Virtual Arkansas built.

Alt text is not a checkbox. For a student with low vision, it is either a door or a wall. What McDougald proved, with a year of real numbers, is that building accessibility in from the beginning does not slow teams down. It frees them up. The burden disappears when the tools are designed correctly.

CourseArc Co-Founder Katie Egan opened the May 7 session by naming something the field had long understood but rarely said plainly.

“Faculty don’t resist change. What they really resist is burden.”

Katie Egan • Co-Founder, CourseArc

The same is true of the educators who did not fight for Soraya’s exemption. It was not indifference. It was a system that handed them a rule without handing them a resource. Accessible design does not fix broken policy. But it does mean that when policy fails, the content itself does not.

The same is true of the educators who did not fight for Soraya’s exemption. It was not indifference. It was a system that handed them a rule without handing them a resource. Accessible design does not fix broken policy. But it does mean that when policy fails, the content itself does not.

At CourseArc, accessibility is not a feature. It is not a final check or a compliance layer added at the end of a build. It is the architecture—built into every template, every default, every AI-generated output from the first click. Accessible, engaging learning as the standard, not the exception. Not because it is the right thing to say. Because it is the only way to build.

Katie closed the May 7 session with a line she did not plan to say. She had just heard Paula’s numbers. She paused, then said simply: “It’s working for everyone.”

For Soraya, that is not a small thing. It is the whole thing.

CourseArc is a browser-based course authoring platform built with accessibility as its foundation. See what it looks like when every learner is considered from the start.

This is what we build toward, every day. If you’re curious about how it works, the door is open.