Digital Accessibility with Amy Lomellini

You may have been hearing the term “digital accessibility” a lot lately, especially if you teach at a public institution. Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (or ADA) was updated in 2024 to require greater levels of accessibility for web and mobile app content provided by state and local governments. Public colleges and universities have until April 2026 to ensure that, among other things, the learning materials they provide to students meet these new accessibility requirements.

This week's podcast episode is all about digital accessibility. As I write this in September 2025, federal requirements for colleges and universities are, shall we say, in flux, so in this episode, we don't focus much on compliance with the ADA updates. Instead, we explore why digital accessibility can be so important to the student experience. My guest on the pod is Amy Lomellini, director of accessibility at Anthology, the company that makes the learning management system Blackboard. Amy teaches educational technology and digital accessibility for Boise State University and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC).

In our conversation, Amy argued that we should move away from the traditional disclosure-accommodation paradigm. Amy shared some of her story, noting that she had a new and complicated medical diagnosis when starting her online Master's program. "Am I supposed to call my brand new program director and disclose my entire medical history? When I don't even know what is happening?" Amy was thankful for an online program that was already designed with access in mind, allowing her to pursue learning without needing to immediately request accommodations.

We talked about AI as an assistive technology and about ways to lead your organization to adopt more digital accessibility practices. Amy also shared some practical strategies for updating our workflows to make our teaching materials more accessible. If you have ever wondered why you should include alt text for your images or use headers in text documents or why watching a lecture video at double speed could be a good thing, this is the episode for you.

​You can listen to my conversation with Amy Lomellini here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Digital Media Projects in Chemistry: An Annotated Assignment

Y'all know how much I like annotation. Not as much as Remi Kalir does, but still a lot. That's why I'm excited that we're trying out a new annotation-focused format on the UVA Teaching Hub.

Center for Teaching Excellence director Michael Palmer has contributed an annotated assignment for the site. The collection explores a digital media project he's used successfully in his general chemistry course. Included are the assignment description, a sample student project, and resources to support students' work and instructor assessment efforts. Michael has annotated many of these documents, pulling back the curtain on his teaching principles and practices related to this assignment.

I would love to see more annotated assignments like this! If you have an assignment that's worked well for you that you might want to contribute to the Teaching Hub, let me know. I'm happy to walk you through the curation and contribution process.

Around the Web: AI Edition

This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too.

• "Charlie Kirk's AI Resurrection Ushers in a New Era of Digital Grief" - File this under "aspects of AI literacy I didn't expect." Religion News Service journalist Jack Jenkins reports on three evangelical churches whose recent Sunday services featured a video with an AI-generated message imagining what activist Charlie Kirk might have to say in the wake of his own death. There's a lot to unpack here, but I'll note that deciding how to represent someone after their death through their own words is complicated enough--now we can make up words for them! One worry I have about this is that listeners will consider such an AI-generated speech to have some amount of authority, as if the AI actually knows what a particular deceased person would say.
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• "What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom" - This Literary Hub essay by my UVA colleague Piers Gelly is a thoughtful, nuanced, and often very funny exploration of a semester's engagement with students around generative AI and writing. Piers writes, "Rather than taking an 'abstinence-only' approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs." He reports on the results of this experiment and what he learned through it about his students. This is probably my favorite piece of writing on AI all year.
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• "LLM-Based Educational Games Will Be a Big Deal" - This post from Benjamin Breen, who teaches history at UC Santa Cruz, isn't new (it dates to May 2024), but it's new to me. He outlines his ideas and early experiments in using generative AI to create educational games that simulate certain historical situations, like Charles Darwin's exploration of Chatham Island (the one with the finches) or working as a female apothecary in 17th century Mexico City. Yes, folks, this post three of my favorite things: teaching, games, and birds! In a more recent post (May 2025), Breen provides a short update on his experiments with these AI-powered games, which includes a playable version of his Charles Darwin game.

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