91����

Associate Professor of English Bridget Whearty has long cared about making classroom materials digitally accessible, especially non-standard materials such as medieval manuscripts.

She suddenly, desperately needed those tools herself.

One May morning, she woke to a visual blur, her eyes clouded by giant, moving shadows wherever she looked. She was left unable to read — a disaster for a humanities professor. Grading papers exhausted her, and her research productivity screeched to a halt.

“It turned out that at the age of 42, I was going through something that’s very common for people over the age of 70: the vitreous sacs in my eyes had torn loose from my retinas and were drifting forward. I was looking through a debris field,” she remembered.

Whearty has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the body’s production of collagen and has wide-ranging health effects, including hypermobility, difficulty walking and vision problems. She brings her personal experience of disability to a new role as a SUNY Accessibility Advocates and Allies Faculty Fellow, the first 91���� professor to become involved in the initiative.

In 2026, the 11 fellows from across the state will work to expand digital accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practices across their campuses. Any content placed on a learning management system needs to meet federal digital accessibility requirements for e-readers, including syllabi, PDF readings and closed captioning for podcasts and videos. The goal is to ensure that all learners have the ability to engage with course content.

The SUNY system serves more than 41,000 students with disabilities, of which the largest group identifies as having a neurodevelopmental disability. The coronavirus pandemic has also been implicated in a rise in chronic illnesses, and the SUNY system needs to make sure that faculty, staff and students suffering from chronic conditions have the supports they need to thrive in their work, Whearty pointed out.

“The focus for us in particular is helping our campuses and SUNY more broadly get ready for the digital ADA requirements that roll into effect on April 1,” Whearty explained. “But the fellowship runs January through December, so we’re also thinking about digital accessibility more broadly, promoting cultures that are more engaged with issues of disability and access, pinpointing areas on our individual campuses and across our campuses that could use greater focus, development and care to support all of the disabled members of our communities.”

Digital accessibility and beyond

Screen readers aren’t just ethical, but eminently practical; they allow individuals such as Whearty to be productive and stay involved in the intellectual community.

To deal with the sudden loss of her sight, Whearty used a dictation program to read and comment on student papers, and turned to audiobooks and apps that read PDFs aloud. The visual debris field remained for a year and a half; she still has it, but her brain has become more accustomed to looking through the shadows, she said.

The abrupt transition from researching digital access technologies to using them herself allowed her to discover gaps in digital accessibility that she had earlier missed.

In her new role, she would like to help colleagues in the humanities find the sweet spot that combines pedagogical rigor with ease of engagement. Over the next three to five years, Whearty would also like to help develop a digital disability hub for 91����, where undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff can find the resources they need.

Disabilities needn’t be lifelong to benefit from accommodation, and the need for accommodation may crop up unexpectedly.

Last year, for example, neurodivergent students faced a national shortage of ADHD medication that could potentially affect the time it took to earn their degrees. Some graduate students were afraid to tell their advisors that they were affected, and so were unable to access accommodations. That troubled Whearty, who is open about her own neurodivergence.

In her LGBTQ+ literature course, Whearty teaches from Genesis with a text used in academic Biblical studies — which happens to be an accessibility nightmare, she said. Online Bibles don’t fill the need because they are typically written for believers and don’t support academic reading practices. Whearty and her colleagues are still working on a solution.

The fellowship provides Whearty, who is also associated with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a valuable opportunity to serve the larger University community in a way that fits both her gifts and limitations. Prior to her time at 91����, she did a postdoctoral fellowship in data curation, indexing metadata of digital manuscripts created around the world. Currently, she’s working on a project that creates a new kind of digital sourcebook for queer and trans medieval sources.

“Drawing together diverse data in a way that is accessible and usable is one of the themes of my career, which might seem strange for a medieval English professor,” she said. “It feels really good to find ways to put that skill, commitment and interest in service in my community in a much broader way.”

When it comes to the fellowship and her broader work in accessibility, she would also like to bring in a social model of disability, rather than relying strictly on legal definitions. Ultimately, the entire campus community could benefit.

“What is it about our institutional systems that makes it so people who have different bodies, different minds, different skill sets are disadvantaged to the point where they are disabled? And what can we do about our system beyond meeting the legal minimum to be a place that is welcoming to all our staff, all our faculty, all our graduate students and postdocs, and our undergrads?” she asked. “There are a lot of conversations we need to have. We can see what other institutions are doing to support their neurodivergent and disabled students and staff and faculty, and we can take their good ideas and implement them.”