The Teach Access Fellowship Program is a year-long, cohort-based professional development initiative designed to address a root cause of inaccessible technology: the lack of accessibility education in higher education. Launched in 2023, the program equips faculty and academic staff across all disciplines with the knowledge and tools to embed accessibility concepts and practices into their courses, programs, and departments.
The Fellowship combines synchronous online sessions, asynchronous learning resources, mentorship, and applied project work. Fellows begin by developing a shared foundation in disability, disability justice, and inclusive practices. From there, they learn accessible design principles, standards, and teaching strategies, and apply this learning by creating, implementing, and scaling accessibility-focused curricular materials within their own institutional contexts.
The Teach Access Fellowship Program is making a real difference. To date, it has engaged 60 higher education professionals across diverse disciplines in the United States and Puerto Rico, fostering a community committed to accessibility education. Fellows have created more than 100 free teaching materials now available in the Teach Access Curriculum Repository. Instead of building expensive new programs, the Fellowship helps schools add accessibility lessons to courses they already teach. As a result, faculty feel more confident teaching accessibility, and schools are better prepared to include it in their programs.
The Fellowship is highly cost-effective, relying on widely available tools such as Zoom, Google Workspace, and LinkedIn, along with open educational resources and peer mentorship, rather than costly proprietary solutions. Its impact is driven by the Fellows themselves through a train-the-trainer model: Fellows apply what they learn in their own teaching and actively engage colleagues and students, extending accessibility education well beyond the cohort. For example, Fellows in the 2025 cohort collectively reached approximately 911 students and 1,175 faculty members. By embedding accessibility into existing courses, rather than creating new programs, the Fellowship enables Fellows to drive sustainable institutional change and inform decision-making at both the program and departmental levels.
Key lessons learned include the importance of grounding accessibility education in disability perspectives, meeting educators where they are, and focusing on small, sustainable curricular changes rather than large-scale overhauls.