“What does accessible mean to you?”. It’s a question I keep coming back to, and I don’t think it has one answer. Ask ten people in education what “accessible” means and you’ll get ten different starting points; a font, a wifi signal, a reading list, a time of day. Here are a few of the answers I keep landing on.
Over my three years at Perlego, I’ve seen first hand what assistive technology can do for neurodivergent students. Being able to switch a page to a dyslexia-friendly font at the click of a button. Adding a colour gradient across the words to help with reading speed and fluency, or to help you focus and keep your place on the page. Small changes, but they change what’s possible for a lot of learners.
What matters most isn’t just that these tools exist, it’s how they’re delivered. When accessibility is built into the platform, students don’t have to ask for it. No raised hand, no explaining yourself to a tutor, no waiting on a disability services form. Technology can help create an equal learning environment, and having that access there by default, rather than by request, fosters a sense of belonging that “get in touch if you need adjustments” never quite manages. Accessibility is by design, not an afterthought.
Sometimes accessible just means flexible. Being able to read on your phone, on the commute, with no wifi. Listening to something instead, while you’re doing the washing up. Studying around a job, a commute, a family, rather than around a fixed timetable.
We’re seeing this shape course design itself, with the rise of HyFlex teaching, where students can choose to join live, online, or catch up asynchronously; and Block teaching, where you study one subject intensively rather than several in parallel. Neither model assumes there’s one right way to show up to learn.
It's easy to design for a stable wifi connection and call it done. But reliable connectivity isn't something everyone has, including in parts of the UK, not just "elsewhere." Institutions building genuinely accessible courses need to think about offline access, downloadable content, and low-bandwidth design as seriously as they think about font size.
And having the connection is only half of it. Digital literacy, the confidence to navigate a new platform, or judge which sources to trust, is its own layer of access, and it's every bit as unevenly distributed as bandwidth: two students with identical devices and identical wifi can still have very different levels of access, depending on how comfortable they are with the technology itself. Infrastructure and digital confidence are both accessibility; they just tend to get thought about last.
There's a flip side worth holding onto, though: the same shift that's raising the bar on digital skills is also producing tools that lower it. AI-powered search and recommendation can help someone find the right reading without already knowing the right search terms, and tools that summarise or read text aloud can turn an unfamiliar source into something usable. Used well, AI can broaden who discovers something in the first place, and how much of it they actually read.
Some people learn best by moving around. Others need a quiet corner of the library. Some people’s best hour is 2am, not 9am. Kinaesthetic, auditory, visual - the labels matter less than the underlying point: there’s no single “normal” way to study, and building a course around one assumed learner leaves a lot of people out. Making education accessible to everyone means designing in that flexibility from the start, not offering it as an exception.
This flexible approach to accessibility was essential to our partner University of Leeds, and the adoption and impact of Perlego is highlighted in the case study ‘Scaling Accessibility: Broadening Digital Libraries to Enhance the Student Experience ’. Elly Cope, Head of Access & Acquisitions, University of Leeds, says:
“The biggest element was Perlego’s accessibility features. When I saw those in action, I thought, ‘oh, this is genuinely different’. The features reduce barriers for everyone to access and read the content. Read Aloud [text-to-speech tool] is brilliant. It’s not robotic and has proper inflection and recognition of punctuation.”
Accessibility also means inclusivity. Thinking about course design and resources, and how representative they actually are of your student body. Supporting students to read widely and diversely, rather than from a narrow, familiar list.
That only works if cost isn’t the barrier. Reading lists are too often built around single-title purchasing, where a student pays for a whole book to read two assigned chapters. Broadening what students read, and who they read, shouldn’t mean asking them to foot a bigger bill. Access that depends on what you can afford isn’t really access at all.
I don’t think there’s a finished answer. Font settings and offline access and reading list design don’t often come up in the same conversation, but they’re answering the same question: who gets left out, and what would it take not to leave them out?
But it’s worth institutions, and everyone working alongside them, asking it more often, and more specifically, than “have we ticked the accessibility box.”
We’d love to hear how your institution is approaching inclusion strategies for students, and how Perlego could support your initiatives.