2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Public universities in the US are now required to meet digital accessibility (DA) standards under the 2024 updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). For mathematics instructors, this means course materials must be parsable by screen readers, but conventional LaTeX-to-PDF workflows cannot provide such materials. Despite the availability of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) as a web standard for accessible math content, supported by all modern browsers, instructor adoption of DA-compliant materials remains very low. This creates a gap between available technology and classroom practice regarding compliance with digital accessibility standards.

This paper makes three contributions toward closing this gap. First, we present a taxonomy of existing approaches for DA-compliant math content, organized by whether they are optimized for print (PDF) or web (HTML) outputs, and we analyze their respective tradeoffs for instructor adoption. Second, we describe and document a proposed implementation: a free software workflow using Obsidian (Markdown-based document authoring and content management tool), Quartz (static site generator), Git (collaboration and version control), and Cloudflare Pages (build and host static sites). This workflow enables math instructors to create, manage, and publish DA-compliant course websites offering MathML from documents that encode math expressions in a TeX-based syntax. The system requires a one-time setup of approximately 1-2 hours, and thereafter site updates occur in minutes, in the cloud, after content authors run a single command. A setup tutorial has been made publicly available by the authors. Third, we present an empirical study of student outcomes across 31 sections of Calculus II over 6 semesters. Student performance data shows that sections using the proposed course website system outperformed control sections, with the treatment group reaching 2.46 standard deviations above the control mean in the final semester of the study. Although all treatment sections were taught by a single instructor, several lines of evidence, such as the acclimation trajectories of other new instructors on the same course, indicate that the system itself may be a meaningful contributor to the observed performance gains. A survey of student experience shows no statistically significant difference between groups, suggesting that the system does not negatively affect student experience. A proposed second phase of the study will assess barriers to instructor adoption at other institutions.