Universities increasingly outsource e-mail and other services to companies like Google—but if Google's software isn't usable by all students, are the schools breaking the law?

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the largest and oldest nationwide organization for those with blindness, has filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that New York University, Northwestern University, and certain Oregon public schools are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. The complaints, sent March 15, call upon the DOJ to investigate the schools’ use of Google’s education software, and they include videos describing the accessibility problems.

Google Apps for Education is a software suite that uses customizable Google applications like Gmail and Google Calendar for communication and collaboration in education. Since its introduction, dozens of universities and hundreds of K-12 school districts with more than 10 million combined students have contracted with Google to use the software. The rapid increase is reflective of a wider trend in education as schools are turning to cloud-based software to cut costs; NYU projected savings of over $400,000 from its own switch to the cloud.

The Campus Computing Project, an organization that studies the role of technology in higher education, announced in a 2010 study that close to 60 percent of campuses outsource student e-mail—and of this 60 percent, more than half outsource it to Gmail. In Oregon, 100 districts plan to move to the Web-based software, while 90 school districts with over 200,000 individual user accounts currently use at least one component of the software.

Saving money is great, but the National Federation of the Blind argues that the cost savings carry a price tag of their own: inaccessibility. Their complaint argues that the schools using Google Apps have neglected the legal requirements established by Titles II and III of The Americans with Disabilities Act and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Those statutes bar any school that receives federal financial assistance from providing unequal access to benefits of their programs, services, and activities, and they mandate fully accessible campus-wide technology.

For those with sight problems, screen readers are invaluable. Gmail has an "HTML view" option that offers compatibility with screen readers; however, the primary language must be English and the view has limited features compared to standard Gmail. Missing features include such items as spell check, rich formatting, and management of filters and contacts.

For Google Calendar, the screen reader passes over appointments, merely reading the hours and table counts of the calendar. For other programs like Google Groups and Chrome, the screen reader can’t read updated posts, certain buttons, and headers. Such limits make it difficult for vision-impaired students to collaborate and communicate with their peers.

In addition to the request for an investigation, the National Federation for the Blind complaints call upon schools to pressure Google into offering fully accessible programs.

The issue is not new to higher education. Just last year, the Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice sent a letter to every US college and university president about accessibility in the classroom. The letter asked schools to refrain from employing electronic devices that may be inaccessible to blind students and proclaimed: “It is unacceptable for universities to use emerging technology without insisting that this technology be accessible to all students.”

Nevertheless, schools have continued to contract with Google. NYU has already begun implementation, with plans to use the entire Google Apps for Education suite by June 2012. NYU's Stern School of Business uses Google Documents and Google Sites to share and collaborate classroom assignments, while the School of Medicine uses Google Calendar for creating and coordinating the official academic calendar. At Northwestern, the entire suite is already in use, and in Oregon, certain school districts assign projects that use Chrome exclusively (the development website for Chrome states that fully accessible support for screen readers is “only partially finished”). When asked for a response, all of the schools reiterated their commitment to accessibility. Google has also met recently with the NFB president about the issue.

Many tech companies are dealing with the accessibility issue. Apple, which won an award from the National Federation of the Blind for “groundbreaking work in accessibility,” mandates built-in screen readers, black-on-white-text, screen magnification, and voice-overs for its products. In addition to an extensive website for personal users, Microsoft provides training courses and development tools for corporate, business, and NGO IT departments.

With universities adopting Google's services so readily, the complaint is no trivial matter. The Obama Administration and Department of Education have pushed to increase educational technology in schools, but the new complaint serves as a reminder of the challenges such a move will face.