January 23, 2026
Most accessibility tools are added around the classroom.
Extra software.
Extra workflows.
Extra requests.
The Podium Solution starts somewhere else entirely: the front of the room. Rather than asking students, faculty, or support teams to bolt accessibility on after the fact, the Podium Solution treats accessibility as shared classroom infrastructure — present by default, visible to everyone, and owned by the institution.
This post explains what the Podium Solution is, how it works, who it’s designed to support, and why we’re actively inviting ideas and feedback as it continues to take shape.
At its core, the Podium Solution is a secure, on-campus accessibility system built directly into the teaching environment.
A classroom podium computer — currently based on Apple hardware — captures lecture audio (with optional video). All processing happens locally. Live captions, transcripts, summaries, and study tools are generated on-device and made available to students through Messenger Pigeon.
An instructor initiates a session from the podium using a familiar interface. A clearly visible device captures the lecture. A local computer processes the content in real time, generating captions and transcripts and preparing post-class study tools.
Students can follow along live or access materials later on their own devices — securely, and under institutional control.
If off-campus access is enabled, content is transferred using encrypted, temporary relay mechanisms rather than open cloud storage. The institution defines retention, access, and governance policies.
This isn’t about adding more technology.
It’s about placing technology where governance already exists.
The Podium Solution was shaped by the reality that accessibility affects the entire academic system — not just individual learners.
Students: Every student benefits from immediate access to captions, transcripts, summaries, and study tools from the first week of term. Support doesn’t depend on early disclosure, documentation, or wait times. This matters because delayed access is a known contributor to academic struggle, disengagement, and course withdrawal — especially early in a semester.
Faculty: Instructors can teach knowing accessibility is present by default, without managing individual requests or adjusting delivery mid-term. Lecture data stays on campus, intellectual property is respected, and recording is intentional and visible. When fewer students fall behind due to access barriers, teaching becomes more stable and predictable.
Accessibility and learning support teams: Instead of operating in constant triage mode — responding after students have already started struggling — teams gain a preventative layer. Classroom-wide access reduces bottlenecks, shortens wait times, and helps ensure students receive support early enough to succeed academically.
IT and AV teams: The system aligns with institutional security, privacy, and procurement standards. Processing happens on institution-owned hardware, with clear data flows, predictable costs, and fewer unsanctioned tools appearing on campus networks.
Institutional leadership: From an institutional perspective, the Podium Solution supports a critical outcome: keeping students enrolled and progressing. Research consistently shows that students who receive timely accessibility supports have higher retention and completion rates than those who experience delays. By embedding access directly into classrooms, the Podium Solution addresses one of the quiet drivers of dropout — students falling behind before help arrives.
Accessibility doesn’t need to just be a compliance obligation. It’s a retention strategy, an equity strategy, and an academic success strategy — delivered through infrastructure rather than exception handling.
A key shift the Podium Solution makes is moving away from request-based access.
Captions, transcripts, AI notes, bookmarks, and text-to-speech are available to everyone. Human services — captioning, note-taking, described video — can be layered in when required, but the baseline experience is already accessible.
This moves accessibility from “one student at a time” to built-in, classroom-wide design, aligning with Universal Design for Learning while remaining operationally realistic.
The Podium Solution is being developed in close collaboration with Humber Polytechnic, with the first pilot launching in the winter semester of 2026.
This partnership matters. The system isn’t being designed in isolation and deployed afterward. It’s being shaped alongside faculty, IT teams, accessibility professionals, and students — in real classrooms, with real constraints.
The goal isn’t just to run a pilot.
It’s to establish a repeatable, governance-ready model other institutions can adapt with confidence.
The Podium Solution is still evolving.
We’re actively inviting input from instructors, accessibility professionals, IT leaders, administrators, and students who are navigating these challenges every day. Feedback at this stage directly informs how the system is designed, deployed, and governed.
If you’re experimenting with AI in classrooms, grappling with accommodation scale, or thinking seriously about data sovereignty in teaching environments, we want to learn from you.
Not because the work is finished — but because sustainable accessibility requires shared design.
As development continues, we’re exploring deeper platform integration, broader classroom types, and pathways toward a national model for secure, on-prem AI in higher education.
Accessibility doesn’t need to be fragmented, risky, or reactive.
It can be built into the room itself.
