This post was authored by Lynn Bloomer, Director, Business Operations, Cisco Networking Academy.
Cisco Networking Academy is one of the world’s largest and longest-standing purpose-driven IT skills-to-jobs programs, impacting the lives of more than 4.7 million learners annually (24.2 million since inception) in 191 countries.
As the world celebrates the 2025 Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Cisco took a significant step towards championing disability inclusion by partnering with Teach Access, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing accessibility education. Teach Access envisions a fully accessible future in which students enter the workforce with knowledge of the needs of people with disabilities and skills to create technology that is born accessible. Together, we have launched a collection of best practices for Cisco Networking Academy educators, designed to empower instructors in educating all learners. Our collaboration underscores Cisco’s dedication to fostering an inclusive digital future by integrating accessibility principles into technology education.
This new teaching resource, the Accessibility Playlist, supports educators in teaching digital accessibility. The playlist is tailored for Cisco Networking Academy instructors and uses Teach Access’s free resources, including accessibility self-paced courses and curricular items in the Teach Access Curriculum Repository. These materials cover a range of topics, including disability awareness, accessible design, and inclusive teaching practices across various disciplines such as computer science, UX design, and web development. By using these resources, instructors will gain valuable insights into best practices in today’s technological landscape and will build their confidence in teaching for a more inclusive audience.
At the heart of the Cisco Networking Academy program is a consistent dedication to equip and empower communities and students of all backgrounds through education. Since we began collecting this data in 2019, over 232,000 students with declared disabilities have participated.1 And we continue to support disability and neurodivergent communities by putting accessibility at the front of what we do. For example, we recently expanded our Advisory Board to include organizations that champion accessibility worldwide, such as the Open University (United Kingdom), the Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired (CAVI) (Australia), NSITE (United States), and Bridge to Opportunity (United States). We also actively engage with students and instructors to identify new accessibility features to enhance our learning platform experience for greater inclusivity.
“While teaching Cybersecurity Essentials, we discovered that the cybersecurity Virtual Machines (VMs) software used in the lab activities no longer had the screen reader. This meant our visually impaired learners were unable to launch and complete the lab activities. I reached out to the Cisco Networking Academy team, who were able to quickly resolve this and add an accommodation to allow use with screen readers. Hands-on learning is so critical for all learners regardless of their experience and physical capabilities.” – Karen Woodard, Cisco Networking Academy instructor
Cisco’s ongoing commitment to this work, led by our Office of Accessibility, and holding ourselves accountable for our progress is important for learners with disabilities; moreover, it’s important to all of us. We are better together. In keeping with our Purpose to Power an Inclusive Future for All, we want to make the technology and services we provide to our customers, partners, suppliers, and employees accessible to all. We are making progress, and there is still more work to do.
Learn more at netacad.com/accessibility.
Sources:
- Optional self-reporting by learners from July 2019, when we started collecting this information, to the end of FY2024.
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