Glassware Labs
Glassware Labs · San Bernardino, California

Instruments for the parts of teaching nobody staffed

Glassware Labs makes Glassability, the accessibility repair service for Canvas courses. It finds what the scanners find, drafts the repair, shows its evidence, and waits for the instructor to say yes.

glass·ware n. The instruments of a laboratory: the vessels work is done in, made to be seen through. Also, what this lab makes.

What we make

Glassability™

An app inside Canvas. It reads a course the way assistive technology reads it, pages, documents, images, video captions, and measures what would fail a student who cannot see, hear or click the way the author does. Then it does the other half of the job the scanners leave behind: it drafts the repair, shows the before and after, and publishes only what the instructor approves.

What the college gets is not a promise but a receipt, in the numbers of the scanners it already runs.

Glassability at accessibility.glass
715 → 44−94% findings
Scanner findings, before and after
Two pilot courses, measured by a third-party scanner's own re-scan, Fall 2026.
1,016,978
Caption words verified
Word by word, with human review where it counts.

How we use AI

The accessibility gap persisted because the work was manual and nobody was staffed to do it. AI changed that arithmetic. We use it for the labor, and we keep people for the judgment. Three things are true of every model we run, and will stay true.

It works on course content, never on students. Pages, files, images, captions. Glassability never requests student submissions, grades or the people in a course, so no model can be shown them.
It drafts. A person decides. Every proposed change waits for the instructor's press, item by item. Every change is logged with a copy of the content before and after, and can be reversed.
Nothing leaves to be learned from. Course content is not used to train any model, and none of it is sent to a third-party model service. The models run on infrastructure we operate.

The Department of Justice has said fully automated remediation is not yet good enough to trust on its own. We agree; that is why the approve button exists. What Glassability keeps, and what the models see.

Who

Glassware Labs is the studio of Ben Wilbur, an adjunct instructor in Human Services at San Bernardino Valley College. Like most instructors at most community colleges, he had no instructional designer, no captioning service and no accessibility staff, only courses full of lecture video, slide decks and readings, and scanner reports listing hundreds of findings that were nobody's job to fix.

Glassability was built to be that missing job. It runs on his own courses first, and every number on this page came from them.

The name is a promise about how the instruments behave. Laboratory glassware holds the work without changing it and lets everyone see what is going on inside. Museum glass does the same for a painting. Glassability does the same for a course: unaltered except where the instructor said yes, and readable by every student who shows up.

Contact

Pilots, questions, and the people who run Canvas at a college: [email protected]. Free pilot terms, the privacy page and the accessibility statement for Glassability are on its own site.