Specialism

Reflection

So why did I decide to do all of this? First off, accessibility is something which is so often left to the end of a process and I wanted to understand the areas on which we needed to focus our efforts so it could be less of an afterthought. By accessibility, I mean the considerations taken to make the content perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, as is stated by W3C’s WCAG guidelines. It is difficult to ensure that content is entirely accessible, as what could be accessible for a student using a screen reader, may not be for a student with dyslexia. However, I believe that considering accessibility and adding variety at an early stage of planning can reduce the amount of issues in the future.I also wanted to make use of the newfound data that came with the introduction of Ally, and wanted to break apart the design of our courses to understand where the issues lie.

The process was enlightening and revealed a great deal about how even within one School, different subject areas approach course design in different ways. There were some consistencies, for example across all three subject areas, PDFs maintained top spot as the first choice of academics, and a higher number of PDFs in a course had a direct correlation with a lower accessibility score. This was due to many of the PDFs being untagged and thus not fully navigable with a screen reader, as well as the inflexible nature of PDFs meaning they are not perfect for those with specific requirements. However, it was interesting to note how one subject area opted for many more visual supplementations in their course, so the approach to accessibility would then differ when communicating with this subject.

The actionable tasks highlighted that a subject-specific approach was necessary if I wished to make any long-lasting and relevant change. To run long training sessions on video captioning for a subject area which opted mainly for PDFs, would likely turn the academics away from the cause altogether. What it also highlighted is that the involvement of Learning Technologists in the early stages of course creation could have a huge impact on the future-proofing of an accessible course, and save a great deal of corrective work in the future.

It triggered me to make an accessible content template on Word, which could then be downloaded and used infinite times by academics in the early stages of their content creation. This template embedded a School-specific type of Styles, which would allow academics to structure their content in a screen-reader-accessible way. It also ensures colour and contrast remained consistent through blocking the formatting options in the document.

I was glad to have undertaken this task as I have a strong interest in looking at, organising and analysing data. I also am passionate about accessibility in education, so the opportunity to combine these two interests into something which I believe will have long term benefits on the School, was a fulfilling and satisfying endeavour. It still seems too early to understand how attitudes are changing towards accessibility, but I am running the same experiment this year looking at the data from 2024, to understand how things are changing and whether the landscape of online teaching has altered at all in the past year. It is great that I have this opportunity to revisit the experiment, as it is allowing me to make alterations based on last years’ experience.

The first iteration involved a lot of back and forth with the central teams, which meant that the process was not as efficient as it could have been. This year, I managed to gain access to the source site of the data, which allowed me to take all necessary data without the need for clarification with the central teams. If I had the option, I would focus more of my time on accessibility and aid academics throughout their design process, acting as a consultant in every stage.

This project allowed me to raise concerns and issues to the disability office, in addition to the University-wide Learn User Group, where I presented my findings. I also presented these findings to each of the subject areas, catering the presentation materials so they reflected the individual subject’s requirements based on the data. Since then, I have had academics reaching out about course creation and corrective measures which can be taken, so I hope for the future, accessibility will be considered at all stages and not just at the end.