I have progressive deafness, something that impacts several areas in my life, but I am fortunate that my deafness does not normally affect my ability to benefit from digital tools. However, my own experience does give me insight into barriers faced by other people with disabilities and as part of my commitment to communicate and disseminate best practice I have taken a special interest in improving accessibility for all users of educational technology.

I came across the above cartoon in a training related to improving accessibility, and the image stayed with me. It shows how an inclusive approach to learning technology is not only about making learning technologies accessible to all types of users, but also reminds us that a key concern of learning technology is to design from the bottom up to improve the user experience in all aspects: navigation, functionality, pedagogical effectiveness, etc.

Technology and culture evolve in concert, and bias is often built into technology by the creators who work from within their own perspective. The emphasis on the visual within the Graphical User Interface and the use of the mouse is a good example of this, but it is encouraging that so much effort is now being put into improving access to digital technology for all.

I have committed to focusing on improving digital accessibility in my formal workplace annual objectives, and also completed a short course on 'Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace' with LinkedIn Learning (below) to improve my understanding.

I have discussed some of the work I did in my previous position in the Second Legislative Area section. Here I will discuss work I have done in my current position.

Accessibility – Resources

I created a series of Blackboard Ally how-to documents hosted on our website along with a video created by my colleague, and a Moodle course to use in workshops (below).

Fix Your Content Day

My institution uses Blackboard Ally, a tool integrated into Moodle that automatically returns an ‘Accessibility score’ for uploaded documents and gives instructions on how to fix the issues it highlights. These ‘Accessibility Scores’ tell staff how well-adapted their documents are for all types of students.

Every year, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) – 19 May this year – Blackboard run a global ‘Fix Your Content Day’ (FYCD). Participating institutions are ranked on a leader board according to how much content they improve and in 2021, 171 institutions across four continents participated.

My line manager agreed that I could propose to run this event in our College, and I began to communicate with relevant stakeholders. As a result, an Information Officer in the Information Services, who is the university’s main contact with Blackboard and whose remit includes digital accessibility for the university as a whole, is supporting a move to make this event university-wide. We have worked together to publicise it to the university, also producing a dedicated webpage that uses some of the documents I made.

The objectives are to increase awareness of the BB Ally tool and improve the accessibility of the files hosted on Moodle. The success of this can be measured by the overall accessibility score that is generated by BB Ally.

It’s important to note that while BB Ally makes it much easier to identify content, ultimately it those who create the content have to fix it, i.e. the academic staff – for the most part. As most academic staff already have a heavy workload, getting their participation will require a clear communication plan, encouragement from senior staff, clear instructions on how best to use BB Ally, and tangible support wherever needed.

To assist staff, I prepared an additional report to help target areas most in need of improvement. The BB Ally tool does not allow regular users to view aggregated data by department or academic programme. There is a reporting facility, but it is only available to the top-level administrators. I obtained raw data from them and used the services of an intern to clean it up and make it into a more readable format, then added pivot tables and conditional formatting to highlight key data (below). I showed a first draft of this reporting tool to it to the administration team of one School and was able to make improvements. I spoke with the Dean of Learning and Teaching, and following his approval I distributed it to relevant managers and learning and teaching leads and have been able to get the topic discussed in departmental meetings.

I have also proposed that some of our allocated budget for interns be used to employ interns to assist with fixing documents identified by BB Ally.

Reflection

I am working on producing a short video that would demonstrate the differences proper tagging makes to screen readers, but have come across significant difficulties in finding a screen reader that works on the university laptop, and getting the support necessary to make it work. This experience only serves to highlight to me the need to work more on improving digital accessibility for everyone and also reminds me of the need to keep up to date with relevant technology.

I also prepared a series of short 30 minute workshops to give guidance on each of the typical issues that BB Ally identifies. In spite of advertising via the College newsletter, and via various Teams, nobody attended. It is not unusual in my experience to have low attendance at workshops, but the complete lack of interest was revealing. Overall, in spite of being a legal and moral obligation, it is more difficult to motivate people to put in the effort to make their content more accessible when they do not have direct experience themselves of the barriers that inaccessible content can create.

BB Ally has the advantage of placing an icon directly in view, advertising the state of accessibility, but I have come across a number of people who don't know what it means and have never clicked on it. This is one of the reasons that I sought to find other ways to raise the profile of BB Ally and when I heard about the FYCD from a colleague I thought it was a good opportunity. We have already started to publicise it and garnered some interest. Our principle message is that any improvement is positive, and the university's principle contact with Blackboard has set up a meeting to see if we can have some live reporting on our webpage on the day of the event.