Time for digital inclusion at scale

I’ve been involved in a conversation on social media today and it’s made me think about what is happening. Poor documents are made and then teams of people then spend hours fixing them when really they should’ve been made properly in the first place, or at least have the basics applied. Accessibility isn’t something you ‘fix’ you proactively should be ‘preventing’ accessibility issues. But these are basic skills, it shouldn’t be this hard to expect people to adopt them or be trained in them. Nobody argued about learning the basics of GDPR or health and safety.  You wouldn’t build a house and then ‘fix’ or ‘re-do’ the doorways afterwards for wheelchair access, it’s done as part of the building plans and regulations. SCULPT lessons learned mentions this vision. https://www.worcestershire.gov.uk/info/20794/sculpt_for_accessibility/2479/about_sculpt_for_accessibility/3

Reflecting on discussions in a meeting and jotting down my thoughts.  We build houses and by default we consider things like accessible entrances, toilets and layout as part of the build. We know if that’s missing it shows a blatant disregard for inclusion. We build documents, and there are more documents than buildings, and ever increasing due to the ‘digital by default’ age we live in, yet we don’t have the knowledge or skills for the basics of inclusion. When broaching the subject people say things like ‘I haven’t got time, I hardly know anyone this affects’ to justify not learning basic skills, but why? What is the difference between building a house with accessibility as part of the design and building digital content. Frustratingly the basic skills that can have a significant impact in everyday documents only take minutes to learn. Once learnt it takes no longer to build a document, so why the relentless pushback?  Why on earth is this a battle?  I am making progres...

I’ve been reading, researching and responding to accessibility related posts on Facebook. Interestingly one was asking about research papers related specifically to the creation of accessible PDFs. I answered with some useful papers, but that research gap really is still there. Where is it? We need more research in this area, we need to start looking at the wider document accessibility issue and not just website accessibility. I also don’t mean documents that go on websites, I mean the ‘everyday‘ documents such as those that get emailed to people, like reports, invoices, presentations, policies, bookings or shared drives. Our world is digital, but when will basic skills for digital inclusion catch up? We need curriculum and courses to change and for digital accessibility awareness to be included. The basics of accessibility should be by design, it should be everyday knowledge, there’s no excuse, the basics are simple. So simple in fact that you don’t actually need to be confident in IT...

This week has been a busy week of presentations that has inspired me to start blogging, it’s really made me appreciate our SCULPT for Accessibility journey is unique. To end this week I’ve presented the journey of SCULPT at Worcestershire County Council, from the early humble beginnings as a PDF in 2019, to present day being recognised and mentioned on websites nationally. This week I also presented with a colleague as finalists in two categories of the MJ Awards, we have come such a long way, yet still have so much to do. The beginnings of our journey can be read on AbilityNet: Everyone can SCULPT for Accessibility. I finished the week thinking we really are at the cusp of making a difference. The team I work for discussed the vast opportunities we have for SCULPT, how we could move it forward in the organisation and how we support the wider skills gap in the community for building inclusive materials. It’s an exciting time.  This week we also had challenges though. My colleagues ...