To Rebirth and New Ideas
It’s time to educate our future inclusive digital generation
Digital inclusion or digital accessibility in recent years been in the spotlight mainly due to the public body web accessibility regulations. Web teams in public body organisations are primarily the ones with responsibility for this work, along with some organisations starting to take a wider organisational approach.
Teachers in further and higher education have had to learn new skills to teach online as well as learn to create accessible online content for their virtual learning environments (VLE). This skills training has been at scale and they are also monitored for this compliance on the VLE.
In councils it’s slightly different, with the focus of skills development for the minority, which is mainly those in web teams or those who upload to websites or intranets who need to adapt content for online use. Often this to just address compliance needs rather than a wider culture or organisational maturity for digital inclusion awareness.
With the focus so heavily on website compliance the everyday practice for digital inclusion is often overlooked. There have been some interesting developments to address this area, such as the SCULPT model at Worcestershire County Council. It was conceived by Digital Designer, Helen Wilson as a model to promote the basic principles and skills for accessibility amongst the entire workforce. This training was made into a mandatory learning module to underpin a wider campaign of organisational awareness about digital inclusion. It was also shared under Creative Commons so others could use it and help develop the model.
However, SCULPT is just limited to just basic document accessibility, which although addresses day to day office practice in a council, it doesn’t necessarily address the wider basics of accessible practice that would be useful for more varied content.
Universities and colleges have adopted a much wider skills approach due to the nature and diversity of learning resources that need creating, and because a wider proportion of the workforce are directly affected by the web regulations. There has been some very interesting work going on at Sheffield Hallam University around this type of skills development and the University of Southampton are undergoing a four year research project to specifically explore this area.
All of this work in both contexts is inspiring and of course will make a difference, but like the regulations this focus has been very long overdue in raising digital accessibility awareness, especially considering how long we have been living in a world that is heavily reliant on digital content and processes.
Addressing the future skills gap
My outlook on this situation is that we are educating and addressing only a small fraction of people who need these skills, and this only comes either within a specific profession, job role or to meet a legal compliance. This is certainly not a widespread culture or mainstream awareness, nor is it working particularly well towards the maturity of everyday digital inclusion that we need in the world today, and it certainly doesn’t safeguard the wider skills development for the future of digital inclusion. Amazingly there are still so many people today that just don’t know what digital accessibility is. Compliance is one thing, embedding it into everyday culture or the mainstream is another.
Our world isn’t just physical anymore it’s digital too and it is continuously gaining momentum. Our future generations need to be prepared to make this digital future inclusive by default. I strongly believe to embed digital inclusion into the culture of our society we need to target our future digital generation.
Digital accessibility just isn’t about websites or public bodies, websites only just scratch the surface, it’s also about those everyday things too like the documents we create; the presentations we deliver, our social media posts, apps, videos, podcasts and emails that we all create and share every single day. Most of these don’t fall under the regulations unless you work for a public body and if this content needs to be uploaded online. The Accessibility Act that is potentially on the horizon might come and change this, but again the focus is still on websites and online content.
I believe the awareness and basic skills needed for everyday digital inclusion should be engrained in the education of our next generation during those formative years, at a time when young minds begin to understand the world. In our own educational journeys throughout childhood and beyond, we were surrounded and exposed to information, guidance and expectations that became a normalised and familiar part of how we understood the world and others around us. Some things were formally taught and other things we learned just because we were exposed to it, or it was part of our environment, or it was on the walls.
Think of the seven-year-old today that understands a no-entry sign by default because of the symbols on it or because it’s red and that means danger, or the health and safety ‘manual handling’ poster we could recite word for word because we walk past it every day at work. These types of things are powerful and help us engage, understand or remember information. Often things like this are not formally taught but we know they are important. I personally remember all of the infographic safety signs on the swimming pool I used to go to as a child.
It’s at this early stage we can influence, inform and normalise. Imagine from an early age almost every day you walked past a poster or a simplified infographic about digital accessibility. Imagine because of this poster, or reinforcement of the messages in it, you just knew you needed to consider colour contrast when you made your poster for that English assignment, or that you needed to enable captions or add a transcript to that video you’ve made for your media project. Just imagine how much impact it could make to normalise and accelerate the future of everyday digital accessibility as something you just do, or reinforced as a normal expectation in project briefs or as a baseline standard to check. The basics are actually very simple to adopt and remember, so all of this could be very much a possibility even without any extra time or effort if the bite-sized support was in place.
This generation adopt new digital skills and tools all the time
In education the current situation with the web regulations is about teachers providing for students’ needs. But imagine a new generation of students growing up, who from a young age just knew how to create the basics for accessible content, just like they currently instinctively know how to post on social media. This is the generation who already adapt to new skills and tools all the time. Imagine more great teachers were still in the profession just because students were able upload accessible content that met their needs too, or even students being able to understand and confidently collaborate with a fellow student or colleague in the workplace who used a screen reader.
From this starting point as the norm from a young age we will no longer be fighting to ‘fix’ the accessibility conundrum by ticking boxes for legal compliance, but instead address it and embed into the very fibre of education and everything thing we do as a normal basic expectation and function of our digital world.
Learn to Enable, Digital for Everyone
The ‘Learn to Enable, Digital for Everyone’ framework is based on this very idea and is something I’m currently developing.
It will combine many resources as well as training support to provide a starting point to bring digital inclusion into the mainstream of education. Many of the skills needed to address basic digital accessibility are very simple and can take minutes to learn and adopt, and this simplicity is a great starting point to lay the initial foundations for ongoing awareness and for longer term wider adoption and ongoing skills building.
All content in this simple model will be bite-sized and aimed at those in school, college and upwards to help underpin the very basic concepts of digital accessibility in plain language. This simplicity of approach potentially makes it understandable for everyone at any age and any IT skills level to adopt.
Here are just some of the basic example statements from the poster infographic:
- if for any reason you can’t hear sound on a video, having captions helps you know what’s going on.
- we can all see information more clearly if there is good colour contrast between text and background.
- if sound isn’t working or you can’t hear a podcast, it’s useful to also have a written copy so you can also read what is said.
- hashtags can be read better if you use a capital letter at the beginning of each word. This is known as #CamelCase.
The research to develop this for an official rollout and in depth study is still being refined, but I truly believe this could be the way to safeguard and plan for a digitally inclusive future.
I genuinely believe our future digital generation are the key to inspiring a more inclusive way forward to help truly promote and embed a culture of mainstream digital inclusion. With them on board we have a chance to accelerate the adoption of digital inclusion for everyone, after all one day those growing up digital today might be the ones needing this type of future support themselves.
The main logo idea:
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