Sculpting the social model of disability as a workforce digital accessibility skills development pilot

Employees and customers needs from your workplace. It’s not just about the web, it’s the everyday stuff too.

What’s needed in digital workplace/workforce. Find out the basics people need in assistive tech, screen readers and cognitive (users needs). Sandy Ref (Wilson, 2020). Back up with literature (Refs) and reasonable adjustments (Christopherson, 20??).

Explain Skills gap and built to meet that need. Introduction text. Reports and academic refs.

Why not being adopted, where are we now - everyday document creation knowledge. More than just the web and web team training needs it’s about wider culture. Skills update 

Research looked at ‘theories of innovation‘ model - why skills not being adopted or engaged with for mainstream skills adoption. (Refs) - low awareness and engagement.

In the context of technological skills development- technology acceptance model. Alight the main variables to findings and refs in academic papers etc.

Legal/compliance led/web teams assumed to be responsible.
Perceptions of disability (medical model-supporting individual needs, usually signpost onto specialist teams for disability support - not usually their responsibility).
Perceptions of complexity, time consuming add-on or complex fixes.

To verify or challenge findings in the workplace.

Who they were, how many participants and a range of departments across the local authority organisation 

Workshop activities: flip charts.

What is digital accessibility 
Whose responsibility is it
Would you know how to make a document accessible

Discuss and describe each findings and cross reference with literature.(prospective learners needs)

Basics can make the difference, baseline skills. Make it meaningful and bite-size digestible.

Reframed to address these variables- simple etc and to think about social models of disability not medical. Why useful to everyone, how to be done - bite size.
*Making accessibility accessible and making it Everyone’s responsibility.

To aid its development it was shared as CC for community of practice. Interesting approach to see how it works in practice. Share experiences, resources and knowledge to develop the model for a set of recommendations of implementation. Socially constructed and situational implementation to each organisation. Used at (Ref/cite all the places)

Two years into the implementation Early findings and feedback in the initial Worcestershire pilot were - interviews. How many people spoken to.

Noticing the wider world, cereal packets colour contrast. Headings menu nav pane useful in large docs, captions on TV in pubs. Simple skills that a child could do. Beneficial awareness beyond the workplace.
Limited as it was only related and relevant to document production and somewhat restricted to office based roles using MS Office. Wider education or model would need to encompass wider skills and formats such as video and social media needs. This study will be used to inform the development of a future skills and awareness framework.

Dissemination events to engage with the wider community were last delivered in February 2022, with the SCULPT website (WCC, 2023) describing two further case studies of implementation in other organisations and a list of ?? direct links to organisations who reference using it as part of their training for digital accessibility.

This type of implementation clearly captured people’s attention and clearly an appetite for baseline skills training and awareness (DWP, GCS, JISC, Techdis etc) and award recognition (MJ, 2022; LGC, 2022; AbilityNet Tech4Good, 2021) so is this a model to adopt within the educational curriculum prior to people entering the workplace, to prepare them with these baseline skills from an earlier age.

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