The quant and the qual

#What is important, meaningful and relevant to gain knowledge, skills and competence in digital accessibility comes with its own debate.

There is an interesting and potential dissonance between the purpose and needs of digital accessibility for disabled people and how it’s enacted and measured in practice. This impacts how we measure it, from whose perspective, and in turn how we teach it. The lived experience and needs of disabled users is not a one size fits all, we’ve already established that disability is a socially constructed concept (ref).

However the industry of accessible content appears to sit in two places. The learning of technical specifications sit more within the scientific and quantitative domain, this often sits within the disciplines of STEM research design (Ref). The domain of researching the experiences and needs of the end users themselves, is a more qualitative stance from the paradigms of interpretive or socially constructed knowledge.

This is already recognised in the industry as a challenge to embed accessibility practices in organisations, as Hassell (2019;p.?) highlighted, his colleagues couldn’t understand was why accessibility guidelines in the web space were a technical checklist, when everything that they had learnt about inclusive design was about understanding user needs (Hassell, 2019; p.?). This clearly highlights the multidisciplinary perspectives of meeting the broad needs of digital accessibility. These are important to consider on a curriculum too. These different disciplines bring with them different measures and parameters for assessing learning and conducting research. 

The theoretical framework of pedagogy offers these different paradigms for measuring teaching and learning. 

(REPLACE Line in written print out) Pedagogy is categorised as the science, craft and art of teaching, each category situated in a slightly different paradigm for research design. 

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