TEXT: Unlearning into the rationale

ADD to rationale in the aims of research section.

There are two main themes of study in the topic area of accessible content in education. Teaching accessibly e.g., the creation of inclusive materials for teaching, and the teaching of accessibility, teaching learners about accessibility and making learners aware of how to create accessible materials as citizens in the digital world (Sonka, 2021?; Teach Access, 2023; Lewthwaite et al, 2022?). This research is specifically exploring the perspective of the teaching of accessibility.

There is research that has already been conducted around the teaching of digital accessibility, but the studies have been primarily in higher education, college or in the workplace. Many of these studies have highlighted the challenge of teaching and learning these skills later in life (Ref). They refer to the complexities of ‘retrofitting’ digital accessibility skills and the ‘unlearning’ of existing or firmly established practices to relearn new ones (Ref). The current situation appears to be teaching people later in the workplace when skills and routines need to be unpicked (Wilson, 2023).

It has also been highlighted that accessibility in many contexts is often considered as an afterthought or something fixed at the end (ref).

Terms like ‘Shift left’ and ‘baked in’ have started to emerge that refer to accessibility as being planned and considered as part of the creation process from the start, rather than a checklist or afterthought to fix at the end (ref). Educating people to create accessible materials means they are able to apply skills and knowledge throughout process of creating content, rather than adding an extra step, or the duplication of effort to fix it at the end (Ref). 

There are calls to make this knowledge and practice more mainstream as the issue of inaccessible content in society itself is a mainstream challenge (Christopherson, 2022). This is not just about websites, it also refers to everyday content created across the board (ref).

Microsoft (the leading BLAH) have used accessible features and checkers in their products for a while,  offering users a way to check documents for accessibility once they have been created. They too are specifically trying to encourage more engagement around the process of accessible content creation by enhancing the support within their family of Office 365 tools (ref).

Microsoft are currently preparing to launch their new Office 365 accessibility assistant that will offer prompts during the creation process to aid better accessibility awareness and decisions as documents are created (Ref).

Holecek (2023) highlights why they are doing this in a related blog, by explaining:

“Inaccessible content is everywhere in the digital world. Nearly 97 percent of home pages on the public web contain issues like missing image descriptions, videos without captions, and hard-to-read text colours that reduce their legibility and usefulness for people with disabilities. The same issues pervade the emails, slide decks, documents, and spreadsheets we all create every day. This creates barriers that keep our colleagues and coworkers from doing their jobs effectively, prevent students from getting the most out of their education, and hinder authors from reaching their broadest possible audience. We all share the responsibility of breaking down these barriers by making our own content accessible”.

This quote alludes to the sheer breadth and scale of the everyday mainstream content we all create and the considerable work that needs to be done to address the issue of accessibility as a shared social responsibility.

Exploring what’s needed for digital accessibility awareness in the context of the national curriculum in schools has the potential to bring this learning right into the heart of the mainstream, and at a much earlier stage in life. It could also help it become more of a shared endeavour and responsibility due to everyone having the same learning experience of it during their school education. It would also no longer be that of just technologists or web developers with this knowledge, nor would it be the retrospective model of training we currently see in the workplace, but would become more a preparation for the digital world and the future workplace instead (Lewthwaite, 2022; Christopherson, 2022; Wilson, 2023).

The aim of this research, is therefore to get this knowledge into the heart of the curriculum at a time when these skills potentially need to be introduced. Just like ‘online safety’ this is much earlier within the educational journey at primary school so these types of lifelong habits and social responsibilities can be learned and established from the offset (Ref). This means our future citizens are taught right at the beginning of their learning journey into digital awareness and capabilities, rather than an add-on later in life.

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Specifically to develop and pilot this type of curriculum.

Update with references.

Add to aims or could lead into the aims?

https://abilitynet.org.uk/news-blogs/amazing-accessibility-resources-microsoft



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