SCULPT Text for lit review

Adopting the more simpler aspects of digital accessibility appears to offer a more mainstream implementation route beyond web teams. It also appears to help embed some of the everyday basic practices, rather than the more technical aspects of accessibility compliance.

Putnam, Rose and Macdonald (2023) highlighted a participants response who indicated that due to the greater emphasis on accessibility and guidance they had observed that people are now ‘tackling the low hanging fruit anyway without being asked’ (p.17). 

Robin Christopherson, Head of Inclusion for AbilityNet (Texthelp?, 2022) refers to the low hanging fruit as the basic principles of accessibility and adjustments everyone could apply that can make a difference.

 In a keynote speech, Christopherson (2022) referred to accessibility being a mainstream issue that …. and referred to creating documents and content using the SCULPT for Accessibility model to help everyone to learn and build some basics for accessibility into all documents and content (Christopherson, 2022)

Accessibility is often assumed to be someone else’s responsibility or the web teams job due to the technical assumptions that come with it (Putnam, Rose and Macdonald, 2023; others Ref, Ref ). But it has been regularly suggested that accessibility should be the job and responsibility of everyone (Refs)

SCULPT is described as being for the wider workforce to apply the basics into practice, which means that specialist web teams can fully focus on their role of the more complex and specialist WCAG guidelines needed to address the web accessibility regulations (WCC, 2023c).

SCULPT for Accessibility acts as a beginner’s guide and a simple acronym of six basic steps and simple adaptions to digital documents and content that can be understood and applied by anyone at a basic level, whatever digital skills level they may have (WCC, 2023). The six letters of SCULPT refer to structuring a document using headings; colour and contrast; use of images; links that are descriptive; plain English and tables that avoid having split and merged cells (Wilson, 2019 - PDF).

The aim of SCULPT was to reframe and simplify the basic principles of digital accessibility in a memorable way, to make ‘accessibility accessible’ to all and to dispel the myth that meeting basic accessibility requirements is time-consuming or complicated. SCULPT was seen by Wilson (2020) as a timely addition to support the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) to make sure people knew that accessibility can be the responsibility of everyone, not just the tech teams. 

It is clear that people are calling for some more simple guidance (refs) because they don’t have time to trawl the internet for a subject they perceive as complex and don’t really understand (Wilson, 2020). Once the initial preconceptions and barriers are overcome, it has been suggested that people are often surprised that the basics are ‘simple’ to apply (Wilson, 2023).

The SCULPT model was shared freely for others to adopt on a Creative Commons licence and described as a way to spread good practice and underpin wider basic workforce practices to up-skill for digital inclusion (WCC, 2023b). It has since gone on to be adopted by the Department of Work and Pensions and Government Communications Service in their accessibility guidelines (GCS, 2021; DWP, 20??; Gov. uk blog) referred to by JISC (????) in their guide to make online learning materials accessible, as well as developed into animated resources by the Intellectual Property Office as an in-house best practice training model for IPO people to learn about creating accessible documents and content (Price, 2022). It was further adopted by many councils and universities as a basic model of guidance to underpin digital accessibility knowledge (WCC, 2023d).

SCULPT is not a part of the legal requirements of the web regulations, but it could be argued that models like this could sit within the Equality Act’s expectations as a way to make reasonable adjustments and provide alternative digital formats (Ref). Basic practices such as this could form the underpinnings of an educational curriculum and act as a starting point to raise awareness (Refs) but currently there is no formal research or empirical data to back up the claimed successes of this type of basic model or practice intervention.

Mandatory - and in case studies. Mandating this model adds an expectation…

It has already been recognised that motivation to adopt digital accessibility is low without a legal incentive (Refs). So without an explicit legal emphasis to robustly put this in place and no empirical data it’s likely to be difficult to convince educators that this is the way forward. However, this research study aims to explore this area of basic adoption further to provide some contributing evidence towards the implementation of this baseline of knowledge.

https://ipo.blog.gov.uk/2022/10/04/accessibility-matters-to-us-all-at-the-ipo/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pilot amends

Remove what subject do you teach. Did you learn about how to make digital content inclusive and accessible at school, college or university? What region are you from in the UK? What type of school or setting are you from: Mainstream school Specialist provision Private education  Trainee teacher Research survey invitation I am Helen Wilson, a second year part-time PHD student at the University of Worcester. I am planning a piece of research titled: Working with teachers to plan a school classroom intervention about inclusion in our digital society As part of this research I’m conducting an initial online survey to help me prepare for the study. Who is this survey for? This survey aims to collect a minimum of 50 participant responses from teachers across the UK. Participants in this study: must be teachers from  upper key stage 2 (Years 5 or 6) , the survey will ask this at the beginning before revealing the questions teachers can be from any type of school setting  includ...
Read more

Notes from original proposal

Text taken from original proposal to unpack/expand: The barriers and ‘unlearning’ highlighted during SCULPT were potentially framed by prior complex  beliefs and understandings and ‘unlearning’ or ‘retrofitting’ skills (Youngblood, 2010). As Gu (2010, p.340) explains “a large part of human and professional knowledge can hardly retain its original meaning when it is divorced from the contexts in which it was constructed and produced.” This made me consider that these skills should potentially be taught at the point these original meanings are constructed and that happens at a much younger age. To understand when it would be appropriate to introduce the basics of awareness and skills in school, I considered the age when young people develop digital skills (Department for Education, 2013) as well as an understanding of what it means to be disabled and children’s perceptions for those with disabilities (Boer et al, 2012).  In a literature review Babik & Gardner (2021) found th...
Read more

Teach Access Repository and Facebook research link

Image
 #Educators, do your students know what assistive technology means? From tactile maps to screen readers, #AssistiveTechnology includes a number of devices that enable and foster the inclusion of people with disabilities. The Teach Access Curriculum Repository (TACR) has various resources designed to build out your courses and introduce your students to these types of technologies.  Go to the TACR (https://lnkd.in/gWMxzk2e) and check out the presentation slide deck on assistive technology and the assignment for using a screen reader, under the Psychology section.    #BackToSchool #Accessibility #Inclusion #ScreenReader #AssistiveDevices #Psychology #Disability #Disabilities #A11y https://teachaccess.org/curriculum-repository/ Facebook research post: PhD Thesis Writing Process: A Systematic Approach—How to Write Your Introduction To download complete article, use the link: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED590321.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED590321.pdf?f...
Read more