TO ADD: Gay, Kearney, Crabb

MOOC

To ensure those in Ontario, Canada could meet their obligations under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disability Act (AODA) (Ref), a series of free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were created to teach digital accessibility to a range of audiences such as office support workers, managers, developers and digital accessibility specialists (Gay, 2023). The MOOCs ran between 2016 and 2019 and served more that 5000 participants. To further explore the need for these resources, in 2020 a market scan of Canadian and international post secondary educational institutions was conducted. It revealed that at the time no Canadian universities were teaching accessibility within their ICT provision. As a result the MOOCs were converted into Open Educational Resources (OERs) so they could support learning in that area. Between 2020 and 2022 they were downloaded more than 10,000 times. 

The OER material covered several courses, such as an introduction to WCAG, web accessibility auditing, manual testing, digital accessibility as a business practice, procurement and advanced learning for web developers. It also provided a toolkit of accessibility checkers, colour contrast tools, readability testers, WCAG techniques and best practice documentation. It became clear through feedback that the toolkit was the most valued outcome in each of the courses accessed (Gay et al, 2017; Gay, 2018; 2023). The other most significant finding was the impact of being introduced to screen readers giving learners the opportunity to experience barriers first hand, often producing an ‘ah ha’ moment and the point we’re the abstract concept of accessibility turned into personal experience and changed the way participants thought about it (p.03). Gay (2023) refers specifically to one example of learners understanding the simple principle of not using terms like ‘click here’ on links. He describes learner experiences of how long it took to find the right link in the text as a non-disabled person, as well as someone having the links listed as ‘click here’ out of context from its original text on a screen reader. The simplicity of this demonstration and activity was described as impactful (p.03).

Wald - other MOOC paper?

AFTER EMPATHY 

Kearney-Volpe et al (2019) conducted a survey of pre and post course confidence levels with students and the different teaching strategies of instructors. It was conducted across 30 university courses who taught the topic of accessibility in programs such as web design, computer science, education and computer interaction courses. In total they had 504 students complete the pre course assessment and 354 who did both pre and post and spoke with 12 instructors. The student surveys were a likert scale questionnaire with answers that ranged from not at all confident to extremely confident, with a final question on the post survey of how students could apply accessible design in their future careers.

The student findings revealed that most of them gained the most confidence in understanding the purpose of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). IT and web students gained the greatest confidence in inclusive and universal design practices, and students in non-computing art departments gained the largest overall confidence and awareness. Results from the instructors reported that the three most common learning objectives were for students to understand technology barriers faced by people with disabilities, understanding design concepts for universal design, engaging with individuals from diverse disability populations, then followed by WCAG and being able to develop techniques. Interestingly the top learning objective for instructors to understand barriers faced by people with disabilities was something learners felt they were already aware of prior to the course and this finding didn’t significantly change after. Several instructors referred to the teaching resources and difficulties using them due to their volume and technical density. Some participants said that most of the materials out there assumed a level of technical knowledge and conceptual understanding of the WCAG guidelines were very difficult for students to understand and work with. However they said that direct interaction with community members as part of the design process may have been the most crucial in changing perceptions (p.385). Overall instructors felt that the experimental learning opportunities had the most impact, such as screen reader demonstrations, field trips, video based materials and guest lectures. They indicated that students do well when they have an opportunity to practice and apply their learning.

These findings echo the challenges and complexities of using WCAG for teaching (Alonso, ??), the positive impact of screen readers and students experiencing the barriers for themselves (Gay, 2023) and aligns to other studies that order conceptual understanding of disabilities as one of the first learning objectives in the curriculum to introduce the importance of digital accessibility (Refs).

Due to few studies related to reviewing the effectiveness of teaching interventions for accessibility, Ludi et at (2018) reported on a three semester evaluation of students accessibility awareness and knowledge following two different teaching approaches. They conducted a study of two groups, the first subset of students had a series of lectures about accessibility including content on disabilities, assistive technology, legal requirements and aspects of web design and development. The second subset received the same lectures as the first but with the addition of first hand interaction and exposure with someone with a disability to receive feedback on the development of prototype designs. Both exposure and non-exposure groups were required to fill in pre and post course surveys and these were compared to see if exposure to first hand interactions with users had any impact on awareness beyond the series of lectures. Overall they found a significant number of accessibility mentions in the response at the end of the semester for all students compared to before. When comparing the no exposure to exposure groups they found significant gains in they sympathy scores for those students who had exposure to users with a disability, as well as differences in their accessibility knowledge. One interesting finding was that the exposure group tended to rely on knowledge and information gained from their personal interactions with someone with a disability than the WCAG guidelines, whereas the non-exposure group referenced them. When it came to identifying and addressing accessibility barriers 3 out of the 35 non exposure groups chose not to address issues they found, yet only 1 in the 14 exposure teams chose not to address it, but this instance was related to their project being targeted at taxi drivers who did not have any disabilities that would affect them driving or their ability to use a mobile phone. Ludi et al (2018) concluded that these findings suggest that interventions that led to first hand interactions or increased empathy with technology users with disabilities may help students go from noticing an accessibility barrier to taking steps to address it (p.722).

WORKSHOP 

Crabb (2019) explains that there are many tools that exist to help developers in the assessing of applications, but these mainly apply a retrospective approach often focusing on the evaluation and checking of accessibility after development, rather than promoting accessible thinking about the needs of users from the beginning of a project and throughout. He raised concerns that this did not develop conceptual understanding of disabilities or empathy in developers. In his paper he describes a workshop entitled ‘Designing for Accessibility’ that was developed to act as a stimulus to prompt developers to discuss challenges that exist for people with a range of disabilities when developing digital services. The workshop had three activities, the first to understand permanent, temporary and situational impairments, the second to explore current awareness of disability issues and what methods can solve them and thirdly to explore in-depth a core problem area and solution. These workshops were performed with 197 participants that included university students studying computing subjects and designers from companies. Findings from the first study showed that participants could identify a range of disabilities but these were not in detail when it came to situational impairments of both disabled and non disabled people. They also struggled with aspects of mental and emotional impairments. The second study revealed that participants could identify some aspects of disability and technical solutions but felt they needed more training in this area. For example, they were not comfortable in knowing which colour schemes would be best to address colour blindness or what effects specific attention issues and dyslexia have on a user and what level of severity and need this includes. In the third activity very few groups decided to focus on emotional accessibility. To conclude Crabb (2019) suggests that future work in the development of tools should include an emphasis on ways for developers to better empathise with accessibility challenges and argues that this would promote better design and interactions. He also suggested to include people with disabilities in the training and development of practitioners and in the development and testing of products. He also identified that there was no one singular source of knowledge that participants were using to develop their practice and this needed to be addressed to help increase the overall standard in accessibility ‘implementation’ rather than accessibility as an end ‘assessment’.