TO ADD: Keates and Sonka

Starting to make some brain headway. Reading, reading, note taking, then writing. Notes for papers, then today with a massive latte the written backbone of the literature review to slot in papers and flesh out arguments etc. On track for a mid-August first logical rough structured draft. 

 Get this article Oswol and Melocon (2017) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18209020893554176512&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1690277340798&u=%23p%3DAHL28wZws_wJ

Keates (2011) study of an MSc course at the university of Copenhagen and the conclusions of 116 students who took the 15 week specialist unit, examined over 5 semesters. 

Keates (2011) It explains how students with little or no background in the area of accessibility can gain pragmatic skills and experiences in a short amount of time. The aim of the course was to empower students to be able to identify and design for the needs of the widest possible audience ready for when they enter the workplace. As part of the course they created a website and then cloned that to develop a second version once they had been taught the skills and knowledge to make it more usable and accessible for people with disabilities. They did this by understanding and developing user personas in a range of disabilities, working with users who were blind and learning to use screen reader software.

Keates (2011) Students had little or no background awareness of digital accessibility and none of the students on their first websites had considered accessibility, they only did so when instructed to do so.

Keates (2011) The accessibility tools that were most universally praised were the screen readers as they made it very clear why content needed to be well structured as well as include options such as ‘skip to content’ that are so important to users who navigate just using a keyboard rather than a mouse.

Keates (2011) Feedback indicated that students clearly responded well to the more practical elements, with a focus on pragmatic problem solving than simple classroom theory.

Keates (2011; 2015) The name of the course was changed from ‘Usability with project’ to ‘Usability and accessibility’ and the enrolment decreased significantly from a mean of 24.7 students on the course to 14 per semester just by changing the name, which shows that the concept or word accessibility is problematic or a topic not worthy of attention. It was questioned whether this was because at the time Denmark had no related laws in this digital area or if this was apparent elsewhere.

Keates (2011) It’s not that they are prejudiced about the work to make products accessible but they do not see the relevance of accessibility to their own careers and shows that work needs to be done in making accessibility and universal design more of a mainstream rather than niche concept.

Keates (2011; 2015) The name change suggests that accessibility and thus universal design is still widely perceived as a niche interest area rather than mainstream activity. And the fact that students came to courses with no or very little awareness suggests this attitude is much more widespread in Danish industry and society and a challenge that needs to be met.

Keates (2011) It is worth noting that in their final exams students were usually most excited by the work they had done with blind users.

Keates (2011) The course showed that students from a variety of backgrounds can respond positively to the challenges presented by this type of course, the overall student response was overwhelmingly positive.

Keates (2015) expands on his previous study to explain that the intention of creating a website first then duplicate and revisit the design and make changes retrospectively was to demonstrate how easily such user needs and criteria can be overlooked in a rush to meet deadlines or that designers typically design around their own needs, such experiences have been noted before (Keates, Lebbon and Clarkson, 2000).

Keates (2015) Although WCAG is commonly accepted as the default standard for web accessibility in the universal access community, this was the first time almost all learners had encountered it. 

Keates (2015) Students had to write a report on their original design to see how much of it conformed to the WCAG standards.

Keates (2015) Students not only did not consider accessibility but few considered usability even though the word was in the course title. This supports the general consensus in literature that accessibility and usability are concepts that need to be explicitly written into the design specification requirements otherwise they will be overlooked. 

Keates (2015) students did not realise that just like in the physical design environment, the digital environment also needed to have accessibility considerations.

Keates (2015) Trials and interactions with blind users were considered the most interesting and personally rewarding.

Keates (2015) Using the tool ‘Wave’ to present WCAG violations was found to be extremely useful to identify accessibility problems on a page, especially as it prioritised issues with green, amber and red colour coding, prioritising issues was something students struggled to do without the tool. However, most groups recognised after doing testing with users that the tools such as Wave were limited and not enough to ensure final designs were genuinely accessible. The most universally praised tools were screen readers because these demonstrated that websites that passed just the basic compliance tools were still fundamentally inaccessible to users because of flawed layouts and user interaction design. The students found the screen readers straightforward to use and by not looking at or hiding the screen found them to provide and good understanding of how a blind person would use and navigate a website.

Keates (2015) When working with users the students were surprised how rapidly the blind users would set the screen reader reading speed and they found this fascinating and incredibly useful to realise this speed meant they needed clear designs and interactions.

Keates (2015) There are no commonly accepted automated tools that simulate cognitive impairments so designing for such impairments is still typically focused around design best practice recommendations (Keates et al, 2007).

To explore to what extent taught courses in universities reflect the needs for designing for the widest possible users Keates (2015) conducted a search of 20 universities to find undergraduate and postgraduate courses under the general headings of computer science, computing and IT that offered modules in this area. He found that inclusion of the topic was patchy or non-existent, and if they did exist they were mainly optional units rather than integrated.

Keates (2015) The usability and accessibility course stopped being delivered in the same format when the author of it moved to the UK. The delivery of it was dependent upon the in-depth knowledge of the author who had over 20 years experience in designing for universal access. To prevent this situation more generic courses and lectures in inclusive design skills need to happen or organisations need to develop more universal design and access champions to ensure it is raised or included in the curriculum, if not it will remain a niche topic reliant on specific people.

Keates (2015) It is with noting that based on LinkedIn profiles some time after the students graduated 75% of those who enrolled on the ‘usability and accessibility’ or ‘usability with project’ course had gone on to find usability jobs in industry, mainly for government agencies.

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) used a pedagogical philosophy of centering accessibility and inclusion into a humanistic and humanities user experience (UX) undergraduate program. 

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) It is impossible to discuss accessibility without touching on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Given the past and present importance of social justice and the urgent need for improving social systems the course centred on ways in which accessibility can be applied and practiced in higher education and wider industry.

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) The goal of the work at Teach Access is to educate young people to work as advocates and accessibility allies where humanistic design and empathy are central to the work. The course focused on the human experience first rather than technical aspects, so accessibility becomes the core focus to be able to enact these values of social justice and equity in technical communications. The course was part of the wider Teach Access program that includes elements such as study away programs where students meet and learn from industry experts, an international conference where learners can present their work and an opportunity to have active membership of s non-profit organisation that was made up of academia, technology companies and disability advocate groups.

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) Disability permeates every aspect of design and engineering and therefore there is a need for it to be taught. Bringing the focus to the humanist approach brings into it strong ties with other disciplines such as topics like social sciences and humanities.

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) Highlight that many courses still fail to recognise the social model of disability and still focus on the medical model, rather than engage with the sociopolitical aspects of social justice and considerations of designing for all.

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) The course therefore touches on the broader aspects of universal design for learning, disability studies, social justice, design, law, culture, policy, ethics, education and personal narratives of lived experience. The aim is to create a culture that recognises accessibility as a shared responsibility (Huntsman, Colton and Phillips, 2019; Lewthwaite??).

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) The course lays down the foundation that accessibility is important whatever career path they take.

PEAT ‘candidates are graduating from computer science programs and other fields without ever learning about accessibility in the curriculum, making it difficult to find job candidates with these types of skills for the workplace’

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) Resituating accessibility work with a lens of social justice helps teams focus on improving industry by building the values of diversity, equity and inclusion from within. By doing this the aim is to seek to address ‘the mess of injustice in our own backyards’ confronting that currently designers design technology for people like them (Haas and Eble, 2018; Keates, 2015) or accessibility is bandaged on at the end of a development process as an afterthought (Potts and Salvo, 2018 - others).

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) If we want to make technology and digital content accessible to everyone accessibility needs to become a mainstream set of skills (Kearney-Volpe et al, 2019; Christopherson, 2022; Wilson, 2023).

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) according to learner surveys after being involved in the course students felt they were able to gain a strong foundation in the field and topic of accessibility and found the course impactful, they also developed a passion to become advocates for accessibility creating moments when students claimed they realised they can make a difference. Several students were quoted as remarking how the program was a defining experience. One student noted that the program was a perfect combination of STEM, arts and humanities where they got to be technical but in a way that championed diversity, equity and inclusion. They envisioned with feedback like this that students graduating from the program could change industry from within by rebuilding it from the strong values of social justice, equity and inclusion the program had instilled in them. 

Sonka, McArdle and Potts (2021) future research could explore the benefits of collaborating directly with industry partners to develop course and learning materials focused on accessibility for both the classroom and the workplace.

EXTRA: The issue of learning without user testing and research brings with it conflicting opinion. Hassell quote …. Checklist versus universal design for disability.

Oswal and Meloncon (2017) remark that programmatically and administratively we seem to have accepted checklists at face value as something we need to adopt or implement for efficiency rather than something to question. Relying on checklists alone is perpetuating an ideology of this being accepted as normal rather than locating the work around disability and the accessibility needs for those users. Work needs to start from the ideology of inclusion and including the people we are designing for and step away from reliance on technical checklists.

Oswal and Meloncon (2017)
While checklists are meant to help facilitate inclusive and accessible classrooms (both online and face-to-face) by providing faculty a starting place on issues where they may not have a lot of experience, unfortunately they are often both the starting and ending place for accessible course design.To do so means they have to move beyond the simplistic approach offered by checklists because in many ways checklists are simply another way of enforcing the "ideology of normalcy" (Moeller and Jung, YEAR). 

To create truly accessible courses means that it becomes necessary to
move beyond thinking in terms of checklists (Oswal and Meloncon, 2017; Hassell, 2019) 

Oswal and Meloncon (2017) However, the failure of widespread adoption of the WCAG guidelines may be because they seem too technical. They have been primarily designed to support software developers and may seem targeted to industry perspectives (p.65).

These guidelines lack the context-specific knowledge that you can gain from the experience of working with disabled users over time. For example, researchers like Christopher Power et al (2012) have studied the usability of these guidelines and report that WCAG 2.0 only addresses about half of the problems that blind users face in typical web pages. ADD HASSELL (30- 50'%)

And most crucially, should our development of online content and environments be guided by the machine-centric ethos of WCAG? (Oswal and Meloncon, 2017).

The most basic critique to checklists is that they propose a one size fits all model and present course design and digital content as something that simply needs to be checked off (Oswal and Meloncon, 2017) 

Wood et al (2014) assert that checklists offer a useful place to start, but they also emphasize that the checklist can make the process reductive (P.147).

Oswal and Meloncon (2017) raise the concern that using any checklist without critical engagement and awareness of strategies to be able to address multiple types of disabilities from our perspective only means that courses will have the patina of accessibility without true engagement and implementation (p.68)

Oswal and Meloncon (2017) refer to Bonnie Nardi who reminds us that "today's complicated, interactive systems should not be researched, designed, or tested in laboratories in isolation from the actual users; they demand a participatory process at all stages of design, development, and deployment"(p.69).

Oswal and Meloncon (2017) emphasize that those in human-centered design, such as designers and developers, continue to view users from an ableist lens, and their involvement in participatory design remains mostly restricted to the able-bodied, and after-the-fact fixes
or retrofits to accommodate disabled users' needs are the norm than an
accidental exception (p.71).

Oswal and Meloncon (2017) underscore that the 'solutions offered by easy-to-apply checklists can make instructors and programs deceptively feel good about having paid attention to accessibility even when these lists are most likely not making our courses or our programs accessible in any meaningful manner' (p.72)

In a systematic literature review and narrative synthesis Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees (2020) identified that even though there is a body of laws around disability and website accessibility, progress is slow. The lack of progress they assert means that we have a pressing need to develop accessibility capacity in the workforce and that means addressing the practice of teaching accordingly in higher education and the workplace.

Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees (2020) Rather than empirical studies much of the literature in this area is characterised by small studies and reflective accounts of teaching a single cohort, course or unit. Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees (2020) Say that this means educators of accessibility are left to rely on trial and error, their peers, technical procedures such as the WCAG guidelines rather than pedagogical guidance informed by theory or research evidence. This means that education is ineffective.

Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees (2020) We live in a digital first economy therefore accessibility education is important, otherwise there is no guarantee that many services will work for disabled users and they face persistent barriers. 

The skills gap to meet these needs in industry has been identified by many (PEAT, 2018; Teach Access, 2023;Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees,2020; OTHERS). Even though attempts to educate the industry such as formal accreditation (IAAP, 2023) or wide scale MOOTs (Ref) there is still a lack of pedagogical teaching support or detailed understanding of the overlapping multidisciplinary contexts such as conceptual understanding of disability, procedural knowledge and technical skills that needs addressing (Lewthwaite and Sloan, 2016). The WCAG guidance alone does not meet this full need, it offers only a one dimensional one size fits all approach often deemed complex and difficult to work with.

Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees (2020) Teachers and trainers in industry may demonstrate strong and up to date content and technical knowledge such as WCAG, but do not necessarily have the pedagogical knowledge required to facilitate or scale the learning experiences needed for all of the multidisciplinary coverage. In academia where pedagogical knowledge maybe more developed in terms of teaching practice and broadening perspectives for learning, research suggests that they lack the necessary content and technical knowledge to be able to develop student expertise. Both scenarios make in-depth teaching of accessibility difficult to implement in a consistent approach that is sustainable (Shinohara, Kawas, Ko and Ladner, 2018).