Sarah Knight

 As we are all aware as teachers or those in a public body we need to make digital content accessible, and the laws have highlighted this, as well as COVID demonstrating the importance of it. Thankfully most people are now aware but still work is still very much needed to give it momentum. However beyond ‘teaching with accessible resources’ for our next generation, it’s their future too, so we need to look at the ‘teaching of accessibility’ so they also know and are aware of the basics to ensure everyone is included in their digital future. This currently does not exist formally on the curriculum at any level.

Lord Holmes is calling for the updating of the digital curriculum in schools, mostly due to the impact and evolution of AI, but he is also highlighting digital inclusion as a knowledge set that our future generations need. In terms of digital accessibility education, it is creeping in but only in specialist units or computing based courses at HE level. Interestingly the papers I’m reading are still concerned with uptake and numbers on these courses or selective modules. So progress is still slow even within the computing discipline. The same lack of progress appears in reports from wider industry. I know Southampton are specifically researching the pedagogy of teaching accessibility in HE.

Although we have the regulations this knowledge still predominantly sits with niche groups and almost all educational contexts that do refer to accessibility is still and add-on or an elective module that ‘IT people do’.

I come to this with a lens of citizenship and being ‘a digital citizen’ and it’s everyone’s responsibility with everyone educated in the basics, leaving the more technical WCAG stuff to the specialists. My SCULPT model was a set of six beginner basics which proved to me this could be done, and has been since adopted by Government Communication Service, Department of Work and Pensions and the Intellectual Property Office. Most recently written about on the government accessibility blog: 

My biggest challenge was engagement early on as people assumed it was complex to do and someone else’s job, but once that was overcome, there was the challenge of ‘unlearning’ or changing established practices to adopt new skills.

When I taught it I made a point of showing how each of the six benefitted everyone, then showed how it benefited those with disabilities, so people could see the relevance to themselves as well as others. More about this can be found on my AbilityNet blog: 

I’m now studying this in a PHD specifically looking at young people at key stage 2 so they can learn this knowledge from the offset, so it isn’t an afterthought or add-on later. It also would help to raise awareness around disability and enabling people, hopefully reducing stigma, perceptions and discrimination.

I’ve also set up a side hustle that one day I’d love to see grow into my own business or professional job. I have created Learn to Enable Digital for Everyone where beyond my PHD, I’m aiming to engage with all levels of education to bring the basics into the mainstream. The BLC conference was an opportunity to do a workshop with FE to gather the thoughts of teachers and technologists. The aim is to use that information to build some introductory learning resources for all teachers and organisations to use and easily adopt to raise awareness. I’ve also done a similar session with the Business Disability Forum.

My job over the summer is to build the resources from these sessions.

I’d love to do more to hopefully raise awareness and support the introduction of this topic one day onto the curriculum at all levels. I’ve reduced my hours at work to commit to this, with the hope I can provide guidance and a supportive easy to adopt toolkit for teachers. 

Is there anything that JISC could do to support this, the wider the spotlight the more I can hopefully bring the basics of digital accessibility awareness into the mainstream.