TO ADD: Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2022

 Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale (2022) are conducting a five year study called ‘teaching accessibility in the digital skill set’ examining how accessibility is taught across a range of contexts. The aim is to establish a body of pedagogical content and knowledge to enhance digital skills as well as forge a dialogue between academia and the workplace.

Capacity in academia and workplace training has not kept pace with demand and the technology sector’s accessibility skills gap remains a critical issue (PEAT, 2018)

Accessibility is challenging to teach and requires a unique combination of theoretical knowledge, procedural understanding and technical skills (Lewthwaite and Sloan) - #HARD to find people with this mix quote

Accessibility is often implemented as an evaluation or repair of existing resources or products rather than an application of an inclusive design strategy throughout the innovation process (Lewthwaite and Sloan, 2016). This then resorts to a fix or retrofit culture that often ends up complex, time consuming and costly.

There is a disjuncture between accessibility as a professional computer practice and the introductory 101 that constitutes most coverage on the topic (Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2022). And therefore with shallow understanding learners are not prepared for the complexities with the technical industry profession #Low hanging fruit basics

Skills framework for the Information Age explicitly refers to accessibility in its skills framework, version 8 was published in 2021.

A lack of pedagogic culture is shown in the limited debate and fragmented literature and often categorised by small opportunistic studies of individual reflective accounts of teaching a single course or cohort (Putnam, 2016; Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2022). Therefore without a body of resources, knowledge and empirical evidence based practice to draw from teachers are unable to inform or develop their teaching practice to implement or integrate accessibility.

Despite a desire to teach accessibility within their curriculum, teachers report a lack of content, resources and subject knowledge either preventing them from teaching it or covering it in a limited and shallow way.

In the tech sector most of those teaching or training in accessibility do not come from an educational background and with that do not have the pedagogical repertoire required to scale and develop excellent and impactful learning experiences.

The research design of teaching accessibility in the digital skill set is grounded in participatory methods that foster a dialogue between learners, teachers and researchers to co-construct knowledge to help build new pedagogical insights (Nind, Curtin and Hall, 2016) which creates opportunities for all participants to voice their differing accounts of teaching and learning engagement.

(Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2022). Indications in literature suggest that many have been increasingly drawn to constructivist approaches with using the voices of multiple stakeholders, such as learners (Ref), teachers (Ref) and multiple stakeholders working together to share and discuss knowledge to build an accessibility curriculum (Sonka, 2021).


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