Sapir questions

The spotlight sessions are conversational and fun, below is a list of the questions to help you prepare:

Tell us a bit about yourself

• Previously worked in e-learning development
• Former further education teacher in digital design 
• Recently worked in content design and accessibility 

Tell us about the work you are doing

• Learn to enable is my research
• It’s about educating our next generation in the basic principles and awareness of digital accessibility
• I believe our next generation can have digital accessibility built into their mindset through awareness education so it becomes the norm, not an add-on 
• I’m collecting and collating anything that could bring this underpinning awareness into the curriculum 
• It’s early days, my PHD is looking at primary education but I’ve been doing workshops with FE and am doing a teaching placement with year 9 (14 year olds) to try out my ideas

What motivated you to do this type of work

• Previously developed a model in my workplace
• Challenges of engagement 
• Challenges of people unlearning to relearn, as we are addressing this awareness and skillset much later in life, and it needs to be earlier to stop it being a challenge to engage people
• I’d written and piloted some OCN units around digital literacy skills for learners and teachers whilst I was at the college and using this experience and knowing digital accessibility is better off being addressed earlier my research ideas were born

Can you share a memorable experience that had a lasting impact on you? 

• I’d made learning materials for a group of learners who had disabilities, and had made many assumptions that I shouldn’t have, it was a bit of a turning point realising that my perceptions of their abilities were very very wrong
• My son around the same time was struggling and diagnosed with autism who was interfacing with the world differently
• I also later met a colleague in my workplace who used a screen reader (Sandy) and the barriers she faced doing her job that were simple to avoid, the speed of her work and the speed of screen reader voice made me realise that she too just interacted with digital content in a different way
• It was her that inspired me to look into basic digital accessibility awareness education, it was her that inspired the model I developed in my workplace which eventually became mandatory and was a finalist in four national awards 
• It was this work and my previous experience of writing OCN units at the college that inspired me to look at the school curriculum in my research 

What does accessibility mean to you? 

• Although accessibility is associated with disability, to me it’s about universal design where it’s part of the design which means it’s planned in, and not a checklist or afterthought at the end
• To me a technical checklist somewhat divorces digital accessibility from the people’s needs it’s supposed to support, often the checklist is used or relied on, sometimes to replace the human element, and that doesn’t raise awareness or understanding of the diversity in society, it just silos it with techie people
• It’s everyone’s responsibility, we need to stop assuming digital accessibility is only for web designers or techie people, just like we all need to be inclusive with our language and behaviour, we don’t say oh that’s not my job, it’s just HR who need to be inclusive, we can all make a difference 

What’s one thing about people with disabilities you wish people knew about? 

• Never make assumptions, when I made learning materials at the college for those with disabilities and went to class to review the use of the resources, I soon realised with the assistive technology these young people did exactly the same as the other learners in the college they just used assistive technology to do it. I realised I had very inaccurate assumptions about people with disabilities, I learned a lot about them and about my assumptions and bias at the time 
• They are people first, not a disability, very often they don’t see past that. Interestingly in my reading of literature it highlighted that students learning about accessibility with users initially felt awkward or uncomfortable about interacting with people with disabilities, buts that’s lack of education
• As I said they just interface with the world differently to you, for example I use an iPhone you use Samsung, I use a mouse, you use assistive technology, that’s why education and awareness is so important and why accessible materials that work with assistive technology level the playing field, no matter how you interface with the digital world
• Some of the basics of digital accessibility can be impactful and benefit everyone, I particularly like the Microsoft persona model of permanent, temporary and situational disabilities because it can demonstrate how something like captions on a video for example can benefit someone who is deaf, someone with a temporary ear infection, or someone in a loud environment or someone who needs to stay quiet in an environment

What do you wish brands and businesses did more of regarding accessibility and inclusion?

• Invest in training to raise awareness so they can create content or branding that everyone can engage in, even the basics make a difference 
• It often doesn’t occur to people that content might not be accessible to the disabled community, it’s often an afterthought
• Engage with the community and learn from them, as human beings they have much to teach you, we can all learn so much from each other

If you have one message to the business community, what would that be? 

• Invest in learning the basic principles to start with, at least you can start making a difference to digital content, from there you can learn more, I love a phrase used by Meryl Evans called progress over perfection, every effort helps
• Robin Christopherson said it’s a mainstream issue and it is, if you work in travel and tourism you need accessible booking forms, if you are making a poster or flyer you need to consider colour contrast, if you post on social media to promote a hair salon you need to use captions on videos, it’s mainstream and we need to educate for the mainstream 

If everyone could do one bit to make the world a more inclusive place, what would it be? 

• Visit the learn to enable website and learn some of the basics everyone can apply, accessible hashtags, accessible links, adding captions or transcripts to videos or using headings, all these can already prevent a multitude of barriers which is an important start to making digital content more inclusive.
• These basics take only minutes to learn, everyone can do the basics, no matter who you are or what level IT skills you have, then the more complex web work can be done by the technical people 
• Everyone is responsible for being inclusive and that includes digital content, everyone can share the responsibility
• I wholeheartedly believe we need the basic principles of digital accessibility awareness on the curriculum from the moment young people learn their digital skills, reinforce it right from primary school all the way through to the workplace, my research is specifically exploring this type of education at primary school to find out what basics can be taught
• Imagine a whole generation doing this by default, not as an add-on like we currently are