The next assignment thoughts
Notes about theoretical positions:
Equal access to digital information for those with disabilities is not progressing well.
Although there are laws in place to make websites and content accessible this is still not commonplace. E.g. reports - home pages/AbilityNet/Hassell/Valuable 500.
In education progress is similarly slow where very few courses are including the top to educate our next generation and there is a skills gap and demand in industry for these skills.
1 in 5 in society have some form of disability, figures range from 15 to 20% of the population in internationally.
According to many studies where digital accessibility has been taught, students have little awareness of the topic when they start their courses as it has not been covered or raised on the curriculum in schools or colleges.
Courses that do exist are primarily at HE or post graduate level, but this is either very minimal, not a mandatory unit or doesn’t exist at all.
Disabled people are being let down and the laws to protect them from being excluded are not being upheld, with the main challenged identified as being lack of awareness or education in both the curriculum or workplace to help address it.
This research is framed by the notion that we need to address this gap by providing the education needed.
Social responsibility/social justice - shifting mindsets to the social model away from the medical model to ensure everyone can be included and adopt a universal design approach to digital content.
Otherwise disabled people will continue to be excluded and their needs being overlooked or treated as an afterthought.
Disability awareness has been reduced to a technical checklist - Hassell quote. Reducing their needs to a checklist and not including them in the building of digital products in society further excludes them and wider understanding or appreciation of their lives experiences.
In education the subject of digital accessibility does not yet formally exist, so what do we assume young people know or learn about a fifth of our population with disabilities or impairments.
Results in people feeling awkward around those with disabilities.
Young people in school could construct a very different perspective and level of understanding if they explored the world from a lens of universal design and considering the needs of our diverse population.
From a critical theory perspective young people could be interviewed to ascertain their awareness of digital accessibility and what their assumptions are about disabled people in the digital world. What have they been exposed to and what assumptions or values do they possess at primary school age.
What attitudes and assumptions are forming in the young to address issues of equality. An intervention could then explore their thinking and attitudes afterwards.
However, as a study what impact would this have long term? The bigger issue is what education would work to raise awareness and what could be implemented as an intervention.
Some basic learning activities around the multidisciplinary lens of digital accessibility could begin to offer insight into how this type of education could be introduced for both learners and teachers.
Education studies show its both students and teachers who would need support implementing this new topic.
The steer towards building a curriculum based on empathy and humanism and addressing digital accessibility awareness education would potentially be a study of social justice and change to bring about early values of equality and inclusion.
By focusing on building empathy and the need to consider universal design when creating content, it could shift mindsets towards the social model of disability as something future society could address rather than the focus on the medical model where the person with the disability is seen as having the barriers to be able to engage or participate in the digital society and foster a culture that recognises accessibility as a shared responsibility.
Refs:
Sonka, McCardle and Potts (2021) explain that this approach re-situates accessibility within a social justice framework that helps to improve shared values, diversity, equity and inclusion (p.267).
No longer accessibility needs bandaged on at the end
If we want to make technology and content accessible at every level, including at schools, universities and in the workplace it must become a mainstream skill (p.268).
Social and ethical responsibility.
In using a more humanistic approach Sonka and Co explain that a solid foundation for students to understand the importance of accessibility in whatever career path they choose and gives them the basic information to advocate for people with disabilities (p.269).
Students taught with this human approach developed a passion to become advocates for accessibility, and provided moments when students realise they can make a difference (p.271).
The implementation of a course on accessibility into a curriculum can highlight and lead to new perspectives and ways of thinking.
Gilbert (2019), Wang (2012).
https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/CSJ-Left-Out.pdf
The reduction of digital accessibility to relying on just a technical checklist removes from testing the essence of ‘nothing about us without us’ and the user experience of using digital content. It is this aspect missing or overlooked where checklists in literature are said to only capture around 30-50% of accessibility issues and possibly contributing to the low progress on making products accessible.
Align this to the fact that many WCAG studies say the guidelines are open to interpretation or lack agreement on what is compliant. Studies where users have been involved or empathy related teaching clearly indicates more success.
Bringing success in this sense back to being about people with disabilities, and these people being heard and involved rather than replaced by a reductionist checklist. Removing people in favour of a checklist makes this not about social justice, but an attempt to simplify something much more nuanced.
Having people with disabilities excluded means that education needs to raise awareness about their needs and bring out their voices and that conceptual understanding of disability and not just a set of technical skills. This education could avoid the awkwardness highlighted in several studies around students interacting with users with disabilities.
Many studies do highlight that people don’t want to say the wrong thing and sometimes realise they view the disabilities first and not the person. This awkwardness could be due to lack of awareness and exposure to be able to understand and people often fear or feel uncomfortable around things they don’t understand - great quotes of feeling self conscious of their ignorance.
This lack of awareness could be addressed from a young age to avoid the fear factor, but at the same time address the lack of accessible content from the offset of learning about others in our digital society.
Organisations appear to bypass working with disabled people possibly to avoid the awkwardness, further excluding people. We need to bring their voices into education and back into the workplace process of developing and testing content.
Even though the legal guidelines clearly says to involve people with disabilities and to do research and test with them from beginning, throughout and before beta.
Most training for accessible content is currently confined to those in technical roles, including the technical standards of WCAG, the regulations specifically for the web, but there is very little for the more basic principles and mainstream adoption of digital accessibility.
It is these basics that could enable greater participation in digital content, and at scale in the mainstream and a future generation more aware that could have considerable impact. For example accessible social media content is something everyone could easily contribute to that could help with a more inclusive digital society.
These basic principles could underpin mainstream adoption and with that mainstream inclusion of those with disabilities in our digital society. Without this we are failing in our duty to look after others in our disabled community.
Next read book - critical theory today.
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