Synthesis and discussion of industry section

 From an Authentic learning perspective much of what has been done in industry seems to relate to meeting the technical specification of WCAG as a checklist for compliance rather than the human aspect of user needs. Technical skills are clearly important, but so is the balance of understanding user needs. WCAG and the web regulations steers the assumptions that digital accessibility it best left to web and technical professionals rather than something wider society can contribute to, and it also appears to be seen or adopted as a fix model rather than a process of inclusive design. For education this poses a problem of little tangible evidence or examples to draw from for a curriculum about every day good practices. However it does suggest that where most issues that are being missed they are basic and there is a lack of user research and testing, a shift is needed to steer this back to applying every day application of digital accessibility principles and the concept of inclusive design that takes account of users and their needs. The current focus appears to still be on accessible products rather than process, similar to the nuanced differences between web accessibility, universal design and inclusive design. It also suggests that accessibility is a reactive process to fix and accommodate the perceived needs of a few rather than creating for diversity, suggesting that the medical model rather than social model is still the mindset behind digital accessibility, not helped by the fix wording in the web accessibility guidelines and it being applied as a checklist. The informal and add-hock learning in the workplace may be contributing to the problem, with many tools, guidance and training focused on testing the WCAG compliance of products rather than structured around understanding user needs. One observation is that there is little mention of empathy or the understanding of disability and user needs in the reports coming from industry, and tools that test for accessibility don’t focus on this aspect either, they instead measure compliance against the WCAG criteria. This may contribute to why this aspect is not being seen as a priority and why this might be deprioritised as a cost cutting exercise to omit the user research and testing phases. It can be concluded for this study that not enough emphasis is being placed on this aspect yet it is clearly needed as part of the process and as part of the training to prevent complex, unnecessary and time consuming fixes later on. Developing a user centred mindset in an educational intervention could help to reframe the construction of knowledge around digital accessibility towards the social model of disability and the ethos of barrier free inclusive design that meets the diversity of needs in society, rather than the current application as fixing it as an afterthought. This would also help inform the type of basic training and skills for the wider workforce currently missing at the moment and this would also be applicable for wider members of society, rather than digital accessibility only being addressed or fixed by a small number of people in technical roles or professionals. The basics are clearly not currently being applied and are not widespread, with many organisations not providing this type of organisational training because they are assuming it belongs with one dedicated person. As Matt May (ref) suggests to scale the addressing of digital accessibility practices what we need is lots of people with basics, not minimal people with in-depth knowledge.