FE stuff for L2E
In every choice that shapes a legacy, let compassion be the compass
Overview from literature review notes
The need for digitally accessible content permeates every aspect of public and private lives (Holmes and Maeda, 2018; Gilbert and Rateau, 2019), increasingly mandating access to education, work, family and friends for millions of disabled people (Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2023). To educate our next generation to advocate for digital accessibility is a fundamental instrument to support the shift towards an inclusive cyberspace and attitudes towards equity and a socially responsible society (Wang, 2012).
Surveys conducted by professionals and employers within the workplace context and disability industry, recognise an ‘Accessible Technology Skills Gap’ (PEAT, 2018; National Disability Strategy, 2021, p. 91; Teach Access, 2023), with the demand for digital accessibility skills and awareness in industry being described as pressing and critical (PEAT, 2018; Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees, 2020), and learning digital accessibility skills and awareness skills later within the workplace context is seen as challenging across whole organisations (WebAIM, 2018, 2021; AbilityNet, 2022; Hassell Inclusion, 2022; Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2023). The lack of accessibility awareness in the educational curricula is being identified as a problem for industry (Baker, El-Glaly and Shinohara, 2020; Sonka, McArdle and Potts, 2021; Teach Access, 2023), and to be able to recruit people with this type of skillset or baseline knowledge is difficult for employers (PEAT; 2018). This highlights the pressing need to prepare and build digital accessibility capacity within education for the future digital workforce and beyond. (Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees, 2020).
Coverdale, Lewthwaite and Horton (2022; p.1) assert that accessibility education, in both professional and educational sectors, is pivotal to building this capacity. From this standpoint, and as we live in a ‘Digital First’ (Cabinet office, 2012) and ‘Digital by Default’ (Donnelly and NHS England, 2019) economy, building accessibility into our educationsystem is important (Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees, 2020), including foundational awareness in digital accessibility that needs urgently defining and establishing in both workplace settings and in the educational curriculum (Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2023, p. 2). There are calls for this to be treated as a shared endeavour (Coverdale, Lewthwaite and Horton, 2022) and for it to be taught as a more mainstream set of basic digital knowledge and skills across education to help meet the diverse and everyday needs of our digital society and workforce skills needs (Kearney-Volpe et al., 2019; Sonka, McArdle and Potts, 2021; Christopherson, 2022; Lewthwaite, Horton and Coverdale, 2023; Wilson, 2023).
Considering the legislative needs for ‘reasonable adjustments’under the Equality Act (Legislation GOV.UK, 2010) or the more recent Web Accessibility Regulations (Legislation GOV.UK, 2018), as well as the identified ‘Accessibility Technology Skills Gap’, it is concerning that academic literature has identified that digital accessibility awareness is not yet regularly taught formally within the educational curriculum, including at university (Lewthwaite and Sloan, 2016; Putnam et al., 2016; Nishchyk and Chen, 2018; Baker, El-Glaly and Shinohara, 2020; Lewthwaite, Coverdale and Butler-Rees, 2020; Coverdale, Lewthwaite and Horton, 2022). Where digital accessibility is included in education, it is mainly minimal, surface level, or only an optional or elective unit at degree or post graduate level (Nishchyk and Chen, 2018; Shinohara et al., 2018; Baker, El-Glaly and Shinohara, 2020), and when it is an elective unit on a degree course, it is commonly dropped (Baker et al, 2020), but most often it is not a part of any core curriculum, relevant course, or subject discipline (Jia et al., 2021). There are concerns that most learners who arrive on degree level courses or into the workplace have never been exposed to accessibility awarenessand have little or no prior knowledge of digital accessibility from their school or college education (Keates, 2015; El-Glaly, 2020; Soares Guedes and Landoni, 2020; Sonka, McArdle and Potts, 2021; WebAIM, 2021).
No academic studies have yet been formally identified within the Further Education (FE) context, yet FE plays a pivotal rolein the educational landscape, because it is focused on careersand not courses, and the progression onto a much broaderspectrum of outcomes such as a good job, apprenticeships, further or higher education or to an employer career pathway(Capper, 2024). Therefore, as a sector for longer-term capacity for driving this agenda, it offers significantopportunities to make the broadest impact for driving basic digital accessibility awareness education across a plethora of career disciplines, and as a sector is also a significant test bed for much broader awareness and dissemination of such knowledge and employability skills.
Some of the basic principles of digital accessibility are described in a podcast by Robin Christopherson, Head of Inclusion for AbilityNet as ‘low hanging fruit’ and simple adjustments everyone could apply that can make a differencein digital content (Christopherson, 2022b). In a keynote speech, Christopherson (2022) also stated that ‘the concept of learning about digital accessibility is now not only more mainstream an issue – it is, in fact, an entirely mainstream issue’ (p.1). He referred to some simple tips for creating accessible documents and content in the mainstream using a simple model called SCULPT for Accessibility (Wilson, 2020). This included the use of in-built headings to structure a document; the use of colour and contrast, using alt text on images, descriptive hyperlinks, using clear language and creating tables that avoid merged and split cells. These basic principles have also been reported as being some of the most effective for learning, with small changes being demonstrated as having a large impact to prevent barriers to users, but also skills that are easy to adopt (Wilson, 2023).
Gay (2023) refers specifically to an example of learners understanding the simple principle of descriptive hyperlinks and not using terms like ‘click here’ on links. He describes learner experiences of how long it took to find the right link in the text as a non-disabled person, as well as someone having links listed as ‘click here’ out of context from the original written content on a screen reader. The simplicity of this demonstration and activity to write links in a descriptive waysuch as ‘apply for your loan’ instead of ‘click here’ was described as ‘an impactful ‘ah ha’ moment and the point where the abstract concept of accessibility turned into personal experience and changed the way participants thought about it’ (p.03). Similarly Holmes and Maeda (2018) describe the simple awareness for digital accessibility of adding captions to videos and how people can recognise that it not only benefits those with hearing impairments, but they can relate to the benefits of captions for everyone including those in noisy environments, where an environment needs to stay quiet, as well as assist people learning a new language. Keates(2011) explains that by using simple concepts such as these to teach the basic principles of digital accessibility, students with little or no background in accessibility can gain pragmatic skills and knowledge in a short amount of time. He claims an underpinning awareness of key concepts can empower students to be able to identify and create content for the basic needs of the widest possible audience ready for when they enter the workplace. However, this type of baseline knowledge of what accessibility is and how it can be achieved is still not widespread in education (Soares Guedes and Landoni, 2020) and of those who are aware, lack the practical understanding of the essential aspects needed to make content accessible (Sanderson, Kessel and Chen, 2022). Whitney(2020) argues that it is important to integrate these basic principles of accessibility awareness as a strong foundation in education and be regularly applied as underpinning knowledge throughout the curriculum to be continually built upon and strengthened.
References
Baker, C.M., El-Glaly, Y.N. and Shinohara, K. (2020) ‘A Systematic Analysis of Accessibility in Computing Education Research’, in Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. SIGCSE ’20: The 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Portland OR USA: ACM, pp. 107–113. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366843.
Cabinet office (2012) Government Digital Strategy. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7ba0bfed915d41476219cd/Government_Digital_Stratetegy_-_November_2012.pdf (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
Capper, L. (2024) ‘Anchors Away – defining the role of our colleges 2023 and beyond | Association of Colleges’. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anchors-away-defining-role-our-colleges-2023-beyond-ocspe/ (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
Christopherson, R. (2022) ‘Out with accessibility - in with inclusive design’, in Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference. W4A’22: 19th Web for All Conference, Lyon France: ACM, pp. 1–2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493612.3520444.
Christopherson, R. (2022b) ‘Why web accessibility matters’. Available at: https://www.texthelp.com/resources/podcasts/why-web-accessibility-matters/ (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
Coverdale, A., Lewthwaite, S. and Horton, S. (2022) ‘Teaching accessibility as a shared endeavour: building capacity across academic and workplace contexts’, in Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference. W4A’22: 19th Web for All Conference, Lyon France: ACM, pp. 1–5. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493612.3520451.
Donnelly, T. and NHS England (2019) ‘Digital first primary care and how the NHS Long Term Plan set a clear direction to mainstream digitally enabled care across the NHS’. Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/blog/digital-first-primary-care-and-how-the-nhs-long-term-plan-set-a-clear-direction/ (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
El-Glaly, Y.N. (2020) ‘Teaching Accessibility to Software Engineering Students’, in Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. SIGCSE ’20: The 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Portland OR USA: ACM, pp. 121–127. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366914.
Gay, G. (2023) ‘Open curriculum for teaching digital accessibility’, Frontiers in Computer Science, Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy.
Gilbert, R.M. and Rateau, R. (2019) Inclusive design for a digital world: designing with accessibility in mind. Berkeley, California: Apress.
Hassell Inclusion (2022) An Immature Response? Why organisations are failing to build digitally accessible products and services. Available at: https://www.hassellinclusion.com/accessiblity-maturity-2022-report/.
Holmes, K. and Maeda, J. (2018) Mismatch: how inclusion shapes design. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England: The MIT Press (Simplicity : design, technology, business, life).
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Kearney-Volpe, C. et al. (2019) ‘Evaluating Instructor Strategy and Student Learning Through Digital Accessibility Course Enhancements’, in The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. ASSETS ’19: The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, Pittsburgh PA USA: ACM, pp. 377–388. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3353795.
Keates, S. (2011) ‘Teaching the Next Generation of Universal Access Designers: A Case Study’, in C. Stephanidis (ed.) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design for All and eInclusion. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), pp. 70–79. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21672-5_9.
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Legislation GOV.UK (2010) Equality Act 2010. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
Legislation GOV.UK (2018) The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/952/contents/made.
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National Disability Strategy (2021). Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-disability-strategy (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
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