Time for digital inclusion at scale

  https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/455326/1/Motivation_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf Learners may begin learning about digital accessibility lacking motivation and interest. They may not have a personal connection  with disability. They may not see the benefits of accessible technology or be aware of the relevance to their field. Research has found that learners were not motivated ‘because they did not see accessibility as an essential skill in all  computing careers’ (Conn et al, 2020). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3381911 Conn, P. et al (2020) Understanding the Motivations of Final-year Computing Undergraduates for Considering Accessibility. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ., 20(2):15. However, research on ethics emphasizes the importance of establishing cultural and professional norms as early as possible in an individual’s career [23, 29].  We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 university students in the final year of their computing degree programs who had work experi...

  https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/    On the website, you can access a single spreadsheet that lists all academy trusts,  including all multi-academy trusts (MATs), along with their address and Unique Group  Identifier (UID) (MATs have a UID, whereas individual academies have a URN). This  spreadsheet also sets out all of the individual schools within each MAT, along with their  postcode, URN and DfE numbers. This spreadsheet (which can be filtered to just display  MATs) can be downloaded by following the steps below:  •  on the home page select the “Downloads” section at the top of the page,   •  then scroll down to the “Establishment Groups” datasets and the “All group data”  datasets underneath; and   •  select and download the ”SAT and MAT membership history” dataset.  Taken from:  FOI 2024 0031520.pdf The CSV has been sent to my uni email 

  https://alphagov.github.io/accessibility-personas/ This is not a substitute for including users with access needs into your user testing. A simulation is never a true representation of an impairment. It’s only a tool trying to make some things roughly as difficult for someone without that impairment. Comment made about personas: Yes! Accessibility isn’t just about meeting standards, it’s about values . Including diverse personas helps us build with empathy and foresight. Thank you for referencing my article. Accessibility personas should not be used as a substitute for talking to real users but they can provide a useful starting point in understanding our users ’ accessibility needs and help ensure accessibility is always part of the conversation. We can, for example, put personas into scenarios to better understand problems, challenges, and pain points people may encounter when working with our products and services. Understanding user experience is a vital conversation to have...

Digital education is falling short when it comes to topics about digital inclusion and accessibility. Although there is teaching around digital accessibility by some educators, this is mainly in the university or tertiary education context (refs) or in the workplace (ref). Often digital accessibility is only incorporated into a course if  an  enthusiastic or specialist teacher brings it to the table (ref), deeming it an unsustainable topic, especially if that teacher leaves (Bohman, 2012). Where it is available, students mainly enrol on it as an elective topic (ref) or drop it as it's seen as too niche (ref).  Beyond web design disciplines, everyday baseline digital accessibility awareness at scale  is not yet formally on the educational or lifelong learning curriculum. Where it is taught, mainly later in the educational or workplace learning journey, this is often the first time learners have been exposed to the topic, meaning it is treated as an add-on, rather than...

Devising the educational intervention for lesson study Design-based research typically recommends that the initial design of materials, activities, or prototypes should be informed by a thorough literature review (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; McKenney & Reeves, 2013). Given the absence of specific curriculum models or established teaching approaches for digital accessibility awareness within Key Stage 2 education, this section of the literature review will provide insight from other educational contexts to recommend learning objectives and instructional activities related to teaching the topic. Additionally, as it has been previously identified that teachers may lack digital accessibility subject knowledge to be able to teach the subject (Shinohara et al, 2018; Parthasarathy and Joshi, 2024; Soares Guedes and Landoni; 2020), so it will also draw upon existing teacher training literature to inform the initial teacher training component of this study. These findings will help to id...