Thoughts on Accessibility in HE

I went to some of the training sessions on accessibility run by JISC organised by University of Hertfordshire on 8/6/16.  I thought I’d write up some notes to share.

Legal Motivation

Universities have a duty of care to ‘make all reasonable accommodations’ to our teaching and teaching materials to make them accessible. It is advisable to be anticipatory about this, if an organisation has a paper trail of embedding accessibility that creates a better defence in case we are taken to court and have done nothing. Different Universities have done more or less, in general, the more effort made the lower the risks are.  Risks are low but the impact of them is potentially high especially to our reputation.

Range of users

There are a range of users of teaching materials, some are disabled but don’t want to admit it, some are on a scale that means they could benefit from accessibility but who wouldn’t explicitly ask for it.  Most students will avoid using usability tools if they can avoid it – they don’t like being seen as different.

What could be done by tutors

There are a range of easy actions that could increase accessibility of materials with low cost in terms of time and culture change.  A lot of these include good pedagogic practice anyway and can give rise to productivity benefits to all students. Examples:

  • Any word document should have headings and sub headings marked using heading styles (HI, H2 etc. as has been done with this report). This creates a structure that is easy to navigate around using a screen reader and can create a navigation bar for all students (View > Side Bar > Document map pane)
  • When transferring from word to PDF, there is a tick box to save the structure so adobe reader will act the same as word for screen readers.
  • Add a caption to all images so that screen readers can get a version of the image.
  • When adding a link, these should be named something meaningful like ‘Treves report 2016’ rather than ‘click here’ as screen readers scan through links sometimes converting the text to words.
  • When discussing accessibility with students, term it ‘productivity’ as this is more attractive to students.

 

What could be done in induction for students

There are a number of things that could be offered to students in induction e.g.:

  • Encourage them to install and use screen reader for word/chrome if needed
  • Encourage them to add contrast plugins for chrome if they need it.

 

Harder Goals

Producing text versions of video and audio content is benefitial but clearly involves a big investment of time. Ebooks vary widely in their accessibility for students, PDF based images of text are impossible for screen readers to scan.  What format are our ebooks in and what can we do about it if they aren’t in an accessible format?

 

Discussion

A number of aspects of accessibility struck me. Inviting tutors to accessibility training is liable to be unpopular, why would they want to solve a problem they didn’t know they had?   Better if we drip bits of accessibility into other training and support given to tutors.

The big take away that occurred to me is the link between flipped learning and accessibility.   Students with common issues such as dyslexia, blindness and mental issues are all helped if they can access text versions of materials that that form the backbone of the course rather than have to learn by being sat in lectures.  Flipped learning can help them by providing the out of class work in text form which can then be read by screen readers or read at students speed rather than listened to at ‘lecture delivery speed’.  The class sessions of flipped learning are flexible so it also allows tutors to accomodate students needing more support.

Flipped learning often uses video, to be truly accessible, text versions of these need to be produced.  A quick and dirty way of doing this is by uploading to YouTube, you can enhance the experience further by use of synote which allows a transcript to be synced with the video. 

 

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