H810: Accessibility Ahead

One of the activities in H810 asks students to reflect on their role and context in education and how they relate to accessibility and online learning. My own situation is complex because I have many roles: Ph.D. student, web application developer, Open University associate lecturer, sometime course chair, and course writer.

As an associate lecturer and course chair at the Open University, I’m on the front lines of dealing on a day-to-day basis with students at a major distance education university. Distance education is not only appealing to people in full-time employment, but it can be empowering and accessible to students with a wide variety of disabilities. I’ve had students who are blind, visually impaired, hearing impaired, physically disabled, as well as a whole host of learning disabilities including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia, dyslexia, and other mental disabilities.

Sometimes I’ve known about them in advance and other times I haven’t. It’s led to some very interesting situations. For example, in one course I had a student who was blind. The course’s project booklet included many screenshots detailing how the project should work at various stages. There were 28 such pictures. None of which the blind student could “see” in the PDF with assistive software. I spent an afternoon writing up detailed descriptions of each of the pictures. The moral of that story is: a picture is worth a thousand words except when you’re blind.

As a Ph.D. student with a disclosed disability, I deal with the student support unit at my own university. They’ve had a tough job, though, as there wasn’t a great deal of public knowledge about my disability and the number of other students at the university was relatively few. I’ve had to cope a lot on my own and I haven’t always been successful. Now they’re probably more knowledgeable and I’m going back to continue my Ph.D., so we’ll have to see what we can do together this coming year to overcome the various obstacles. It’s not online learning, I admit, but it’s still learning and it’s still challenging and difficult.

As a web developer, it’s been somewhat frustrating to be interested in accessibility. Although legislation and public perception has made companies more willing to pay to include accessibility enhancements or at least not insist on completely inaccessible designs. However, it’s still a struggle trying to get them to appreciate good, accessible design and it can be a challenge to create accessible applications that are usable, functional, as well as aesthetically pleasing. We still have a ways to go and there’s much to learn about how the rapidly growing deployment of social applications can increase accessibility and inclusivity. For my Ph.D., I’m particularly interested in how these types of applications can be used to enhance online learning, especially long-term learning.