Episode 22-Accessibility Literacy
0-0:12 Orthotonics Accessible as Gravity plays and fades out
0:13 Hello and welcome to Accessagogy a podcast about accessibility and pedagogy. I’m your host Ann Gagné and this podcast is recorded on land covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and within land protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Agreement, which is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
0:33 Welcome to episode twenty-two. In this episode, I want to spend some time talking about accessibility literacy and how it can appear in the different places that we’re in Higher Education. I want to reflect on the inequities that high context speak and documentation causes, and how we need to get past just spelling out acronyms to really think about the level of speak that we surround ourselves with and the assumptions that we make every day about someone’s knowledge and digital literacy and multimodal literacies.
1:04 I will be giving a talk to a group of librarians and information professionals this week and it has me thinking a lot about the literacies that we bring to spaces, and the assumptions about what people know or don’t know when we share information. I also don’t necessarily love using literacy here, because there’s a whole bunch of socio-cultural socio-economic connotations and really not great histories around literacy as a barrier to many things, like voting or immigration. But literacy as a word seems to kind of get at the heart of what I want to talk about here.
1:40 By accessibility literacy I mean having an awareness of the vocabulary, tools, and procedures to make something more accessible. My friend Kim Ashbourne has written so well about the need for accessibility literacy in the web and I am going to link to some of her work in the show notes. Basically we all need to have a certain awareness of accessibility to do the accessibility work. But what often happens is that there is a person at the institution or in an area who is the person known to be accessibility literate person about a certain thing and they are the one that is called on time and again to support.
2:19 And this could mean that you have one person that is really good at accessible pedagogy and knows all the terms, theories, and ideas that connect to that, and not just UDL as we’ve talked about, and you may have another person whose accessibility literacy is within the scope of web design, or document or resource creation. It is true that these scopes of accessibility literacy often overlap, and yet most institutions like to approach this in a siloed way, which means that people who should be working together don’t and that then adds more accessibility gaps. What sometimes happens is that every accessibility thing is given to the same magical unicorn at an institution and then that unicorn gets burnt out because no one wants to take on the work of learning about how to be more accessibility literate in their areas of impact.
3:11 Accessibility literacy is a big deal; it involves a lot of things. More things than I could ever cover in a 10 minute or less podcast episode. However, I do want to start a conversation about what needs to happen to increase accessibility literacy in the spaces that you’re in and to make sure that your magical unicorn person doesn’t get burnt out and leaves. So I will try to focus on three things today, just to make it manageable and accessible because modelling inclusive practices is a thing.
3:42 Which actually leads me to point one, which is demonstrating accessibility literacy or fostering a space for accessibility literacy means that the areas that have a lot of outreach to students, faculty, or staff, absolutely have to model accessibility in their web presence, their resources, their meetings, and event design and execution. This is ultimately something that means that they need to train staff in those areas so that accessibility literacy is something that supports the other work that they do, and is not framed as an add on. So I’m going to name a few places where I see this modeling to be crucial, which is centres for teaching and learning, the campus library, and educational technologies. These three areas really need to be staffed with folk with accessibility literacy that demonstrate that through clear documentation, accessible resources, and choice models in the way that they to offer support. These three areas are also spaces that tend to have extremely high context jargon and acronyms, which is why it is really important that accessibility is foundational to the work.
4:55 To model accessibility and support accessibility literacy and awareness, support needs to be provided in a way that doesn’t assume a user’s digital literacy, the ways the user will use or receive information, and what they already know about a particular thing. If you folk have worked in an area for a really long time they often will lose the ability to explain the thing they do to someone in an accessible way, because they are already 10 steps ahead when they start explaining. This is about plain language use, which I talked about in episode 13. Accessibility literacy starts from the beginning, and ultimately gives the user the option to start 10 steps ahead if that’s where they want to start, or at the very beginning if they need to. This is why often you will see training that is framed as beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Recognizing that everyone is entering to this space with different ways of engaging with that information is key. And if you don’t know what they’re entering with, the only safe assumption is to start at the beginning. Refrains of “well they should already know this” is a very neurotypical and ableist response and these assumptions often lead to dismissing the user, the user’s needs, and their feedback.
6:18 This leads to point two, listen to feedback. Accessibility literacy and awareness can really be supported if we listen to the feedback provided and implement it. That last part is so important. If someone notes that there’s a colour contrast issue for example, with a resource or a document, it doesn’t matter if no one else in the history of the use of this resource has not had an issue with it, it doesn’t matter if 10 other people know the secret jargon work arounds to make it better, you need to make it better for the person who is giving you that feedback, and doesn’t know the secret jargon work around.
6:55 Just because people share a disability, doesn’t mean their experience of that disability is the same. I know for a fact that my experience of tinnitus is very different than my friends. There’s a real tendency to use cliques and edge cases as a mysterious reason why it is not worth learning more about an issue, finding a common terminology and language and explain what is happening, and then enacting change. Accessibility literacy means gaining more knowledge, skills, and awareness about different use cases in order to design and support in a more accessible way. That feedback will allow for more conversations around things like, “remember that time that we did that thing and it became a barrier” and then you can design more inclusive and accessible product, resource, or event instead.
7:47 Finally part three, break the “we will get there in the future” chain. So much about learning about accessibility whether it be accessible pedagogical strategies, how to create accessible documents, how to create inclusive and accessible web content, gets in the quote “we don’t have time, we don’t have money, we don’t have capacity” loop. Institutions are notorious for this. They will only react if there is something legislative seems to be coming then they will run to learn about all the things, or more often, they will hire a unicorn who knows about the things to attempt to patch all the gaps that exist.
8:23 If your institution has the word “inclusion” anywhere in their vision, mission, academic plan, strategic plan, then they absolutely have to work on their accessibility literacy beyond hiring a unicorn. This requires top-down leadership and support in different ways. Have folk learn about how to create accessible documents, make it mandatory, offer training, and not during lunch. Have your web presence and social media presence be user tested by disabled folk and pay them to do that. Then fix the issues that are brought up. User testing without actually doing anything about what comes up is an absolute waste of everyone’s time.
9:05 There’s so much to know about accessibility. I learn from community all the time. I read articles and posts. I research new tools that could support accessible pedagogy. It is constant work that should be part of many people’s scope of practice and work flow and you can’t have just one person be responsible for all of it. It’s a team effort. In the words of my friend Thomas O’Shaughnessy, quote “accessibility auditing is a whole job, not a side hustle” which I love.
9:35 It’s absolutely okay for folk to have their accessibility specialty. It is in fact how it should be. Maybe someone knows about image accessibility and colour contrast, maybe someone focuses on accessible pedagogy, maybe someone focuses on accessibility and learning management systems or how learning management systems will interact with assistive technology. These are all good and great things and there is so much to know about each of these things. My point is that general accessibility literacy is possible, right, alt text your images, use headers, review font choice, review tab order, caption your videos properly, transcript your podcasts, review sight lines for the tech in your classroom, so many things. And know the tools and the menus that will get you there. But more importantly, accessibility literacy is knowing where to look for that information. Don’t leave it to the unicorn, the unicorn is tired, and if you are that unicorn engaging with this podcast episode, hi, I see you, you are not alone, eventually others will see why this work is so important and should be part of everyone’s role, but until then, you have me and I will continue to say these things.
10:55 So that’s it, that’s episode 22 of Accessagogy, with a discussion on the range of things to think about to support accessibility literacy in the spaces that you’re in.
11:04 Remember as well that I also want this to be a space where you can ask questions and share concepts that you’d like me to discuss. So if there’s anything that I mentioned here, that you would like me to clarify, please ask.
11:14 As always if you have any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you would like me to address in this podcast, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy so that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I will try to include as many suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 22 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week!