Episode 31- Access Friction
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.
0:32 Welcome to episode thirty-one. In this episode we are going to talk about a term that you may have heard in passing on social media or maybe in conversation with folk who are interested in accessible pedagogy or critical disability studies, and that is access friction. I want to discuss access friction today because there is a lot of different definitions of the term so I will first frame what I mean by access friction in my particular discussion in this episode and then provide three aspects where access friction can appear in the context of your course design and in teaching and learning.
1:12 So for this episode when I talk about access friction, I am talking about situations where providing accessibility supports in certain ways to one person can in turn create accessibility barriers to another. This can happen a lot in eduspaces and in this episode I’m going to identify three situations where access friction can happen and also give a few examples for each situation to help contextualize what I am referring to. It’s my hope that by having more conversations about access friction that it will then be part of the things one thinks about in course design, or even when you’re organizing webinars or conferences.
1:52 So the first situation I’m going to talk about is access friction between learners in the same eduspace. So the example that is often given in this case is what happens if you have two students in the same class where one has a pet dander allergy and then the other needs the support of a service animal. What do you do in those instances? Of course a lot of conversations have been had about this exact situation and how you would support both students in this situation. Some have said well one student could take the course online, and sure. Others have said well maybe one students can go to another section of the course, and again sure. And I am not here to argue about what is the best way to support folk in this particular situation, what I am here though to do is to actually raise awareness that this is a possible situation that could happen.
2:45 Let me give you another example, one learner could benefit from having classroom lights at the highest setting, and then another could benefit with a lower light condition. Again having lighting at medium can help these kinds of situations, but there’s a bunch of other things that create light in the classroom that you also have to think about. For example, the many screens in an active learning classroom for example.
3:09 Okay so let me give you one more example. You like to do a lot of group work as part of your pedagogy, which some learners really appreciate because it creates conditions and opportunities for them to connect and support their learning and give context to the course. However, some learners find the sound of many groups talking in the same space distracting and difficult for many reasons such as you know hearing, ADHD, Autism, you know hard of hearing as I mentioned before there are a lot of reasons why.
3:44 These examples are given to you because when we talk about access friction it’s important to remember that often when we design these courses we design them with a normative student in mind, a normative student that doesn’t really exist, and thinking that all the students will be exactly the same or be exactly like this normative student that we have in our minds is where the design problems come from. Remembering that we’re not robots is a good starting point towards more inclusive accessible pedagogy. But also sort of having a plan B for a few things like activities and so on can help when a situation like that arises where there is access friction between learners.
4:25 Ok Situation two, access friction between learners and instructors. Now this is something that we absolutely don’t talk nearly enough about and it’s almost like we don’t want to talk about it. There’s an assumption throughout eduspace that educators, instructors, professors, staff, counsellors, advisors don’t have accessibility needs and that is absolutely the furthest from the truth. Disabled staff exist and we need to also think about how our accessible pedagogy is designed in a way that acknowledges that.
5:00 I’ll provide you with a common example about access friction between learners and instructors. A few students need extra time to finish an assignment and the instructor’s access needs are such that having to plan for extensions is difficult in terms of organizing time to grade or supports that those students may need after the majority of the students have handed their work in. This is a very real example and I know many are working with this situation right now. And this access need may be connected to a disability on the part of the instructor, but it also may be connected to a disability plus other responsibilities that they may have. So, this happens a lot in the sandwich generation where there are folk that are taking care of their children but then also taking care of their parents so we need to start thinking about that too.
5:49 Another thing to remember about access friction in both learner access friction situations and then the learner and instructor access friction situations is that these can also be dynamic or episodic. So just because there’s friction one semester for an instructor, doesn’t mean that there will be access friction the next semester or with another group of students or even with another class. Maybe one class that an instructor is teaching is very maps or visuals heavy and they are going through a time where having light causes migraines maybe from long COVID. Basically just the act of acknowledging and in some ways planning for that access friction possibilities, will make it ideally easier to support when it does happen.
6:36 And then finally situation three, which is that last example that sort of connects to, access friction between learners and instructors but also between the technology used in the class or for the institution. This is probably the most common understanding of access friction because when it comes to folk who work in accessible technology or in user experience (or UX) space, they talk about access friction specifically about the technology. So sometimes our institutions procure technology, or professors choose to use tech or edtech that is for whatever reason a barrier to learners. Sometimes that barrier is about the way the website or tool is coded, sometimes that barrier is about how information is organized. And maybe the organization works for some folk but it doesn’t work for all of the learners and all of the instructors in the institution.
7:32 This is where a lot of people will hear about accessibility overlays which attempt to customize the user experience to what folk need. However, as you may have also heard, accessibility overlays are kind of like a bandage to a greater access problem around design.
7:48 So one thing I would love to see more of is conversations about tool, website, learning management system, and then just general edtech design for accessibility. So for example, the discussions around artificial intelligence, and AI in general, not just large language models or LLMs like Chat-GPT they talk about how AI or some AI can support disabilities, like be my eyes or automatic captions (which I do note are still not better than having human CART transcription but we don’t have conversations about how some of the user experience for tools that we use on a regular basis just simply don’t work for some folk.
8:30 I’m going to link to a Government of Canada Accessibility website that absolutely does not work for me and it does not work in the ways that I consume information. And it may work for some folk, but it just does not work for me. And this is a bit of a tragedy actually, because it is a website that is supposed to support folk about organizing inclusive webinars and conferences but it’s actually the last place that I personally would go to look for information if I was somebody that was working for the Government of Canada.
8:59 Access friction with technology can appear in many different ways. Both between folk who are in the same eduspace or with the technology that is required to be used within that eduspace. So it’s my hope that this episode starts you thinking about some design choices that you could make to make learning more inclusive, or at least to start the conversation and awareness about how access friction can appear. And I guess like with most things, the moral of the story is, we’re not robots, at least not yet.
9:30 So that’s episode 31 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of access friction and how access friction can happen in our eduspaces between learners, with instructors, but also with the technology.
9:42 Remember that I 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 about access friction or anything else that you have, if you have any good examples of access friction that folk may have not thought of and you would want them to know about please feel free to share this with me and I’d love to discuss that on here.
10:04 As always if you have any aspects of your pedagogy that you’d like me to discuss or 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 of these suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 31 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week!