 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to day two of alt C 22 Lovely to have you all back here this afternoon for the online part of our program And we've got a really interesting talk coming up just now. So fantastic to see you all joining us So I'm really delighted to welcome Alastair Macnaught Who's going to present today? Unfortunately Amy who works for ability net wasn't able to join us. I'm sure you will all know The work of Alastair Macnaught for his long-standing work in the area of accessibility At JISC and since in his consultancy work as well I'll be keeping my eye on the comments. So do comment ask questions as well and I will share those With Alastair as we go through the session So a virtual clap and welcome to Alastair for this session and I shall pass over to him Okay, thank you very much. I'm assuming that was the introduction Unfortunately, there's a very slight technical hitch where I can't hear Kerry I think everybody else in the world can Except me. So thank you for the session and if I If we share my screen, thank you very much So I want to look at digital accessibility in particular in further education because that's where recent research has shown some real struggles for colleges and Training providers actually getting their head around what accessibility is digitally and how to be compliant So we're going to look at that, but it will also be equally relevant for any organization that is Effectively a public sector body and although Amy Lowe from ability net is not able to join me today She's helped me put this together and we work together on all sorts of projects So I'm going to start by defining digital accessibility And I don't want to define it in terms of technical standards because that doesn't actually help people Yes, we need to know about them ultimately or some people in the organization may need to know about them But from for the purpose of today we talk about using digital tools To maximize the learners experience. We're talking about Employing those tools in a way that minimize unnecessary barriers and that maximize opportunities for personalization productivity independence basically Who would not want their students to be able to? Have the digital competencies to be able to manipulate the resources They've got to make them more comfortable easier to read more productive That's something we all want but unless you get it right in terms of digital accessibility it may not work so I want to look at The almost what I call the onion of accessibility the nested layers that you have to get right in order for the learner to have a really predictably good experience and as long ago as 2010 ofsted noted that Good teaching itself really benefits inclusion It's not the inclusion or accessibility to tag on and ofsted noted that where the best teaching was seen The need for additional interventions was reduced and specialist disability staff and so on could Support could give more support to those that needed more help So it was about removing the barriers through good teaching. So good teaching is in itself an inclusion approach But the good teaching needs to go through these three areas the platform how they find things how courses are designed the resources that they use and whether those documents those Videos those presentations are equally accessible to all your learners and the activities that they do It's great to have a you know a little Kahoot quiz or something like that but if there are people with slower processing speeds or people with Motor difficulties who just find it harder to press the right button You might end up testing something that you have no idea that you're testing you're testing their speed You're not testing their understanding and that can result in some real issues but Even when you have all those four sort of those three layers Perfect and things working really well There's an additional layer on top which is on the platform or on the resources or on the Activity and the little tool that I'm using to engage with my students Can they see it comfortably? Can they change the magnification? Change the colors or the contrast if they need to can they navigate by keyboard or by touch or by mouse Can they skip over repetitive bits if they're navigating by keyboard? So they don't have to go through your entire VLE menu every time they move from one VLE page to another Can they go down a really long document whether it's a PDF or a word document? Can they go down by? pulling up the navigation pane or pulling up the bookmark pane and Instantly clicking on a heading that's three quarters of the way down the page But it's the one that they really need instead of having to read through Reams and reams of pages in order to get to the bit that's relevant Will it work with text-to-speech or a screen reader? And if it's just a scanned PDF an image of words, then it probably won't does it rely on them hearing seeing? The way that you do or reacting in a specific time frame. So those are the issues that Accessibility digital accessibility seeks to address is that layer on top of good teaching and good pedagogy the problem is and I have a theory that one of the real problems in accessibility gaining traction in the FE sector is because the FE is so good at one-to-one support at the traditional paradigm of Okay, you need help you need text-to-speech you need support and picking out key ideas or you need different colored backgrounds That's great. Come to us. We've got a team of people dedicated to helping you We are the ladder experts you experience a barrier. We'll give you a ladder to get over it But that's not a great paradigm. It's not a sustainable paradigm because it results in no institutional learning so The big questions we should ask is well, why doesn't the resource work with text-to-speech? We should be asking well if the students having difficulty picking out the key ideas in a really long document Why is there no heading structure that would allow them to see instantly how all those ideas and those headings and subheadings nest together and If the students need a different colored background, why are you using a format that doesn't let you change the background colors? And those are the sorts of things that we want to begin to address. That's ultimately the Rubber hits the road part of good accessibility practice It's about a new paradigm of I called it here accessibility maturity I don't think I should I think I should be calling it a new paradigm of digital Maturity because it's about staff digital competence or the documents you create embody good accessibility practice It's about students competence and students consistent expectations that they know what level of Accessibility they can expect with any document or any presentation you create them or anything that's online on your VLE and it's also about communication because You know the real world is messy real technology is messy and some things are more accessible than others But there's nothing that's perfect that's out there So it's when you know that some of your systems like your Kahoot or your Mentimeter or your Padlet When you know some of them may not work effectively with some users assistive technology Doesn't mean to say you won't ever use it. It may mean that you use it But you communicate to the students so that anybody that would have a difficulty Can let you know in advance because they know that there's a likely issue there and then you can offer workarounds so from a staff perspective, it's about that better communication that better practice and that That better service level standard that your students can guarantee that their content will be basically Accessible but from a student point of view if your content has good accessibility built into it the students can then personalize it in all sorts of ways and be more productive and If the student knows what your college's accessibility baseline is then they know how to inform you Appropriately when somebody somewhere doesn't meet it and that will happen it happens all the time But the issue is that students don't complain about it because they don't even know what they should be expecting so students knowing who to go to and What to expect makes a big difference in terms of digital competencies and digital maturity But let's get back to that idea of the overarching accessibility maturity how accessibility mature is your organization so I'm going to look at two types of maturity and I use a Hedgehog for this because the inside of the hedgehog the skeleton bit is the sort of institutional level Accessibility it's the bit that the users don't see they don't see your staff training in the background They don't see who is responsible for accessibility for quality assurance for legal compliance But somebody in the organization needs to be if the other bits are going to work and the other bits are The course level accessibility maturity elements So that's the direct experience of the use of the range of formats is it all PDFs is it all text? Is it a mixture is it videos as well as power points as well as interactivities self-access quizzes and so on all those things Make or break the students experience at course level and of course level and I've looked at probably about 70 different courses across Maybe 50 organizations as part of my work at course level. I can tell you they are really spiky Profile which is very apt for the hedgehog So several years ago working at TechDis and then working more recently to develop the idea with ability net I came up with this top-level maturity model where I found a lot of organizations I was working with were either at the luck stage with luck Nobody will have a problem and we'll get away with it or what I call the tokenism Which is yes, you're giving brilliant one-to-one support, but you're supporting people over barriers that should not be there So that's not mature. That's just kind of a tokenism will help you Over the barriers we've created There's the standards bit all our systems are standards Everybody knows how to create content that's accessible and that's good, but it's not the end product Because the end product is not meeting standards because you can do that in really boring unengaging ways It's about ownership. It's about staff having a range of digital tools and resources That they know how to use to maximize learner independence than mixing and matching different tools and technologies But the ultimate stage is the partnership where you're not realized or you're not regarding Your disabled students as a potential problem. Oh, no I won't be able to use this tool or this assessment because of my disabled students It's when you move from that to say, okay How could I involve my disabled students in helping me do this in a different way and the creative pedagogies that that opens up is actually quite extraordinary So We've got that model. That's the top level model and we've then got underneath it We've got a much more detailed model where we've got seven themes that are measurable So accessibility is not about good intention It's about measurable stuff to do with strategy structure how disabled users Voices kind of built into your organization staff training and guidance and so on So we've got these seven and you don't need to make notes on these because you can download them At the end. I've got links for you and The here's an extract from that. We've got a And a very an inter a fully interactive version We use when we're working in depth with clients and then we've got this creative commons version which doesn't have the weighting but it still has all the questions in there and It's basically the same overall template But it's one that you can use on your own So you could download that I'll give you the link will be there in a moment I don't know if I can put links in the chat if I can and they can go to everyone then I'll do that or maybe Kerry could do that for me in a bit When I put the link in but you could download this and there's the that's one of the seven Themes on it use it on your own You know, if you're a senior manager or use it with others perceptions can vary enormously So you might think you're doing really well on some areas and somebody else who perhaps deals with student Complaints may have a completely different perspective Use it to build a picture of gaps that need a dressing or a roadmap for future improvements And perhaps more than anything one of the things That's in here that's really important is that some of these questions are about project based things You know, have you done this? Have you done that? But a lot of them are about putting in place things that are culture change Because that's the only way it becomes sustainable and then you don't rely on a single person with a passion It actually becomes part of your culture So all the alternative is that um, you know, you can get external support and You know a critical friend to challenge you um, so On this slide. I've got the links here now. What I'm going to do at this point I shall give you the the link to the content If I pop this in the text chat and again, I'm not so familiar with stream Yard, so it may be that kerry I'll put it under comments. Okay. I'll put it under comments. Um Except I can't see how to add it under comments. So out there we are. Thank you very much kerry. That's great and This has got all the the key links you need For the maturity version the light version there that we talked about and for the one I'm just about to talk through as well Um, so you can download that you've got the link to the background. Um, I'll give you the link to the slides as well So that you can get back to those Okay, so that's the institution level but Most of the learners experience isn't actually directly impinged by what goes on at that level It's affected by what goes on in terms of the teacher's awareness It's about the course design the resource creation the pedagogical practice And so on so we have a separate model and again, I'll give you a link to that in a moment Well, in fact, it's on that link. We've just had it's kind of down near the bottom And this is looking at courses now. It's 10 themes and again, it's about things that are measurable So is there evidence of live quiz use for example, because that's actually a really good accessibility benefit Um, it really helps people with mental health issues people struggling with anxiety Not sure if they're keeping up with the class people with short term memory issues who Aren't quite sure if they've understood what they should have done or remembered it So simple things that we do every day as teachers Actually translate into really important accessibility Elements for supporting disabled students So there's a whole list there and you know, if you look down those Many of those you'll think oh, actually there's a bit of that in universal design for learning or there's a bit of that in the lory lard model of Conversational frameworks ABC learn those sorts of things and we've actually Mapped that I'll come to in a minute We've mapped it to a wide range of other frameworks so you can see how it all fits in but What we're focusing on is these areas because they Involve both the resources element And the organization element as well as the human element and that holistic approach to accessibility is really important It's not about Throwing a whole bunch of technical standards at people and saying oh those are the standards get on with it This is not about that. It's about information giving navigation orientation support reliance community building confidence Metacognition that's what accessibility translates to and that's why it's such a fantastic opportunity for further education Colleges because it is about what most colleges are passionate about So there's some examples there of what we mean by information giving you know the accessibility information Do you tell them how accessible your word documents are? um Do you tell them in advance about your curriculum content that actually everything online is just a word document That monoculture or do you say no? We use a whole range and we do that for good pedagogical reasons and Which is also accessibility reasons So those are the sorts of things and you'll be able to see all the details the support self-reliance You see all those questions if you then download that and I'll show you that well it's on the link You've just had but just before we move to and look at that link This is also mapped to multiple models. I said that you know a lot of those themes there would be familiar for just good teaching and so we've mapped Each part of our 10 different themes We've mapped across to give you examples of where it fits the blackboard exemplary Course program or the cast universal design for learning or the arcs model or any of these that you may or may not be familiar with So the the point is what I want to do through this session is really Encourage you that accessibility is not an alien exotic thing. It's something that Many of your staff would already feel really familiar with but they just don't necessarily know the Additional layer that we talked about right at the beginning so that it's not just wow great pedagogy great resources great activities but it's also And they all work in a predictable way that allows the student the kind of Agency to change things as they need to listen to it instead of reading it to magnify it And it will work without having to scroll left and right and and all that So again, we've got an example Here I can show you At the module level. This is the the actual live one that we use with organizations um, where there's waiting for the different elements because some things have a bigger kind of Maturity sustainability element than others and some things are harder to achieve than others so they they should wait more in the scoring um, and As you go through that, you know deciding whether you agree disagree slightly agree mostly agree It will automatically calculate out um your your badge And tell you Oh, no that one's got some bits missing. Sorry. I thought that was the one I wanted But um the the one that we use with organizations you get your own version of this you then can tweak it yourself and it will give you Results it will give you a badge as well at the end if it'll tell you whether you are bronze silver gold Um, just as the institution level one will do as well So and again, you can do it on your own by downloading the creative commons one Or you can get external support and that critical friend challenge as well So that's on the link that you've already got Let's just talk briefly about the risks and then we'll look at the benefits and then we'll end by looking at how you can um How you can kind of benefit from this as an organization and lots of free links that you can look at So the key thing is that in the legislation and we're talking about the 2018 public sector bodies accessibility regulations which apply to all colleges universities and so on um, it actually spells out that digital content in the digital context digital content is binary and measurable in terms of whether it is accessible or not So the document has headings or it doesn't it has descriptions for the images or it doesn't and the paragraph 12 says a failure to comply with the accessibility requirement is a failure to make a reasonable adjustment and A failure to make a reasonable adjustment means a failure In the context of the equality act and the disability discrimination act In other words, there's loads of things you do In terms of working with your disabled students where you might have some debate about what's a reasonable adjustment or not In terms of your digital world There is no debate if it is not meeting the accessibility requirement. You have failed to make a reasonable adjustment Now there's two elements to that One is the government digital services are um have a rolling program of website auditing of public sector bodies so lots of universities have Had this already lots of councils have I think there's very few fe colleges last year But they are ramping them up more as they they only started last year. So there'll be more colleges this year You'll be audited when they find problems And they'll probably not go deeper than the vle probably the main website your accessibility statement Maybe the vle you get 12 weeks to fix the issues Now that's their timing. You can't say oh, yeah, but we've got an inspection coming up You've got 12 weeks to fix the issues and if they're not satisfactorily fixed you get forwarded to the equality and human rights commission now Whether that's a scary thing or not. I'm not going to comment But the bigger risk I think is disabled students experiencing persistent digital discrimination because they know that It should be accessible and they find that it isn't they could Definitely take their own legal action or even just conduct a griller campaign of every time You mark their grades they come back and say now I'm disputing that because I was dealing with inaccessible content It took me much longer. It was a much bigger task So I need a better grade to reflect your lack of accessibility. So that's also a possibility to be aware of The two basic requirements are to improve your accessibility and to communicate it effectively through Accessibility information now. I've got link there to the Legal wording of the model template. I've looked in I did some work in Wales recently where I looked at 13 Fe colleges not one of them had a compliant accessibility statement, which was a bit scary But the really useful information comes at course level Helping students to benefit and there's another link here again. I'll give you the link to this Through the presentation that sample template gives you A sort of model that you can use to just build a course level accessibility template. It's got all the things that a perfect Accessibility course might have and you just delete the bits that don't apply to you So it's a really quick and easy way of starting To have some accessibility information for your students and beginning to think through what you could use yourself So in summary good teaching and learning is that onion of experience the platform resources activities plus The ability to personalize it in those different ways It's a legal requirement. It's an institution wide responsibility So it has to be owned from high up and it's got benefits for everyone There's some really useful resources from the education training foundation from their enhanced platform And I've got links to a load of accessibility specific webinars there the association colleges have got At least two sections in that creating post-covid strategy with accessibility I wrote one of them some another colleague wrote one on assisted technology There's free courses from a head island accessibility for managers and for teachers free free resources from ability net sculpt guidance That's some great free simple Guidance with videos on getting started on the main things And just what I'd like you to do now if I can get you that Just want to fill in your planned actions from this And I'll give you the link to the resource and To this Okay, so here's the link to the form and again if Kerry can do the magic that I need That's the link to the form So just to spend a minute saying okay, we covered a lot of stuff in a short time Which of those would you like to follow up from and there's Um It includes the option to book a 15 minute discussion where we don't have to go at the same speed But that's entirely option. So we're not harvesting your emails. That's a completely optional one if that would be handy and then the link to this re to this slideshow I will give you And that is also in the chat here And hopefully Kerry can do the magic to get it into the comments And that's it So thank you very much for attending and do have a look at that And that google form if there's anything there that you want to do The anything relating to the useful links You want that slide link underneath? And the slide link is probably the key thing because the slide link gives you access to everything else Thank you so much Alistair a Virtual clap from everybody who's watching as well. I'm sure Uh, if there aren't any questions or any comments Do just pull into the chat because I can't hear whether Kerry's talking Just let Alistair know that I've just asked for questions um And we can add any to the screen as well And I'll just show him your appreciation as well by showing you all of the Showing him all the lovely messages Also, if you want to have a look obviously, there are other links here as well But I've also shared Alistair's Link to the slides in in the discord As well if you want to go and have a look at those afterwards So just a big Thank you again To Alistair for everything that he's done This afternoon and to Amy, of course who you wasn't able To join us And oh, there's a comment. Let's see. Ah, just a nice. Thank you message. Thank you Jessica. So Without further ado, I shall finish this session If you want to you can also ask Alistair or passing any comments to Alistair as well in our discord channel so another online Clap for Alistair for for his session And I will say goodbye to you for this afternoon And we shall finish and I hope to see you at some of the other sessions later on