 very pleased to introduce to you Alistair. Alistair is over to you. Thank you very much. Give me a second to work through the design metaphors so I can share my screen. Here we are. I was lovely listening to Don. Right, digital accessibility, three laws, a contradiction and some useful approaches. So what I want to start with is very simply, if we're talking about digital accessibility, let's make sure we're all on the same page. Oh, forgive me. I'm going to switch captions on. I'm using Google Slides in built captioning. I know that it can be brilliant for some people, but I know some people find captions really distracting. If you're of the latter category, what you can do just as a sort of temporary thing is worth knowing about. You can always pull yourself up something like a notepad, blank notepad and just drop it over the bottom like that, resize it so you can't see. So I prefer to use captions because if I use captions, people can block them. If I don't use them, people that need them can't invent them. So that's a quick tip. So let's go. I want to start in the chat pane. Let me find my way back there. I want you to very simply define some examples of digital accessibility. So could you do that, please? Give examples of digital accessibility. Alt-Tax, thank you, Sheldon. Following guidelines. Okay, that's helpful, Leigh, that sort of take us back to the beginning. What are everyday simple things? So keyboard shortcuts, aria elements. Now, what's brilliant about this is keep going. Don't stop and listen to me. Listen to the crowd. The crowd sourced wisdom is brilliant. So a load of things here. And what's interesting is that some of these are very technical. Some of these are almost invisible because they're residing in the code. Some of these examples here are just what a creator would do. It's creator practice. It's what you do with your word document or with your presentation. So loads of great examples. Fantastic. That's a better list than I would have given you. So thank you for that. And that puts us on the right footing because we've seen then that digital accessibility is all these different things. It's about being personalizable and it's about being flexible. So what is the legislation? Now, I've called this three laws and a contradiction or something like that. And I'm starting with two bits of legislation because these are the bits that are really important. Back from 1995 through to the Equality Act in 2010, we've had legislation that still applies that is focused on individual disabled people and is predicated around this idea of reasonable adjustment. And if you summarize that in a quote, it's really, if there's a problem, we might fix it if it's reasonable for us to fix it. And then on the other hand, we have the new legislation which a lot of people are very exercised about at the minute. We've got September the 23rd, exactly four weeks, I believe. And this focuses on something very different. It focuses on organizational responsibility, removing barriers at source, meeting the so-called accessibility requirements. And if we were to summarize that in a quote, the quote would be, these are the problems and this is what we're doing to address them. These are completely contrasting paradigms. They work in parallel. So your students will still be in a position where that person-centered reasonable adjustment will apply to any one of your disabled students. But alongside that in parallel, you have legislation that is requiring process-centered approach where you're meeting accessibility requirements. Let's just unpack these very briefly because it has implications for what we look at later. The person-centered approach, if we look at that paradigm, it actually has some benefits. And from a disabled user's point of view and the organization's, there are some benefits. So for the disabled person, it is personalized. I have an issue. I go and ask for support on that issue, and I get support. And the support I give, maybe the alternative format I give, won't necessarily be 100% accessible, but it will be 100% accessible to my particular requirement. So it's contextualized. It's dynamic. Somebody else might go with a slightly different request for an inaccessible content, and they get a different solution. The benefits for the organization are similarly that it's kind of reactive. You don't have to do everything in advance. It's contextualized. And I say this not with cynicism, but with the realism of what it's like out there. It can be arguable. You could say, actually, I don't think that is reasonable. We don't believe that's a reasonable request. And so you can push back. However, you can already see the flip side of all of this is that for a disabled person, the reasonable adjustment process and that legislation that protects them also gives them real problems because it needs energy to ask. It needs courage to actually argue and say, no, actually, I think it is reasonable for me to have an accessible version of whatever the content is. It's also a needless waste of energy because I could say, why is it that every disabled person in the last five years doing this course has had to come and ask for exactly the same adjustment? Why wasn't it made accessible in the first place? And the other big issue is that the culture hasn't changed. It's just that disabled people have had to adapt to the culture. The problem for the organization is it's unpredictable. You do not know at what point a particular resource will be needed by a particular student with a particular disability. So it's completely unpredictable. You're making up responses on the fly. You are legally very vulnerable as a result of that. Even without the new legislation, you're vulnerable because you are not being able to evidence that you have anticipatory duty, that you have policies and strategies in place. And fundamentally, the worst bit from an institutional perspective is that there's no institutional improvement taking place. So those are the issues. When you compare that with the process-centered legislation, which is the one we're looking at now, the public sector web accessibility regulations, here the premise is threefold. You will meet the accessibility requirement because it is unreasonable to create content that isn't accessible, or perhaps not that isn't because we all know in the real world, sometimes things are more complicated. But if it is needlessly inaccessible, that is a real issue. Disabled people should not need to ask for an accessible version. And frankly, when people say, oh, we've only had two years to adapt to this, I do point out that it was 1999, the first web content accessibility guidelines were published. And it was 1995, that the disability legislation first suggested that reasonable adjustments and anticipatory duty should be in place. So those are some of the things that I think you can push back on. Now, the accessibility requirement, wow, that's a lot. If you think of it in terms of driving a car to use some metaphors, then the accessibility requirement, when you look at the web content guidelines, it's being under the bonnet, the cogs, the fan belts, the valves, all of that stuff. But actually, the user requirement is like sitting in the driver's seat, and can I adjust the seats? Can I tilt it back? Can I make the mirrors work? So two very different perspectives on this. But this is where things begin to get a little complicated, because there is a legislation conundrum. It's great to say this new public sector web accessibility regulations do last what they should have been doing, or what perhaps we should have been doing for 20 years, 25 years. But here's a conundrum, because a good deal of the content you have on your websites and your VLEs, you don't own the copyright for. So for example, we have a situation where if you've got ebooks, or you've got journal articles and so on, where you don't have the IPR, the copyright and rights performance regulations. So here's a third bit of legislation I'm talking about this session. That legislation tells you it is entirely legal for you to take content, which you don't have the copyright for, but you do have legitimate lawful access, entirely legal for you to take that content, to take it apart, to make it accessible in different ways to different students, to create a completely accessible version. That's legal. However, it's only legal for personal use of disabled people. But the public sector bodies web legislation actually says something entirely opposite. It says that any failure to comply with the accessibility requirement, including the content that I have purchased, that I have licensed, that I have given students legitimate access to, any failure for that to meet the accessibility requirement is a failure for me as an organisation to make a reasonable adjustment. Now that's serious, because on the one hand it's saying you can only change that content for disabled people. On the other hand it's saying you have to change it for everyone. So you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't, because your organisation will include this huge range of content and you only have the right to make and supply accessible copies of copyrighted material to disabled people, but you have to somehow do it for everyone. So there is a conundrum here. You have three bits of legislation that you're having to negotiate around, that an individual student has an individual right to individualised support under the Equality Act, that all people should have access to digital accessible versions of all your content or accessible versions of all your digital content, all people should as a matter of right have that and then that actually you can, yeah you've got the rights to change copyrighted material, but only for disabled people. So what a nightmare. So here are the five strategies and I'm going to ask you, as I go through these, I'm going to ask you to reflect on this because in a moment I'm going to give you a link to an interactive Google document where I'm going to try to get some crowdsourced solutions, but I think there's these five broad approaches, procure wisely, check your suppliers' accessibility information. If they haven't got an accessibility statement, push back and tell them that you need one. Jessica Wikes at City University London has done a brilliant job recently, she's worked with five suppliers, pushed back, said we need an accessibility statement from you, you don't have one, do you want us to license these things again and she's ended up with the suppliers in the space of just a few weeks creating accessible accessibility statements for them, but obviously for the entire sector as well. Or if you're talking about eBooks, for example, the Aspire project has got scores for all the key suppliers of eBooks, the main publishers and the main platform providers that UK universities use. So ask your supplier if they are on that Aspire list and what their score is. And if they can't give you good accessibility information ask for a license reduction to cover your legitimate additional expense in either creating an accessibility statement yourself on their behalf or indeed supporting the students that can't use their inaccessible content. So procure wisely and influence academic practice. So I call this a sliding scale of preposterous demands because I know sometimes getting academics to do things outside the comfort zone is a little bit of an uphill struggle. So here's the first one a mandatory minimum of digital content on reading lists. So no longer is it okay to just point students to 15 hard copies in the library but have mandatory digital content that in itself would help. Maybe mandatory accessibility training on document accessibility. So you don't get a situation where one part of the organization is frantically trying to improve accessibility and the other part of the organization is still happily creating inaccessible content on a daily basis. Here's another as you go up that sliding scale of preposterous demands. How about the an organizational policy that departments need to support the additional costs for inaccessible resources. So if the commission purchase create inaccessible resources then maybe a central team will put them right but the department pays the costs. Or how about course leaders actually being responsible for course level accessibility statements that includes known issues and what your remediation plans are. And that sliding scale there will certainly help ownership of the academic practice that could push forward accessible practice. Train students strategically. Most students have not got a clue when they're on a journal platform or an ebook platform they have not got a clue whether they would get a better accessibility experience for their particular need by using the online platform, the PDF download, the EPUB download, the HTML version. They have no idea. So each of those has a very different accessibility profile and even more so depending on the tool that you've used to access them. I thought that might be the case Chris. I know I'm trading on thin ice here. And DIY remediation. There's loads of things you can do even if you've got a particularly inaccessible PDF. I can take an inaccessible PDF just a perhaps a scanned copy of a journal article. I can drop that in Google Drive, turn it into a Google Doc. It will automatically do the OCR. I've already improved that enormously. So there's a list there of browser plugins students could use, Office 365 options, inaccessible PDF that doesn't reflow nicely, bring it into Word. You read it in immersive reader or use the web layout view in Word in order to read it. So lots of different ideas there. But this is where I'm just going to go very quickly through the last couple of last options because I want to see what you use. Advocate broadly. Lobby just collections. Why are they not pushing back and not saying they're not? But why would you have to create accessibility statements for things that you're you're procuring or collecting from them? So anybody you can lobby, lobby. Lobbying is good fun. Do it and explain effectively. So that's where your accessibility statement might say, look, you can probably do X, Y and Z on these platforms, but you're going to struggle with PQ&R. So those are the bits that you might need to come and get us to help you with. So let's go now over to you. I've got a supplementary activity. I'm going to give you a link in the chat pane. Let me just get my link out and what I'd like you to do on that chat pane link. Here it is. If you open up that and I will bring that across onto the screen so you can see that as well. We've got a Google Doc there and I just want you to spend a couple of minutes now. It's on the second page of that document. So there's a navigation down the right hand bottom right. And just a couple of minutes on how your organization deals with copyrighted content. You don't have to name your organization. I'm just interested in you going down through that list. Some of you think, no, we don't really do that or maybe you do all of those. But I'd like you, each of you, there's only 80 of you, so it won't take long if each person put in just one, filled in one of those lines, what you do that you think is good practice, then we've got a crowdsourced document of 80 different good ideas. And if you do something completely different from all of that, there is one at the bottom called other approaches. So I'm going to give you a minute to do that and then that will give us five minutes for questions at the end. If you need that link again, I'll tell you, if it's not loading for you, I can give you the direct link because sometimes accessing a Google Doc from within another tool can be a little bit more tricky. So just give me a second and I'll open that up. This is where I find I've shut down my Google Drive. I knew I shouldn't have done that. I'm going to give you the direct link to the Google Doc and hopefully that will work for anybody where the other one didn't work. And now I just have to find my way back to where it's blackboard gone. Oh, there's blackboard. Is that blackboard? Yes, that's blackboard. Here we go. Direct link. Oh, somebody's done it already. Thank you, Shakir. Brilliant. So there's the link to the Google Doc directly. And if you wanted the link to the supplementary resource, which I'd quite like you to have because it does have some other content on there that will be useful to you. The supplementary resource is here. So we've got 50 odd people writing in there at the minute, which is brilliant. Please do that if you're interested in the joy of auto captions. Look at the screen. Oh, it's just gone. We had 50 old people rather than 50 odd people. Just while people are completing that document, I can see there's lots of busy typing going on. If you would like to ask a question and you'd rather do it over the mic than through the chat, then you can raise your hand and we can ensure that your microphone is enabled so that you can do that. So I'm going to just briefly look at the last couple of slides now. So you see what's there. We'll give you the link to the slides right at the end as well so you can come back and explore those at your leisure. One of the things about creating accessibility statements and about telling students what does work and doesn't work on the different systems you've got is that there's a big difference between being compliant and actually letting compliance change your culture. Along with some other colleagues, I've developed the FACTS model for accessibility statements, looking at making them formative, actionable, compliant, transparent and supportive. And if you are busy creating accessibility statements at the moment, as I'm sure you will be, then there's a really nice link to, well there's lots of different links on here, but particularly in that supplementary resource that we just looked at where you've been busy filling in, there's also, if I just bring that on the screen for a minute, you'll also see on the third page, down the bottom, I've got the embedded ASPIRE guidelines where what we do, we've got a list of things, it's almost like a checklist. You know, it does your statement, do this, does it do that, but it goes way beyond compliance. Level one and level two is about compliance and then we go on to user experience. Does it tell people about colors and contrasts, magnification and so on. That's well worth being aware of. And then the final elements, well that was the final element, so any questions really in the last five minutes? Excellent, thank you much. Yep, we've got one question there from Tundi. It says, I would be interested in hearing who is leading on accessibility within institutions across various stakeholders, is it web teams, marketing, education, research data computing services, disability teams? It's a brilliant question Tundi and the issue is that is every one of those and the organizations that you know, I'm aware of those organizations where it's lots of different groups of people. The thing that I would say is that if it only belongs to one team, it is going to really struggle to be effective because it needs to be supported as far up the the chain as possible because ultimately it involves job descriptions, ultimately it involves quality assurance and ultimately it involves things like self-assessment reviews. It might even involve your policy changes. No, you can't do that from halfway down the organization. There's got to be ownership higher up so the broader the team the better but also the higher up it coming from the commitments coming from the better it is. Okay, do we have any other questions? Anybody like to come across the mic where you can slide it into the chat? Yep, we've got one there. Scott, yeah. Maybe you think you find the effect of it, do you think it's been at the forefront? Yeah, I think it's had a mixed impact Scott because in some ways I think it's it's almost provided the excuse for people, oh my goodness we can't look at accessibility because we're so busy going online but at the same time I've also had the opposite where because people are having to go online and so much is online and they haven't got the friendly disability support team working individually with students on a Thursday afternoon to take them through content they're struggling with. I think it's also in some ways really highlighted that this is something that's really really important so it is a mixture. I think we might have time for one more quick question if anybody's got one. Feel free to raise your hand if you'd rather do it over the microphone. Okay, I don't think I can see any more questions or people typing in their Allister so this will bring you to the end of your presentation and so if you'd all like to find the clap function within our emojis in our chat we're going to give a big round of applause to Allister. That was absolutely brilliant presentation. I very very very much enjoyed that and really really useful for what I'm doing at the moment so I appreciate that yet lots of rounds of applause coming in and don't forget that recordings will be available on the resources section of the platform so once again Allister thank you so much for that presentation, very enjoyable.