 I'm going to press record or Debbie already has fantastic things, Debbie, and we're going to hand over to you. Take it away here. Oh, you're 20. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Tareem. I'm a learning technology researcher at University College of State Management ready. Today, my talk is based on the book chapter that myself, Professor Andrew Adams, Professor Shirley Williams have recently published in the book, Opening Education, Theory and Practice. The book chapter is titled, Open to Inclusion, Exploring Openness for People with Disability, and you can find the final version from Research Gate, and I've given the link at the end of my presentation. In this chapter, we explore how openness have been viewed over the years, opening the flow of capital, technologies, goods and services with increased globalization, opening higher education with the Open Universities movement, opening access to content with open educational resources and open courses, all of that. We also ask you to think about open as opening up to inclusion, accessibility, especially for people with disabilities. My talk will be more or less aligned with these areas, but first of all, I want to tell you a bit about my interest in accessibility. In 2013, I was part of the University of Reading team, offering begin programming, build your first mobile game, MOOC, on the new, then new platform, FutureLearn. The course was very popular, and it ran twice a year, with many thousands of participants. The course used a billiard-like game to introduce programming concepts. I was the lead facilitator of the MOOC, managing a small team of student mentors, supporting the learners on the course. One day, there was a post from a lady who said that she could not see the ball that is used in the game. She was colorblind. She could not differentiate the ball from the background because the way we have presented it. She said, after programming the game, that is, for the ball to move in a certain way, she had to ask her boyfriend to check whether it was working correctly. She was trying to access learning materials, but the way it was presented, it was not accessible to her. Later, I learned that red on green is a difficult combination for many colorblind people. In this instance, it was very easy for me to correct to help her change the color of the background and the color of the ball by replacing the image files. This experience of virtually meeting a learner who had a difficulty in accessing learning materials made accessibility real for me. And this is where my interest in accessibility started. Accessibility can mean many things in different contexts. For example, it can be used to mean access to internet in some contexts. Access to water in other contexts. Oxford Living Dictionary defines accessibility as the quality of being easily reached, entered or used by people who have a disability. This is what I mean when I say accessibility. People with disabilities, whether it is long term, short term, age related or any other, can use the website and services. There are digital accessibility standards for a very good reason. And most widely used is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in its 2.1 version. And the 2.2 version is now made available for the first public working draft. There are three levels, A, double A and triple A, which is the goal standard for accessibility. In the UK and many other countries, there are laws to stop people from being discriminated against when accessing physical or online products or services. So accessibility of online content is important to not discriminate against disabled people. Moving on to the next. Open content can be created by anybody with an interest. This could be the world authority in the subject discipline or a complete beginner with an interest. People who are creating these content may be knowledgeable in their subject area. But are they aware of creating content that is accessible to people with disabilities? If you carefully read the quote I have shown here in this slide taken from Andy Lane's work in 2012, it talks about socially excluded communities who do not have much access to technologies or who may not be able to cope with technologies and new ways of learning. In this presentation, I am going to explore with you what it may be for people who have disabilities. Like in the example I showed you at first, how these people, even when they are able to use and cope with technologies, could be barred from accessing open content due to their disabilities. As I touched upon earlier, there are legal frameworks to provide equal opportunities for people with disabilities. In the book chapter, we look at several countries and their legal frameworks. However, the legal framework on its own is not going to provide the solution to opening access. I will talk about this a little bit later. One may think if we have laws and if they are enforced, the problem could be solved. However, it's not that simple. In the United States, there are quite a few cases with many high-profile cases such as MIT, Harvard University of California, Berkeley being sued for accessibility reasons. However, when people are creating their own open educational resources, these do not come under the enforceable laws. My slide looks a little bit different, but anyway, there is a big ethical question. There are about 270 tube stations in London. About 79, 78 of them have some form of step-free access. Some of the tube stations cannot be retrofitted for accessibility. One-fifth of disabled musicians have been forced to cancel gigs due to lack of access according to Attitude is Everything survey. Similarly, out of so many OERs, only a very few are accessible. In the case of University of California, Berkeley, you may remember in March 2017, they took down a lot of freely available video and audio content because it was way too expensive for them to caption. So how can we solve this problem? Should we charge a nominal fee to access resources that can then be used to make them accessible? What about this nominal fee? What should this nominal fee be? Remember, huge part of the developing world population live under the absolute poverty line. A nominal fee for us may not be a nominal fee for them. Then we replace one access limitation, in this case disability, with another access limitation that is financial means. If an OER is used in a formal course, the university or institution will provide accessibility support. If there is a problem, you can ask the university or institution you are studying with to provide you with accessible versions. Even if it is a MOOC or a free course, from the cases in the US, we know that you can get accessibility support. If it is not part of a formal course and you wanted to access, it is the legislations are unlikely to cover that kind of OER use. But many OERs are created by individuals and in this case there is no help from legislations. If institutions are using OERs to make them accessible, they could then provide these best to the OER repository so that the resource becomes accessible to all. Quick search on Merlot database showed about 450 OERs having an accessibility information out of about 80,000 resources. So you can see the scale of this. What we see is that if OERs are created by an institution, the institution can be held responsible for accessibility. However, when OERs are individually created and shared, these are not governed by equality laws. Personas is a representation of your websites or systems intended users. It gives focus to the intended user when designing your system or your website. Personas help us to replace the abstract user that you think of with the presence of a specific user in the design process. In our chapter, we use four personas to explore accessibility issues with OERs. So this is Khalid, 18-year-old champion swimmer, college student who is into computers and gadgets but is also deaf. Then we have Sophie, a 25-year-old musician and a trainee accountant who lives in supported accommodation after losing her site. We have Arun, a 55-year-old software engineer who took early retirement due to MS and now using an adapted computer. Finally, we have Chamary, who is a 45-year-old childcare assistant whose promotion is depending on English and Maths qualifications. Chamary has dyslexia. So what challenges will they face in accessing OER content? Khalid will need captions and or transcripts as an accessibility aid for video audio content. Sophie will require keyboard accessibility and screen reader accessibility of the materials. She will leave video descriptions and alternative text for images as a minimum. Arun on the other hand will need keyboard accessibility. Chamary will need simple organizations, illustrations, less text, ability for text resizing and perhaps line spacing, text-to-speech. For example, a scanned image of text as a resource will not be accessible to her either Sophie or Chamary because screen readers cannot work on scanned images. Unless you have OCRed them, how will they create OERs? Unless captions, transcripts available, Khalid is not going to be benefiting from a video or audio content. So Khalid is unlikely to create audio content if we ask him to create an OER. Unless it is screen reader friendly, Sophie is not going to be able to navigate a resource. However, she will be able to use audio resources. Keyboard accessibility will be the primary concern for Arun. As for Chamary, textual content will present a problem and she is more likely to go with audio or video content. Imagine if our learners were each to create an OER without being aware of each other's accessibility needs. Being a learner with disabilities, would they be able to create more accessible content? They would be working within the constraints of their own disabilities and not likely to use the functionality that they themselves have difficulty in accessing. They are more likely than not to create something that is accessible to them. But doing so, they may make it not accessible to others. For example, if Chamary creates more visual OER, it will not be accessible to Sophie. If Arun creates all textual material, that is likely to present a problem for Chamary. Likewise, you can see how their limitations, if they are only aware of their limitations, would create a problem for each other. This is where accessibility awareness comes into play. So even if you are an assistive technology user, you may not be able to create a fully accessible OER unless you are aware of wide variety of accessibility issues. This is why we want to emphasise the importance of accessibility awareness and best practices. Open content can support open to inclusion. There are good MOOCs that address accessibility issues. On future learn digital accessibility, enabling participation in the information society by University of Southampton, accessibility designing and teaching courses for all learners in higher education on Canvas are some of these courses. You can see here, we have adapted University of Hull's accessibility posters that they had made available via Creative Commons licence. It is available with Creative Commons licence for anyone to use. Feel free to download it and use it if you think it will be useful to you. What I want to leave you with is the fact that open content can support open to inclusion by raising awareness. You can download our book chapter from the given link here and explore with Khalid, Arun, Chamary and Sophie how the support for them will differ in different contexts. Thank you. Thank you very much Therindu for an amazing session and I hope I can now invite everyone in the room to put their hands together to give a very warm thank you to Therindu for an amazing presentation.