Very brilliant keynote that we had this morning. My name is Alice Chapman and I am going to be chairing this session today, just to welcome you here. Welcome online to everyone that has joined us. It is great to see you. We have two brilliant presentations coming up and we have got Q&A sessions at the end of each one. In the hall or if you are online we have the VVox available for us in the main hall, so get your questions in on there. We have also got a microphone if anyone would like to ask a question in person. I wneud am ysgrifennidol, rydw i'n gweithio y cysylltu ffyrwyr i'r sgwrdd a'r gyfnodol, sy'n gwneud i'r ddweud o'r gyfnodol, ac wedi'i ddweud y cysylltu ffyrwyr i'r ddweud. Rydw i'n gweithio Matthew Turner ac Alison Gibson, os ydych chi'n cynddi'ch ysgol. Yn dweud, yna ymddir yma, roedd diolch y cyllidir ac ymgyrch yma. Fyraedd y dyma i'r cyfnodol i'r ganddau a'r gweithio yma, a we've got Will, Moindrot, and Ben and McRae, who are going to be talking about that. So enjoy the sessions and I'm going to hand over to our first speakers. Thank you. Hi everyone. So we're going to talk to you about accessibility statements and our roll out and encouragement of people to use accessibility statements at the University of Birmingham. My name is Matt Turner. I am one of the heads of HEFFY at the University of Birmingham. I have responsibility for one of our five colleges, the College of Arts and Law, and we're from a unit in the university called the Higher Education Futures Institute. We're an institute made up of learning technologists, learning designers, and also we have colleagues that work on the educational development side. So we're very much staff development and from a digital perspective supporting staff with the use of their digital tools from an education perspective. Hi everyone. I'm Alison. So similar to Matt, I'm a head of digital in our department. I am lucky enough to work with two colleges for some reason. So I get the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences and the College of Life and Environmental Sciences. So the two kind of STEM colleges are the ones that I'm looking after. Great. So in our talk today around accessibility statements we're going to tell you a bit about the background and development of our principles around accessibility statements. Alice is going to talk through the benefits and challenges of rolling those out. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the evaluation and feedback from the rollout of those both in terms of feedback to our academic colleagues but also to students and then a little bit about where we've got to now and what we're planning to do in terms of next steps. So in terms of background and development then, I'm sure many people in the room will be familiar and many people online at home as well will be familiar with the public sector accessibility regulations and the requirements that a public sector body must provide an accessibility statement. So imagine we're fairly familiar with that. And we like I'm sure a lot of institutions have taken the sector produced templates and the guidance around producing an accessibility statement that meets those legislative requirements and we have one of those for RVLE, so Canvas is RVLE. We have one of those on the virtually learning environment for people to engage with. The problem with those kind of statements and the kind of requirements around those, that requirement that there's an explanation of parts of content that's not accessible and the reasons why, ideally a description of accessible alternatives provided and a description and a link and a contact form, but we find that those are really really technical but they become very technical quite quickly. So you get technical information about a website's accessibility, you get you're required to put information about non-compliance with accessibility regulations in there and in many respects it's unclear who that statement is aimed at. And indeed in conversations with students, students have fed back that the accessibility statement we have in RVLE is not accessible, it's really not understandable, it's not written in plain English even though it conforms to those sector templates and it meets the requirements of the legislation. So we gave them some thought to this and thought about well what could we do actually that would provide students with a more accessible version of a statement, but also gave them more substantial and concrete information about the way that teaching would take place on their module or a discipline level. So bringing it much much down from the RVLE as a platform but thinking about it from a disciplinary perspective. And we carried out a review of what else was out there in the sector and this is going back a few years, this kind of in 2022 we'll begin to think about this. And so some of these resources you might be familiar with, some of them you might have contributed to, some of which might have changed and moved on from the point at which we looked at them. But so there was a piece of work from Advanced HE around guidance for captioning rich media and that included suggestions on the lines of text that you could put in that statement that you might put out to students. So you might say something like whilst we would like to achieve full technical compliance on video and lecture capture recording we cannot currently meet the full accessibility requirements, we're working to improve accessibility of all media content by taking the following steps and then you might go and list what those steps are. Kent takes a similar approach or took a similar approach at that time, so an example from them, we aim to design content for everyone to find, read and understand and be compatible with assistive technologies and in accordance with accessibility standards and then they would go on to outline that in the statement. UCL in their course level baseline requirements, they also had an accessibility statement draft text that they had in there that then talks about the type of resources and the type of approaches that are contained within that particular module or course. So there were some good examples already out there of approaches that you might take to provide statements to students that give them a clear set of information about what to expect from a digital accessibility perspective. I then took these these kind of sector experiences and basically wrote a set of accessibility statement principles that could be shared with staff to encourage them to develop a student facing user friendly accessibility statement for kind of whatever level they like really, so first of all thinking about this at a module level, so an individual module but also beginning to think about it at a discipline level as well about something that might be specific to a certain discipline and the principles obviously are trying to be as straightforward and simple as possible saying that the statement should be inclusive and accessible, should give an overview of the resources that are available of how they're organised so on canvas in our instance on our VALE, should highlight what you're doing to provide accessible resources, should highlight any areas which may fall short in terms of accessibility and what steps you're taking to mitigate them, importantly who to contact if you find an issue and also in our conversations with colleagues as well making it clear that providing an anonymous route for students to contact is really really important so you don't you know you don't have to put your head above the parapet to declare that you've got an issue to notifying raise that there is an issue and then just making it easy to find as well, so clear sign posting so that it can be found really really easily it's not just just hidden away somewhere in a kind of a niche place for a small number of people only to find if they know where it is and then we go a little bit further and we encourage colleagues to actually think about it more as a statement about the approach to teaching on that module so let's not make it just niche for a small number of people that have accessibility requirements let's think about it as an overview of how the programme or module might be talked and give it some information on what approaches to teaching how the content might be organised for all students so make it much more inclusive wherever possible so we don't really have a prescribed format we give the option for it to focus on digital accessibility but to allow that option for it to be a wider approach to how teaching might be organised on that programme on that module whatever kind of works so alongside those principles we give a bit of a template as to an approach that you might use to present that statement and template is a word document and it's broken down into four headings so I've given you the headings there and also just given you some examples so just just thinking about the headings first of all there's an overview of the teaching resources there's a statement and information on what we will do to provide accessible resources information on potential accessibility issues and the steps that have been taken to lesson them or we'll attempt to take to lesson them and then that all important contact route as well so really just three headings and then and then a route for contact an email address or a form or whatever that might be and then alongside that template or suggested template with those those heading structures some examples as well so we give give some examples from different disciplines so in the first instance that was a language discipline based example and a mathematics based example so so two quite contrasting disciplines with quite different needs from an accessibility perspective gave some examples of type of language that might be used and then as we've developed further and people have started to write statements for use on their own modules and in their own areas we've provided those examples as well as a kind of a bank of resources that colleagues can use when they're beginning to offer their own statements and what we get then is almost a pick and mix set of statements that colleagues can use and they can pick and choose the ones that suit their module and their approach to teaching and they can amend them and just you know quickly edit them as as they might see fit so there's there's a few examples there that I've given you from both those sample ones that we've provided but also ones that we've seen in real use so some really simple things like the module will provide a range of resources on canvas pages adding word PowerPoint and PDF format documents and pre-recorded videos and these will be arranged on a week by week basis with clear page and file names so just a real simple intent about what it is that we're going to do and then as you see we go through some more detail in terms of what we'll do to them we'll check those pages we'll use the accessibility checkers that we've got access to we'll provide captioning we'll make effort to correct those captions if we've got complex images then we'll provide alternative descriptions of those we'll ensure that there's ways that you can engage with them in alternative ways and ideally we'll provide a glossary of terms as well of that common terminology that might show up in in you know might be talked about in lectures might show up in the lecture materials and the teaching materials so that you understand and you get those key terms in varying different forms in varying different formats so that's the kind of the overview of that approach that we would take. We've got a quick polling question for you now so if we can if we can swap over to the polling please. So just a simple question so have you approached providing a module level accessibility statements or you know just in the area you teach or perhaps been involved in any conversations around those type of things whether that's in an institutional level or just within your institution or just in terms of your own approach it's going to give that just a couple of more moments for a few more responses to come in okay great and if we can swap back if we could show the results sorry first okay good that's that's interesting it's interesting that there's you know there's there's 20% of people that have kind of thought about it or made steps in those directions they'll be interesting to hear from people in conversation around the conference about kind of what those those steps were okay thank you if we can swap back to the slides. So as Matt said he's been doing a lot of work on this in the institution for quite a while and I kind of jumped in a bit on his coattails when I came into the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences because there was quite an appetite in that college to trial some school level accessibility statements so it's a really large college but we've trialled accessibility statements in two of the schools so metallogy and materials and chemical engineering and we discussed you know having a college level statement entirely and we've decided to go with the school level one so so school of math school of physics all these schools are developing their own ones now and the reason that we chose to do it that way rather than the college wide one is is what I'm going to talk about a little bit now and also think about some of the challenges that we encountered along the way so some of the benefits in terms of providing these school level or department level statements one really obvious one it allows you to be discipline specific so we all know when we're talking to academics that the more you can say tell me about your discipline what's special about your subject is a really good way to get people involved and wanting to talk to you and these statements allow you to have those conversations they also mean you're not making decisions like like Matt mentioned complex images you're not deciding whether that has to be an accessibility statement even for disciplines that don't use it or do you leave it out for everyone even though it's relevant to some people so you're kind of you're avoiding some of those tricky conversations and allowing yourselves to be a little bit more specific with what you're including it also allows you to start this dialogue with students so again people might say students with accessibility needs will tell you they'll come forward they'll declare it they'll have support and what these statements allow you to do is be the first one to start that conversation so it puts the responsibility on the department to say we're going to have this conversation with you this is our part that we can play in this conversation and and invite the students to talk to talk to you about it at that point once you've kind of made the first move essentially and just creates transparency about what it is that you're going to be doing it also acknowledges different accessibility needs so when I talk a bit later about some of the evaluation we did with students some of the conversation was around them saying things like I don't have any accessibility needs but it's you know it's good that these statements exist and one of the things that we're trying to change with this conversation with these accessibility statements is none of us really know what our accessibility needs are going to be over the course of a programme of study might be different today to it is tomorrow and those needs are going to change between different students and four individual students and these statements allow you to address that they're also quite good at just being really explicit about whose responsibility it is to do what so Matt said we use canvas canvas is great in a lot of ways but we are we will bump up against limitations within canvas and academics aren't responsible for those limitations so these statements allow us to be more specific about what it is a module lead or a module team is going to do so we've got another poll here so obviously in the first one only 20% of people have said that you've already either implemented or started thinking about these accessibility statements so this is if you have already done it what challenges did you face but if you haven't done it is there something holding you back are there challenges that you can that you're predicting that you might face this is a word cloud so you're a bit limited in terms of how many characters you can can put in we've got lots of buy-in and liking that phrase that comes up several times time yeah the student interest one is interesting and consistency yeah the the more schools I talk to about this the more that comes up to just a couple more minutes there thank you these are these are all great and thank you everyone online who's who's chipping in this is really interesting to see okay so if we oh it just keeps changing because everyone keeps putting things in thank you it's great just to think a little bit about those challenges and I'll go on to the list that we've prepared as well but a lot of it is very similar buy-in from staff academic staff interest from students um resistance is an interesting one that I'll talk about a little bit um an academic engagement because I think it's it's not what you'd expect or it certainly wasn't what I expected but that's great let's let's go back to the presentation if we can thank you for that that that's uh led very neatly into the list that we've prepared um so yes engagement from staff um like I said this this is perhaps a little bit different to what you might expect because it's it's become apparent that it's quite difficult for people to say no to this if you say maybe we should do an accessibility statement and these are the benefits people don't really have an easy way of saying no to that um so getting the yes is is really useful um but it's it's moving that commitment in words into actions which is one of the points on there turn turning people's yes this is a good idea into our okay what are we going to do and what standards are we going to hold academics to if if we put these things in writing so that's really a really big part of it um the skills and experience of staff obviously there was a lot of upskilling for us and I'm sure for a lot of you during COVID but there are still things that people don't know around digital accessibility um you know very basic formatting things using proper headings instead of just making fonts larger those sorts of things that people are still just missing so making sure um we address those communicating with students students get such a deluge of information especially at this time of year so it's really hard to try and break through that um getting senior leadership engagement um we did have an academic a senior academic make the comment to Matt not that long ago that these the aim of these statements was to under promise and over deliver and that's that's the kind of attitude that we're often dealing with it's people saying yes you can do it we just can't actually promise to do that much with them now we don't actually have a huge amount of time left so I'm going to quickly move on to some of the steps that we took um to overcome some of these challenges so staff engagement often it's just about repeating those benefits from the beginning why it is that we're doing this why is it important for your specific discipline um acknowledging that documents are going to change over time we don't see these aesthetic documents that are going to be in place from now until forever we're addressing them every year in terms of staff skills the the approach we took to this which has been um really useful is that we actually have our statements are essentially dual facing so we have a student statement which is everything that's already talked about but then we have a staff version which links out to guidance it includes really quick tips and pointers it tells them where to find the information so that they can be doing the things that we're telling students they're going to be doing and that's worked really well and running more training sessions um choosing your language really carefully so we use very soft language a lot of the time we say things like staff will aim to do this staff are encouraged to do this so that's just that thing about what expectations we're setting and can we meet them and then communicating with students we haven't cracked this one entirely or I'll be honest but it's getting the well-being teams on board at this um for the next academic year I think is going to be really useful um so just quickly on to the evaluation and feedback so like I said this was in two of our schools we had just over 50 students respond and about 30 staff members the questions for the staff members were primarily asking them whether they were actually doing the things that we said they were going to aim to do in the statement so are you recording your lectures are you using accessibility checkers in word on canvas um are you using alt text when you have any images and how are you approaching complex images so those sorts of questions were what we asked staff um and some of the comments back were really useful particularly around the idea that it's actually technology in the room which is limiting people it's poor microphones it's missing microphones audio quality unrecorded lectures you can say yes I record my lectures but it doesn't mean they're usable so that came up really strongly and then for the student survey only about 50% of students had actually seen the statements until we did the survey so doing the survey was actually a really good way to to encourage students to go and look at it and get some quite good feedback the down the bottom where it's about 25 30% of students having a negative feeling about the accessibility statements that was actually more about a lot of the comments suggested it was more about students having issues with accessible resources it was actually comments like I didn't get the power point before the lecture or the audio quality was terrible so that that information isn't quite accurate unfortunately but again some really good comments came out particularly one around the fact that the actual accessibility statement was perhaps not that accessible when it was a word document and that it could be inbuilt into Canvas to make it a bit more accessible which is really useful feedback that we will take on board we will move very quickly on to next steps so Alison's talked about the statements being either in use or in development for all seven schools in our College of Engineering and Physical Sciences so across all those STEM subjects that Alison's mentioned they're also under discussion in the four schools in our College of Life and Environmental Sciences and in my college we're we've currently drafted and it's you know it's up for further discussion and finalisation and approval but a college level statement for the College of Arts and Law the disciplines are quite similar in the College of Arts and Law as you might expect so we're beginning to scale up from small small starting points we're beginning to scale up which is which is great and we're beginning to get some senior staff in each of those colleges on board we've taken this further forward we obviously need to continue providing support we need to continue providing training continue providing guidance we've got some a range of courses and guidance resources available to staff we've got an accessible educator course I'm talking about on Thursday so have a look out for that one but also thinking about what can we do to influence equipment so better microphones better access to microphones those kind of things that can really help from a recording quality perspective and what can we do around caption correction can we provide additional resource or can we influence the institution to provide additional resource for caption correction I'm sure everyone recognises that as a problem so those are kind of some of the steps that we're taking and I think what we'll probably do is we'll finish there so I'll skip past the the other poll that we had the references are on the slides I'm not going to expect you to read those for now and then there are our contacts should you wish to get in contact with us at all and again I'm presuming that you'll get access to the slides so you don't have to scrub all that down right now but we'll pause there for questions thank you very much thank you thank you very much and that was a really interesting talk on this scenario I'm particularly interested in so I was scribbling lots of notes there and I just want to say thank you I think I'm sure that everybody has been listening intently and writing down their own notes as well and we do have a couple of minutes just before the next talk so if there are any questions I can see that one's come through on Vvox what were the key differences for science disciplines versus arts shall I start off? I mean I think it's it's obviously it's thinking about the different teaching approaches in in the discipline and therefore what type of resources students might get presented with so if you think at the kind of those two examples that I used in the presentation of a very fundamental level if it for a mathematical based discipline you've got a lot of use of mathematical terminology you've got latex mathematical formulae those kind of things and it immediately becomes a challenge as to how you present those from a lecture recording perspective captioning mathematical terminology is is pretty much impossible really really hard to do so you've got to think about what you're going to provide in terms of alternative resources and support from that perspective there's a lot of handwritten lecture presentation approaches in those disciplines for example our mathematics department it prefers to use white boards and short boards as opposed to powerpoint and those kind of things so again it's how you present that and how you share those materials back to students so that's what you want to tell students from an arts perspective it's potentially much more straightforward but then you've still got disciplines like languages um who are obviously using languages other than English not necessarily using the same alphabet so again it's how you make those resources available to students and how you provide accessible versions of those resources so again it might be thinking about a glossary of terms or those those type of approaches so it's a quite lot of differences and you've had more detailed conversations in I think maybe just the other thing to mention about the science disciplines is we we included things that not to do with digital accessibility but around lab work because that's such a massive part of so many of those um schools so so information for students around group work that they'd be expected to do as well as accessibility of the um labs themselves thank you and I can see that we've had quite a lot of questions come through but we do need to swap over to our second set of presenters but I'm sure um you're going you are around aren't you at the conference and we've obviously got discord as well so please do if you haven't had your question answered then I'm sure that um you'd be happy for people to get in touch with you wouldn't you as this is something that I'm sure we could talk about all day so um just to give you another thank you for sharing and um to give you a round of applause as well if we can do that in the evening.