Many learners have limited direct experience with people with disabilities, and those that do tend to draw on disabled relatives and friends. We have seen how accessibility educators engage in a range of teaching activities to raise awareness and understanding of disability. These include bringing in expert users and guest lecturers to share their lived experiences or demonstrate their use of technologies, using videos, personas and simulation, and where applicable, educators and learners themselves drawing on their own experiences.
Whatever approaches may be employed, educators risk promoting some disabilities over others. These decisions can reinforce learner assumptions and societal stereotypes, marginalise some disabled communities, and present learners with incomplete and bias perspectives when designing and developing accessible solutions.
As learners develop more nuanced understandings of disabilities and come to recognise diversity, they engage more critically and reflexively in developing the technical knowledge and skills to implement accessibility effectively. Amy Ko described how her students react to watching a wide range of documentaries available through Access Computing:
“They suddenly realised that there’s just this incredible diversity of abilities in the world and that they can’t really make any assumptions about that, they just have to anticipate a broad spectrum of abilities and make sure there are many ways of using something and do the work to make those many ways all just as good as all the other ways. So usually, it’s kind of through by overwhelming them with the diversity of people’s experiences and abilities and lives. Once they’re overwhelmed, I feel like I’m successful. When they say things like ‘what do I do?!’ then I know that I’ve gotten that that level of empathy into them because they suddenly have this hopelessness. And then I can say, ‘well, there are some methods and here’s some tools and here’s some guidelines.”
Amy Ko, Professor, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Approaches to recognising diversity may require educators addressing specific disabilities and impairments and how they align with specific assistive technologies and accessibility solutions, while recognising the scope and nuances of the wider disabled community.
“In the oral exam, I choose TV, mobile phones, computer games, many, many different technologies where they have to reflect in the exam about the needs of the users and come up with something they have learnt in the course. So, I think this is really driving them in a way so that they have to think about different disabilities, not only about blind people… If you have people in the group, in the cohort, but if you do this in an oral way, you also can confront them with other disabilities. And then it will be really interesting. Some students learn specifically for this, so they know then which types of disabilities they can talk about. And only in the second step, they reflect. So, they have at least learnt which groups I’m covering and what are the specific needs and what multiple handicaps there are. So that they at least have a bigger overview than just referring to a particular technology or particular issue.”
Gerhard Weber, Professor, TU Dresden, Germany
Shilpi Kapoor, founder of Barrier Break in India, highlighted the need to also raise awareness and understanding of diversity amongst her disabled workforce, who engage in accessibility and usability testing:
On the side of the assistive technology users, I think the first thing we have to break is, ‘ours is the only disability that exists, and there isn’t another to worry about’ and to open their eyes and say that, you know, disability goes beyond your own disability and you need to consider other disability types, is a challenge. And it takes a little bit of time for people to get used to that approach that we have to think for all disabilities and not just our own.
Shilpi Kapoor, Founder, Barrier Break, India
This theme was explored further by Susanna Laurin, identifying the challenges organisations face when accessing and engaging with expert user communities:
“End users also need to be educated and trained in accessibility. And this is something that some people think is very bad of me to say, but it’s still true. So and very generically speaking then each disability group, know accessibility from their little perspective, but they don’t know so much about others, which is kind of natural. But that also means that if a client asks the end-user community or end-user organisations about something, they may just get one perspective. So that it would be better if the end-user organisations could be a little bit more inclusive of themselves and try to cover – I mean, You can’t be experts on everything – but to just try to make sure that you don’t provide advice that goes directly in conflict with another group.”
Susanna Laurin, Chief Research and Innovation Officer, Funka, Sweden
Barrier Break address this by ensuring the 65% of their workforce who are disabled is diverse and integrated in the way they work:
“We have a very high number and we have people from all walks of life and all disability types. So for us, it is when we’re looking at accessibility testing and we tell our customers, if you want a low vision user, just to come in and test your pages, that’s an option which is available. And we don’t as a company want, you know, a sighted person to do low vision testing, which is what most of the industry does. We want to have a low vision tester and have an observer who understands what their challenges are, what they can’t do, and then document that. So for us, it’s very critical. So just to give a simple example, our document mediation services that are done by people who are deaf and hard of hearing and physically challenged people and people with autism. And the same file is then tested by a sceenreader user. And so the team becomes very integrated with people with disabilities.”
Shilpi Kapoor, Founder, Barrier Break, India
A similar approach is adopted at at Google, where Holly Schnell described the powerful advocacy voice of disabled advocacy groups within her organisation, and the necessity to engage across all communities:
“We definitely have teams that are just focussed on, for example, cognitive disabilities or different other types of disabilities that are just focussed on that, and they do a lot of advocacy and actually create their own products to demonstrate how it can be done. But that is something that we do hope to convey in the foundational knowledge, like all the different types of disabilities and all the different, you know, for example, colour blindness is not something that’s necessarily thought of a lot, but it’s something that is an easy fix that you can incorporate into your products or, you know, captions for the deaf and hard of hearing is a huge one. Don’t ever put out a video or any kind of audio that doesn’t have a caption component to it. So we try to hit on every different type of disability. Switch access, you know, for folks with mobility disorders and things. So we definitely try to cover all of them. We also have folks who are focussed on a user that has multiple disabilities because not everyone just has one. And in fact, the president of our Disability Alliance, she has multiple disabilities and she talks openly about those, and you can see how she has different products that, they work together to create a good experience for her. So, we do try to touch on that quite a bit.”
Holly Schnell, Accessibility Education Program Manager, Google, USA