Innovation and accessibility

You’ve now come to the end of Week 2. This is a good time to reflect on what you’ve learned this week and to think about changes you might make to your own practice.

Opening up education by making learning accessible to all can have life-changing consequences on a large scale. The World Bank points out that:

Persons with disabilities are more likely to experience adverse socioeconomic outcomes such as less education, poorer health outcomes, lower levels of employment, and higher poverty rates. Poverty may increase the risk of disability through malnutrition, inadequate access to education and health care, unsafe working conditions, a polluted environment, and lack of access to safe water and sanitation. Disability may also increase the risk of poverty, through lack of employment and education opportunities, lower wages, and increased cost of living with a disability.

The European Union’s Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030 states:

There is still a considerable need for action as demonstrated by the gaps in educational outcomes between learners with and without disabilities. More young persons with disabilities leave school early and fewer learners with disabilities complete a university degree (gap of 14.4pps). […] At EU level, inclusive education has been put high on the education agenda. One of the six axes of the European Education Area is dedicated to inclusive education and lifelong learning for all.

Accessibility is therefore one aspect of being an online educator that is worth spending time on getting right, and where it’s possible to have a significant impact on people’s lives.

You’ve seen that accessibility and inclusion do not need to come at the expense of innovation. In fact, it’s arguable that inaccessible educational technology and teaching innovations are an indulgence that perpetuate the digital and educational divide.

We hope that working with your fellow students during this week has provided you with new examples of inclusive innovation and good practice. Maybe you’ll try some of them out, or you may change aspects of your practice on the basis of reading some of the accessibility guidelines you’ve encountered this week.

Developments in online education are fast-changing, and accessibility guidelines can quickly go out of date as new tools and practices are introduced. So, if you make use of social media it could be worth following accounts where the latest developments in accessible educational technology are regularly shared. To find these, search for phrases such as ‘digital accessibility’.

In the coming week you’ll look at ways of evaluating any changes you make in your teaching, and of investigating claims made by others about the impact of innovation in online education.

References

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BC Campus (2018). Accessibility toolkit, 2^nd Edition: Multimedia. Available at: https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/chapter/multimedia/  (Accessed: 22/01/2025)

Blattgerste, J., Renner, P. and Pfeiffer, T. (2019) ‘Augmented reality action assistance and learning for cognitively impaired people: a systematic literature review’, in Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (pp. 270-279).

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