Accessibility in Education - a new nudge for universities

At the risk of being mildly controversial, it's time we started to move digital accessibility away from disabled people. I'm excited about a new, free resource to help with that move.

The focus of legislation has changed

The more mature digital legislation becomes, the less it requires the existence of disabled people to justify good practices. In many countries, accessibility legislation applies to all public sector bodies whether or not a disabled person ever looks at their website. The European Accessibility Act?will embed accessibility considerations in a wide range of digital services and products, irrespective of how many disabled customers they have.?

What is at stake here is a long overdue professionalisation of digital skills. It shifts the focus from the abilities or disabilities of the user to the abilities (or lack) of the person creating the product or service.?

Education providers look at the wrong people.

In the education context, the discussion is focused too often around disabled students and the difficulties they have accessing study materials. This entirely misses the point. The "disabling" takes place not because they are neurodiverse or visually impaired but because of the poor accessibility of the Word documents, PDFs and presentations they have to use. The person needing support is not the dyslexic student struggling to find key content in a long document or the blind student trying to find the key hyperlink they need. The lecturer is the "disabled" person, the one whose digital skill gap leaves them creating amateur documents in a professional setting and disabling dozens of others in the process.

Publication opportunities provide a different hook.

And this is why I am delighted to see the recent guidance from the Institute of Professional Editors - Books without Barriers. Many university lecturers are as committed to their research as they are to their students, maybe even more so. But the currency of research is publication. And when publishers begin to require base line levels of accessible practice, higher education has a vested interest in adopting professional practice.

The culture shifts from "I do this in case I have a disabled student" towards a healthier and more sustainable "I do this because that's the professional practice and I am a professional."?

So this is my Big Ask. It is entirely achievable.

1. that academic publishers look at the Books Without Barriers guidelines and incorporate the principles into their own submission guidelines.
2. every University Press requires high quality accessibility as part of their manuscript submission process, and
3. every university research support facility provides guidance to help researchers write up research that can be read by the widest variety of users on the widest range of devices. That - by the way - is a neat definition of "accessible"...

The right priorities in a timely way

I've read too many author guidelines that provide detailed guidance on "How To Capitalise Titles" yet remain unaccountably silent on how to use heading styles or create an accessible table.

More accessible manuscripts translate more quickly to more accessible publications, and the European Accessibility Act has much to say about that. By helping make accessible practice a baseline professional requirement (and adding it to job descriptions for anyone creating digital content), you'll shift the focus away from the end user and back to the skills of the author.?Admittedly, we need to consider both, but an unrelenting focus on the end user can create both a resentment in the writer (why do I need to do this?) and a dependency in the reader (please do this for me!).

Let's see it as it is. There are right ways of creating digital content and wrong ways. Forget about disabled people for a moment; if your job description involves creating digital content, you should be doing it the right way as a professional.

A lot of disabled readers will thank you for that.

• Various formats of Books without Barriers are available from the Institute of Professional Editors website.