Accessibility maturity in an educational context - 1

Maturity and compliance are different

When you ask adults to recall their most memorable and enjoyable learning experiences it nearly always comes back to relationships – a fun teacher, an inspiring lecturer, a lively community. Such human interactions neatly illustrate the difference between maturity and compliance. A “mature relationship” sounds a lot more attractive than a “compliant” one. Yet many institutions are offering compliance to disabled learners rather than mature relationships.

In the UK, the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) set clear legal requirements for universities and colleges - and slightly less clear legal requirements for schools. Many colleges and universities have made significant efforts to move towards compliance. It’s a good first step but the worry is when compliance becomes the goal. If your digital accessibility preparations were about “Task and Finish” groups, or steering groups, or secondments that ended in Autumn 2020, you have probably made a good start with compliance. But you will already be going backwards. Like the human body, organisations need their growing to outstrip their dying. Accessibility maturity is about ensuring the things that promote good practices continue to grow. This means being embedded in cultural practice and consciousness. There are implications far beyond a time-limited steering group.

Maturity in an educational context

Among public sector bodies, education has unique challenges.

• Engagement, challenge, and assessment – technology enhanced learning has to engage all the users with all the content. It must challenge them to persevere with content they find difficult. It must set them tasks and test the extent of their understanding. As a teacher, I had to ensure every one of my learners was engaged with the online content I provided. No other public sector body has the same demand to be entertaining and challenging. No other public sector body requires their audience to access and learn all the content provided. This has implications on the media, formats and activities teachers need to use.
• Third party content - an online teaching module may have links to YouTube videos, journal articles, e-books, research papers, industry publications and so on. All of these have their own copyright and IPR conditions. These hinder tutors from making wholesale improvements to accessibility, even when technology exists to make such improvements.
• Skills, resources, and training - most public sector bodies have a small team of trained people in charge of online content. Quality assurance is easy to guarantee. But a university or college may have a thousand different people with different skill sets uploading content daily.

Within this context, a compliance-only approach, is at best, very hard to achieve.  At worst, it is counter-productive. If organisations retreat from digital diversity to rely on hardcopy printouts (where no accessibility standards apply), disabled students are massively disadvantaged.

If organisations retreat from digital diversity to rely on hardcopy printouts (where no accessibility standards apply), disabled students are massively disadvantaged.

Accessibility maturity is based, instead, on a holistic approach that

• acknowledges the generic benefits of digital content over traditional handouts/hard copy,
• encourages diverse digital approaches that are mindful of different accessibility needs,
• recognises that people with different disabilities (or indeed none) benefit from different resources in different ways,
• moves beyond compliance to culture, seeking to identify and evolve “best achievable practice” that draws on good pedagogy, good policy, and good quality assurance.

Measuring maturity

The concept of accessibility maturity has been around for a long time in different guises and different examples exist. The critical thing for any consideration of accessibility is that it needs to have resonance and relevance for the people employing it. That’s why other “high level” maturity models have less traction in educational contexts. They don’t get to the nitty gritty of practice or influence.

The critical thing for any consideration of accessibility is that it needs to have resonance and relevance for the people employing it

The AbilityNet/McNaught model originated in my TechDis days. I was researching further education good practice for a series of Senior Manager accessibility briefings. The model emerged from observations and conversations with dozens of leaders across the sector. Simon Ball, a TechDis colleague, was simultaneously researching good practice in Higher Education. When we compared findings, the maturity model seemed equally relevant in both contexts. TechDis developed a series of Online Accessibility Self Evaluation Services (OASES) based on the principles of the model. Online sessions with 98 institutions validated the model’s usefulness, noting that “One of the key values of the work was in identifying areas where responsibilities genuinely overlapped, and progress is only possible collaboratively.” More tellingly, “A significant proportion of participants, who believed their institution to be very advanced in terms of support for disabled learners, were surprised to find the gap between specific support and embedded practice.”

The TechDis Accessibility Maturity Model effectively disappeared when the Jisc advisory services were disbanded at the end of 2014. Throughout 2020, I’ve been working with AbilityNet to

• build on the original model,
• extend and update it to reflect developments in the last 10 years,
• make it more granular,
• make it more measurable.        

We’ve developed 2 versions of the model - one at institutional level and one at course/module level. These reflect the relative responsibilities and spheres of influence of different staff roles. We’ve tested the 2 models with 18 different pilot institutions. This is the first of a series of blog posts exploring the findings of those pilots and the implications for real-world practice.

Institutional level maturity: 8 lenses... and an overview

In total, there are 8 lenses through which organisations are invited to measure themselves. There is some overlap between them because accessibility is pervasive, not discrete.

The lenses we use are:

1. Main driver - Where is energy being expended and what is measured as success?
2. Responsibility - Who are the actors. Do they have sufficient authority?
3. Model of disability - Is the perception "users with issues" or "systems and content with barriers"?
4. Focus of effort - Is accessibility a "task and finish" project or a long-term quality improvement?
5. Skills and expertise - What is the focus of training? Who gets it? Is it considered important?
6. Digital accessibility in policies - Digital accessibility is a vital equality issue. Is it visible in policies?
7. Culture - Is the focus on minimising risk? Or maximising user experience? Does accessibility straitjacket online learning? Or encourage innovation and experimentation?
8. User's digital experience - How consistent is the user experience? How well designed?

 Subsequent posts will explore the findings, lens by lens. We will end this post by exploring two top-level messages from the pilot.

Takeaway message 1- there are different routes to excellence.

The pilot institutions included 3 organisations with very similar final scores, ranging between 51 to 57%. Yet how they achieved the same kind of score was markedly different, as shown in the graph below. Institution “a” scored well for policies, culture and student experience but had much lower scores for clarity of responsibility and skills/training. By contrast, institution “i” scored well for responsibility, culture, and student experience but poorly for policies and model of disability. Institution (c) had far more consistency across each lens, being let down only by skills/training. Using the model allows organisations to identify their strengths, weaknesses and inconsistencies. This helps focus efforts. Areas identified for improvement can be coordinated with other broad initiatives across the institution, saving time, resource, and effort.

Takeaway message 2 – perceptions within an organisation can vary significantly

Many institutions struggle with effective internal communication. This may result in vastly different perceptions about an organisation’s accessibility progress. Identifying differences and exploring the realities behind them is a vital part of maturity. It is easy to believe all areas of the organisation are as confident (or unconfident) as your own. We recommend many people are involved in the self-reflection process. Divergent views give insight into the effectiveness of communication or pervasiveness of good practice. The screenshot below shows the differing scores two people working in different parts of the same pilot organisation. While they closely agree on the quality of the organisation’s culture, their scores are highly divergent for the institution’s policy framework, the effective allocation of responsibility and even what they perceive the main drivers to be. One view is more pessimistic. Finding such discrepancies is vital to unearthing information and experience that otherwise remains hidden.  

What next?

During January, I hope to cover the pilot results from each of the lenses. Hopefully this will provide useful comparative data for your own organisation to learn from.

Meanwhile I would encourage you to:

• Consider how our findings might help your organisation become more “accessibility mature”,
• Download the Accessibility Maturity Model overview from the AbilityNet website and have a go at the free interactive tool on the link provided.
• Consider getting a two or more colleagues together to attend our next guided training session where we take you through the detailed, granular questions that help you score yourself.
• Consider our bespoke service where we meet online with key staff, walk you through the self-assessment process and make specific recommendations for your organisation. Contact [email protected] for more information.