We (at RSC Wales) have just completed the first four of our series of roadshows and, now that I have recovered from all of the planning, travelling and delivering that was involved, I am taking a moment to reflect briefly on ‘Barrier Busters – Accessibility and Inclusion’.
In my opinion (and many others I’m sure) accessibility and inclusion is something that should be of interest to anyone involved with learners and our partner JISC service, JISC TechDis, believe (having complete a number of accessibility self evaluation surveys with a range of education organisations last year) that ‘there should be a shift from specific support for disabled people (to help them over institutional barriers) to a focus on reducing the institutional barriers in the first place’. Following JISC TechDis’ advice there are many small (and free) things you can do in order to make the whole learning experience more inclusive for learners. There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ solution but by making small changes to the things you already do, you can probably make that ‘size’ fit more learners than it currently does. Things like the way you present your Word documents/PowerPoints/pdfs, the variety of formats you make your resources available in and the open source and free tools you make available to your learners will all help to ‘bust’ those barriers to learning that many face. Raising awareness of these potential solutions has been the focus of the series of 4 ‘BarrierBusters – Accessibility & Inclusion’ roadshows that we have been running for the last 4 weeks.
Those of you who didn’t make it but who would like to share the resources from the event can do so by visiting our online information and resources area at: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/aandi2010
Those who did make it to the event (over 110 people from FE, HE, WBL, ACL and schools) have given us very positive and constructive feedback, some of which I’ll share here:
Feedback via the text wall on the day:
- Discussion of barriers very interesting. Plenty of food for thought.
- Accessible word a whole new way of thinking! Lot of training now has to be provided but hopefully won’t take long to become second nature
- Access apps will be a really useful tool. Good to practice this afternoon
- Barriers exercise has got me thinking that one of the biggest barriers to my learners might be me!
Feedback via the evaluation form after the event. The most useful part of the day was …
- Exploring the idea that accessibility issues are not just linked to disability
- Excellent awareness raising of the materials that are available
- Learning how to make document such as Word and Acrobat Reader more accessible to learners
- Learning about AccessApps
- Making a video in Windows MovieMaker
- The practical activities – the workshop approach
- The opportunity to discuss issues raised with colleagues from different sectors of education
Following on from this last comment … this was the first cross sector event we have run and I will admit that whilst we were planning these roadshows we did have a tiny question in our minds as to whether the different sectors would work together … but of course they did! We are all focussed on improving the learning experience for all learners, after all, aren’t we?
