On Wednesday 26th June, the University of Nottingham held a hybrid conference and gave other institutions the option to host the event locally, which was a great way to continue the conversation locally about all things accessible. 21 institutions opted to host local events, including the University of Bristol. Brickfield Education Labs sent out some merchandise for the event which included an Accessibility Top Tips cube and an Accessibility zine, which make great conversation starters when it comes to accessibility.
There were a total of 800 participants who signed up to the conference and at the opening session 371 participants joined online, not sure how many were face to face.
Mark Bradley – the University of Nottingham’s Academic Lead for Digital Accessibility gave the welcome message highlighting the importance of transforming institutional culture when it comes to digital accessibility, and the value of everyone taking the steps to make resources accessible for all. He commended Julian Tenney, the event organiser, on helping their organisation to make significant changes in terms of accessibility.
There were three strands of sessions falling under various sub themes – people and culture, pedagogy and curriculum design, leadership and governance, capability, tracking, and realising benefits
Here are a few takeaways from the participants at Bristol:
Fiona Hartley: The analogy of a digital iceberg and the fact that students come to university without knowing how to name files, do google searches, and we, as educators need to support them with this.
SCULPT a great tool for basic awareness of accessibility
Amber Cottrell: The conference itself was an exemplar of how to run a hybrid event, as an online participant we were fully included and definitely not second-rate participants (which is sometimes the case!). The need to support staff is my key takeaway from the day’s content, it’s not enough to simply tell people to ensure they use Plain English or prepare materials in accordance with our Digital Education Office’s guidelines. Instead support staff by condensing best practice into an easy format e.g. provide staff with a one-page checklist of the most critical things they can do to improve the learning materials, or a VLE page, or whatever it is we want to make more accessible.
Making Things Accessible is a really useful repository of best practice based on a collaboration between various London universities to make their digital environments as accessible as possible
Martin Nutbeem: I was incredibly impressed by the event, as Amber mentioned it worked well as a successful hybrid conference. As usual with online conferences, there was a wealth of additional info and insight in each session’s text-based chat. I walked away with a lot of great links to follow up on.
Some highlights for me included several sessions looking at the use of AI to improve accessibility, tellingly many essentially saying “there’s potential but it’s not quite there yet” a message I’ve heard consistently from AI enthusiasts over the last few years. I was impressed with the Image Accessibility Creator tool from Arizona State University which can create relatively descriptive alt text for images.
There were a few sessions on accessible maths, which is a perennial issue for digital accessibility. I found a session on Accessible HTML Notebooks a particularly workable solution to fixing inaccessible LaTeX notation as it would be compliant with every device pointed at it. The need to move away from PDFs as a format also links into this, it is not really fit for purpose anymore. Lilian Joy’s What does accessible maths look like? Poster presentation and related video is well worth a look.
Another theme that really stood out for me was the need to listen to authentic voices talking about their lived experiences trying to access teaching and learning materials. It is something we as an institution really need to consider if we want to be an inclusive and accessible place to work and study.
This is some support from Bristol’s Digital Education Office on Accessibility
Accessibility and Inclusion | Digital Education Office | University of Bristol
