What if Accessibility is Relative?

Jutta Treviranus

Although we have achieved pervasive accessibility legislation and policy, as well as federal, state, and institutional commitments to accessibility, accessible information and communication technologies (ICT) are still an elusive goal. Compliance studies regarding the accessibility of Web sites for even essential services are extremely discouraging. Access to accessible curriculum and textbooks seems mysteriously unachievable. Legislation seems to generate more creative excuses for non-compliance than creative ways to achieve accessibility goals.

Several projects led by the Adaptive Technology Research Centre in Canada are exploring a new tact.  Having studied the attitudes of Web and ICT developers toward accessibility requirements (that accessibility is counter to technical innovation, does not allow interactivity, discourages interesting design, and compromises the user experience for the rest of the users), the ATRC has tried a new notion of accessibility. Rather than a fixed quality, accessibility is seen as relative. Given this framing you cannot determine whether something is accessible until you know the user and the context of use.  In projects such as The Inclusive Learning Exchange, TransformAble, Web4All, and AccessForAll accessibility is about designing for diversity. People with disabilities are far more diverse than the rest of the population and therefore far less likely to be served by a one-size-fits-all solution.

One of the most successful applications of this new notion is in computer-mediated education and online learning. It is widely acknowledged that there are different learning styles. Outcomes research shows that people learn best when the experience is personalized to their learning needs. Learning breakdown, drop out and lack of engagement in education, occurs when students face barriers to learning, feel marginalized by the learning experience offered, or feel that their personal learning needs are ignored. Digital content and digital delivery mechanisms can be harnessed to assist in addressing the diversity of learning needs – due to the potential mutability or plasticity of digital systems and content but more importantly due to the opportunity for collaboration, cumulative production of learning resources, and support for networked communities. These enable personalized learning experiences and a greater diversity of learning resources to address the broad range of learning needs.

The traditional approach to education accessibility is a certification process to name educational resources as accessible or not and certify learners as having a disability (and thereby qualifying for specialized services) or not.  It has many drawbacks for the learners with disabilities it is intended to serve, however. This binary notion of disability and accessibility:

• excludes learners that do not fit the categories (learners with disabilities have less degrees of freedom or flexibility to fit assigned classifications and are therefore more likely to “fall between the cracks”; in addition there are many learners who do not qualify as having a disability but would benefit from or need alternative learning experiences),
• treats learners with disabilities as a homogeneous group when they are in fact the most heterogeneous group of learners,
• classifies learners based on a single parameter, ignoring the multiplicity of needs and skills that affect learning,
• constrains the design of learning resources thereby giving less leeway to address minority needs and non-normative learning styles or approaches of many people with disabilities, and
• compromises the learning experience for many of the learners the services are intended to serve (e.g., people with learning disabilities who rely on visual learning).

The fixed binary definitions also encourage specialized, segregated services for students with disabilities (i.e., they serve to “ghettoize” education for students with disabilities). This makes these services less sustainable (more vulnerable to funding cuts, open to the whims of shifting funding priorities, peripheral to mainstream efforts and investments, etc.) and more costly (duplicating services found in the mainstream).

This relative framing of disability and accessibility recognizes the range of human diversity. All learners potentially face barriers to learning. Like barriers faced by people with disabilities these can be seen as a product of a mismatch between the needs of the learner and the learning experience and environment.  Learning needs that affect learning can include:

• sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional and social constraints,
• individual learning styles and approaches,
• linguistic or cultural preferences,
• technical, financial, or environmental constraints.

Using this framing, an accessible learning experience is one that that meets the needs of the learner(s). Thus a resource cannot be labeled as accessible or inaccessible until we know the context and the learner(s). Some learners are more constrained than others and are therefore less able to adapt to the learning experience or environment offered, with the result that the environment or experience must be more flexible.

The ATRC and research partners around the world have developed an IMS and ISO standard (AccessForAll or ISO 24751) and the necessary Web services needed to enable meeting the learning needs of individuals. The system relies upon learning resources that are amenable to reuse and a large, diverse pool of resources such as those found in many Open Education Resource repositories. If the default curriculum is inaccessible to a specific learner the inclusively designed system either:
a)  transforms the resource (e.g., through styling mechanisms),
b)  augments the resource (e.g., by adding captioning to video), or
c)  replaces the resource with another resource that addresses the     same learning goals but meets the learner’s specific access needs.

With this approach the learning experience can be optimized for each learner whether or not they qualify for special services. This also means that developers are free to innovate, explore new technologies and be as creative as possible without fear of breaking accessibility rules - after all, the challenge of accessibility requires as much creativity as possible.

It has been argued that the most effective means of achieving accessibility goals is through the use of “the stick” in the form of legislation and the threat of litigation. However while “the stick” can serve as a last resort it is too blunt an instrument to properly address the complexities of learning and like its use in child rearing, usually has unintended side effects (e.g., time and energy devoted to developing creative means to bypass legislation or seek exemptions to legislation, rigidity in adhering to the letter of the law thereby suppressing innovation, legalistic application of the regulations that do not recognize the diversity or nuanced nature of learning needs) and does not in itself lead to systemic, long-term cultural change.