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Tag: Disability

Empathy in Accessibility

Types of Disability - Permanent, Temporary, and Situational
Example of how disability can be permanent, temporary, or situational

An excellent session on empathy and inclusion in accessibility by Craig Abbott, Head of Accessibility at DWP Digital. Excellent because of the various ways in which Craig conceptualised disability, and I am shamelessly going to lift and adapt many of these points into our own teaching around accessibility in CELT.

On disability itself, Craig made an important distinction between disability and impairment. Someone who uses a wheelchair for example, is not ipso facto disabled, their mobility is merely impaired; they are disabled by societal failures. They may, for example, live in an accessible home and have a car that has been adapted, but once they get to the local shops they are disabled by the stairs going up to the newsagents with no ramp available.

In an example from tech, consider red / green colour blindness – the most common form of colour blindness, yet we in tech do like to have our red / amber / green traffic light status symbols. (The solution is to not convey information by colour alone.)

Another great thing I’m taking from this session is that disability and impairment are situational. I am not currently disabled, but there’s a good change I will be as I get older. Prevalence of disability rises with age, from 8% of the population in childhood to 46% of adults at state pension age. A broken arm, an ear infection or laryngitis are all things that could happen that would render me impaired or disabled for a period of time. If for no other reason, you should embed accessibility into your work because it could happen to you too!

In practical terms, Craig pointed us to both the DWP’s Accessibility Manual and Worcestershire County Council’s SCULPT Framework – Structure (use headings and styles), Colour and contrast, Use of images, Links, Plain English, and Tables.

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NERAC Training Day

NERAC, the North East Regional Assessment Centre, is based within the University’s Disability Support Service and provides study needs assessments for students at the University and from other universities and colleges in the North East. This training day was to provide an overview of the latest versions of software and hardware which can be made available to assist students with specific needs, and was very helpful in raising my awareness of what is available and which I will cascade to my team.

For literacy support two software packages were discussed, Read&Write and ClaroRead Pro. Both have functionality for converting text to speech, highlighting, conversation to other formats including MP3, and scanning tools. Read&Write tends to be the preferred software with students, partly for its better spell checker which can check as you type and pick up on phonetical spelling errors, e.g. suggesting ‘enough’ for ‘anuf’.

There was an excellent presentation on hearing impairment which discussed the different types of hearing aids which are available and how these can be complimented by technology such as induction loops and the Roger Pen. Two software packages for audio note taking were introduced, Sonocent Audio Notetaker and Notetalker. Both packages allow students to annotate presentations, e.g. PowerPoint files, with audio recorded notes, and have text to speech functionality for the conversation of recorded presentations, though it was noted that these rarely work as well as intended in real world scenarios due to background noise.

Next, two tools for mind mapping were discussed, MindView and Inspiration. MindView was noted as being the generally preferred package at this time, as it has a familiar Office style ribbon toolbar and some nice features such as being able to add multiple notes and attachments to each branch, collaborative working, a citation tool, and a Gantt chart tool. Inspiration offers a word guide which can suggest synonyms and definitions, a presentation tool, and mobile apps, though it was noted that these were fairly basic.

Finally, software for screen reading and magnification were presented – Supernova and ZoomText. Both tools can do screen magnification, and ZoomText is able to apply different colour schemes to open windows and applications, as well as to the mouse cursor and pointer. It also has a feature called AppReader which can convert text to speech and can reflow the text in a magnified window as it is reading it out. Also demonstrated was Readit which can scan images and convert to text using optical character recognition. This also works with PDF files in which the pages are image files rather than text, useful for older journals which have only had simple scans. Readit can export to various formats, including Word and MP3.

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