Beyond Inclusion

Jonathan Hassell at the BBC – who I worked closely with on a project for blind learners – has an interesting idea about accessibility which I think deserves wider hearing. It sits - sometimes uncomfortably, for me at least - alongside an often-peddled notion that “designing something to be accessible will mean that it’s more usable for everybody”. This is true up to a point – yes, we all have our own preferences, learning styles and limitations, and if mine happens to be the need to see something in a larger font and that’s supported by the software, all well and good. But there are limits to this, and people and organisations seem scared to admit it. I suspect this is mostly because it would make them admit the compromises they’ve had to make in designing their offerings – and in a highly sensitive area, this can attract the wrong sort of attention.

Accessibility is vital and should be “designed in” – included, even – from the beginning of a project. But designing accessible products is an art as much as a rigorous process and science. You can’t just tick a bunch of boxes – pragmatic and specific decisions, and often compromises, have to be made about what you can afford and what’s reasonable for a specific project. Sometimes, websites or CD-ROMs have to have less than perfect accessibility to deliver a really great experience for the majority of users, or to fit within the commercial constraints of the initiative. Equally, some projects need to be the reverse – specifically designed for certain disabilities or needs of a minority, and providing a more limited experience for the rest of us. This latter point is what I understand Jonathan to mean by “beyond inclusion”. The best projects, of course, admit all of this up front and have the budget to allow for the creation of separate experiences or versions for particular disabilities where they just can’t be catered for by the “main” version - but such budgets are few and far between.

There was nothing like seeing the face of a six-year old blind learner experiencing a product which was designed precisely for her needs. She could unpack all of the layers of sound we had provided in our resource in ways which, as a sighted person with less attuned hearing, I simply couldn’t. If we’re aiming for excellence in our electronic learning materials, we should acknowledge that sometimes accessibility in its widest sense will be limited - for the minority or the majority.

Jonathan’s holding an event about this at BAFTA on June 30th, if you’re interested.

The myth of "free"

There’s been a lot of discussion about “free” at the moment – a debate in BECTA’s ICTRN email list, and Wired journalist Chris Anderson's notion of “freeconomics”, examined in this Guardian article. The ICTRN discussion focussed around the apparent demise of free electronic educational resources on the internet, and the supposed benefits of open source; the Wired notion is all about how you get some things supposedly for free, but there is generally a hidden agenda (mobile phone “free”, monthly contract £15 per month, for example).

Made me think a bit. Fundamentally, and rather obviously, the key point is that nothing is free. The important debate is about who pays, when, what their motivations are - and what sort of market and products and services the chosen system creates. To dissect the current situation in electronic educational materials:

• we all pay for publishers’ materials indirectly, via the money, targets and incentives that the DCSF distributes to schools (see below on this blog for more on how the market for educational resources in schools in the UK is incomparable to a much closer-to-free market such as that for wheat or potatoes);
• the DCSF and other government bodies create materials using our taxpayers’ money and to their own political agendas (for example the materials for the strategies);
• we all pay for the BBC and its free materials via the licence fee;
• schools and colleges create materials for themselves, and sometimes others, which are also effectively at the taxpayer’s expense (as we pay teachers for their time);
• there is nothing much “open source” in terms of software designed specifically for the UK schools market that I am aware of – Moodle and other VLEs are much more international (and often higher education oriented) in their focus. This is almost certainly because the creation of educational software is culturally very specific, time-consuming, difficult and expensive. Even if there were lots of such material, it would still have been paid for somehow – in people’s time and in the computing resources that they have devoted to their work.

Since the demise of BBC jam the debate about what sort of electronic materials and services we want for our schools seems to have been absorbed into the wider debate about what sort of education system we want in general, and how technology does (and doesn’t) help us to get there (for example in Futurelab’s Beyond Current Horizons programme). In many ways, this is entirely appropriate and sensible – but we should not lose sight of the myths and agendas which have shaped people’s attitudes to the current market.