Guest editorial

As researchers and evaluators of disabled students’ access to high quality higher education, we have seen many changes in the delivery of education over the last 10 years (Colwell, Jelfs, & Mallett, 2005; Cooper, Colwell, & Jelfs, 2007; Jelfs & Richardson, 2010). There have been developments in the greater use of the Internet, cloud technology and the delivery of course materials via institutional virtual learning environments. These have created change within higher education institutions (HEIs) and the need for change management at sector, institution, faculty, library, teacher and student levels.

The articles of this special issue cover the broad spectrum of perspectives that have a view on accessibility: the perspectives of the higher education sector, the institutions within it, the educators and the Library Services who support the teaching as well as International perspectives. The special issue has brought these perspectives together although with the exception of the student voice as discussed below. The articles in this issue address similar issues that face all HEIs: those of institutional requirements, faculty needs and the need to incorporate the academic support systems available to all students, not just disabled students, such as library resources, teaching staff and interaction with other students.

We are very pleased to have received papers from both within the Open University in the UK (OUUK) and from US universities plus a review of the Japanese perspective from a recent conference. This demonstrates that although the legislation may be slightly different across the globe, universities seem to be facing very similar issues, in particular locating where responsibility for accessibility lies. It is with this in mind that we regret the loss of UK JISC TechDis,¹ a UK organisation that provided advice and guidance on technologies to support disabled students. This was a useful source of information that enabled all UK HEIs to take responsibility for the accessibility of their provision, as well as having web resources freely available to anyone anywhere.

A theme running through all the articles and reviews is the need for cultural change across the board in education, and the OUUK is influencing that change through the securing greater accessibility (SeGA) initiative, as described in detail by Slater et al. The OUUK is also promoting change in practice through its Masters level course, ‘Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students (H810)²’ (part of the Masters in Online and Distance Education). This module looks at the experiences of disabled students, the technical aspects of accessibility and current debates about disability and accessibility in educational contexts. It currently uses Seale (2014, reviewed in this special issue by Douce) as its set text, having previously used the 1st edition. The module also uses many resources provided by JISC TechDis, thus drawing on best practice from the UK Higher Education sector.

The article by Linder et al. presents a study of the US university sector. This is a valuable article which surveyed and interviewed US university staff to understand institutions’ practices and policies. The findings highlight a lack of infrastructure to support accessibility, and a lack of clarity about responsibility, which in turn leads to a ‘sense of overwhelm’. Put simply: it is not clear whose job it is to support accessibility. The authors make useful observations and recommendations, primarily the need to invest in time and resources and to incorporate consideration of accessibility into all university policies and procedures. This would enable universities to be proactive, rather than reactive, in responding to the needs of disabled students. The authors briefly promote the concept of Universal Design for Learning as a framework that could support this change.

The theme of Universal Design is developed by Rao et al. This article presents the faculty (staff) perspective, particularly in the application of Universal Instructional Design to online courses. The authors describe their translation of Universal Design principles to instructional practices. This article represents the wider definition of accessibility: to support cognitive access for all students, as opposed to the physical access that some students need due to a disability.

This difference in definition is a concept that the OUUK is beginning to address where we have struggled with the term ‘accessibility’ because it means different things to different groups across the University. At the OUUK we use the term ‘accessibility’ to apply to disabled students, but use the term ‘access’ when promoting widening participation for other under-represented groups, including offender learners, black and minority ethnic students, and students from low socio-economic backgrounds. This use of nomenclature has not been an issue highlighted in any of the papers, but it is something that we often grapple with to avoid confusion within the different widening access agendas. In reality, we are all pushing for increased access to higher education, and clarity in terminology would benefit all stakeholders.

An institutional perspective is provided by Slater et al. who present a detailed description of the SeGA initiative at the OU. In particular, the authors discuss the role of the Accessibility Specialists. The article demonstrates the effectiveness of placing responsibility for accessibility in the faculty, where subject specialists support their colleagues in making learning accessible, as opposed to just having a disability office that is responsible for making all reasonable adjustments.

The article by Gallardo et al. represents the teacher perspective. It presents a project that enabled colleagues to collaborate on, and reflect on, good practice examples of activities to support students of Modern Languages who have specific learning differences. The examples and accompanying guidance are publicly available so that other Modern Language teachers can implement and develop that good practice.

The article by Mears et al. represents the university library perspective. It presents the learning journey travelled by Library Services in supporting an OUUK module in providing accessible versions of third-party content used in the module. It describes their processes for checking the accessibility of papers and third-party databases. It also describes the impact on both the module and on Library Services. Again the authors have made their checklists available in the paper so that they can be used and adapted by colleagues in other university libraries.

In bringing these papers together, we find that some authors may be answering each other’s questions: for example Slater et al. may provide answers to the question ‘Whose job is it?’ raised by Linder et al. Similarly, Rao et al. may provide evidence needed by Linder et al. to demonstrate the usefulness of Universal Design for learning.

Two papers in particular discuss the importance of collaborative activities between colleagues to support accessibility (Slater et al. and Gallardo et al.) This supports what we might initially think Myers et al. mean by ‘allies’ in their book reviewed by Pearson. However, as Pearson discovers, Myers et al. define an ally as a supporter of social justice who is actively involved in enacting change, but suggest this status can only be bestowed by a disabled student. As Pearson points out, this is particularly difficult to achieve in a distance learning context where students do not always come into contact with those enacting change. We expect, like Pearson, many of the authors of this special issue can relate to Myers et al.’s concept of ‘a community of allies’.

Douce’s review of Jane Seale’s book highlights the importance of the student’s voice. Seale asks, ‘what are the silences?’, or, in other words, ‘which perspectives haven’t we heard from?’ Her point is simple and direct: if we are thinking about accessibility for students, we need to hear more about their experiences.

This is a pertinent point as even in this special issue the student voice is largely ‘silent’. Rao et al. do provide an overview of student evaluation of online courses. However, the students’ voices are mediated through the author’s interpretation, and so we do not hear directly from the students. A particular challenge for distance education, as Pearson observes in her book review, is that it is difficult in a distance learning context to hear students’ voices directly. Attempts are made by the OU to hear the students’ voices through surveys delivered at the end of every module, and the findings used to enhance the quality of our provision to disabled students.

The guest editors Colwell and Jelfs are, respectively, the current and former chairs of the SeGA initiative described by Slater et al. Those authors have identified a number of challenges that still need to be resolved at one institution, including: provision of accessibility information about qualifications and routes to them; the provision of accessibility information to enquirers (potential students); the accessibility of third party content; and the accessibility of new forms of online content, such as apps and advanced e-books. There are further issues that we would add to that list that affect all educators. For example, student generated content: how do we enable access to learning content that is created by student peers as part of their assessed collaborative work and may not be accessible? We cannot place the full responsibility for accessibility on students, so responsibility needs to be shared by faculty staff, but it is difficult to effectively anticipate the level of responsibility.

Another challenge faced in distance education is the description of video content: where the visual aspects of video need additional description for visually impaired students to make the meaning or purpose explicit, e.g. whether the visual content is rain or sound of horses’ hooves. ‘Audio description’ (a method including descriptions in the audio track of video) is the ideal solution, but it may be prohibitively expensive to ‘audio describe’ all videos used by a university. For some videos, such as ‘talking heads’, separate text descriptions may sometimes be sufficient. Universities need processes for assessing videos for the need for descriptions, and processes for writing descriptions and delivering them.

A further challenge is the use of tactile versions of diagrams that can enable access for visually impaired students to information in diagrams where text descriptions are insufficient. These can be costly to produce, and universities need guidance and resources for the redesign of diagrams, their production and the checking processes, as well as appropriate production training. Ensuring the quality of the tactile version is important so that students can use these diagrams effectively in their studies.

The SeGA initiative is illustrative of one effective way to deliver high-quality materials and support for online distance education. These ways of working can be adapted to suit institutions that rely on the flexible delivery of study materials in different formats and the internal support mechanisms required to deliver those materials. A recent evaluation of the SeGA initiative demonstrated that it was perceived positively by those that are aware of it, but that it needs to increase its visibility across the university (Bryan, 2015). This is an issue for all staff in HEIs who need to influence the policy of their institutions to put accessibility at the forefront of people’s minds and highly visible to those who can implement change.

We are very grateful to our reviewers who voluntarily gave their time to read the papers and provide constructive feedback to the authors, and in many cases, reviewed the papers a second time.

Chetz Colwell and Anne Jelfs
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK
[email protected]; [email protected]

Notes

1. JISC TechDis: Retrieved January 30, 2015, from http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/.

2. Open University Masters module: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students: Retrieved January 30, 2015, from http://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/modules/h810.