In which I make up for my last few blog posts about decades’-old work and talk about some work in progress.
I don’t remember when I first learned about digital accessibility and made some changes to my then-website to support it, but I remember learning a lot more when Mark Pilgrim published Dive Into Accessibility in 2002.
From then on, I always felt like I had a good handle on it, expanded my knowledge here and there and kept it up to date. While digital accessibility has never been my main expertise, I have acted in the role of expert on the subject. This was all largely in the abstract, in the sense that I do not identify as having a disability and I had largely not worked with others that that do.
A leave of absence
That changed in 2024 when I took a leave from my government job to work at Fable. I was speaking to people with disabilities and they were mentioning specific brands and models of assistive technology hardware and other items that I hadn’t heard of or didn’t know much about. As with anything else, I started to make a list to keep track of these things and do some proactive research so that I wouldn’t have to waste time asking people for explanations.
As part of other work I was doing, I kept expanding my list and it got very long and messy, and was just a part of what I was learning. While I had tried out some screen readers before, I tried out voice control and other technologies.
Returning to the Ontario Public Service, I wanted to make good on the reason why leaves are approved to begin with, i.e., that people will gain new knowledge and skills and bring them back. I was trying to figure out how can I take the most important things I learned and pass that knowledge on.
The Ontario government already has a team that does accessibility training, and I wanted to do something a bit different. What I settled on was an interactive course on assistive technology.
The course
I built the course, did an alpha, beta, two more runs, and am now scheduling it again. Each time making adjustments based on feedback. I’m hoping to eventually make it available to a much larger audience, but that will take some time.
I also hope to publish the course online at some point; I designed it from the beginning to be usable by anyone outside the government, aside from a single slide of of links to internal resources.
The course is 5 sessions, a week apart. Each one but the last introduces a type of assistive technology, which participants try out on their own. The sessions are discussions of our experience trying them out, watching videos, and discussing the videos. Videos are used so that participants can see people with disabilities speaking for themselves, showing experienced assistive technology use, and to show a wider variety than what participants will try out. As a bonus, it makes the course content more consistent and scalable.
Some of my philosophy behind the course:
- no prior knowledge needed
- limited lecturing, no memorization
- let people learn through experience
- ease people in (the tools get farther from most people’s usual experience each week)
- skip the basics, like explaining why one should care whether people with disabilities can use computers, how common disabilities are, what disabilities exist, etc.
The basic take-aways from the course are (hopefully):
- lots of people use assistive technology, for a variety of reasons
- there is a wide variety of assistive technology and how it is used, and thus a wide range of ways in which people interact with content
- assistive technology is widely available and already included in most popular software and operating systems
- anyone can easily try out their content with assistive technology
- testing with assistive technology users is best
Challenges and status
The main issue I’m adjusting the course to deal with is that not everyone is doing their “homework” of trying out the assistive technology. I’m trying a few things and aim to share more when I find what works. Although the “answer” may end up being that not everyone is going to do it, and that’s fine, because those who don’t are still learning something.
The other issue is that I am quickly exhausting my potential audience for the course until I get approval to share it more broadly, so that’s another thing to work on. I may need to push this sooner than later, if I want to get the course run again before too many people are off for winter break.
Stay tuned…. possibly. I don’t have a great history with updating this blog.