Anyone who gets at all involved with the fight for accessibility soon learns just how hard we make things for our differently-abled fellow humans—either through sheer negligence or just a lack of care.
For example, guess what: all that pivoting to online learning by Universities has so far left blind students’ needs at the bottom of the pile. In a story on a US publication called Inside Higher Ed, for example, we find that a full year into COVID such students continue to encounter barriers, and to such an extent blind students are opting to take time away from their studies rather than continue with:
- digital class materials colleges provided for remote learning that are incompatible with screen readers
- physical materials, including Braille and embossed diagrams, graphs and equations, sometimes arrive too late for the corresponding class
- How Zoom-style video chat apps still haven’t tackled how to get visual information off of someone’s screen as they’re sharing it
The report also notes that because many lecturers send class materials to the accessibility office just hours before class, too often they can’t be made accessible in time. The story has an American perspective, but do any of us really think things are that much better this side of the Pond? And, again, though appearing in Scientific American, I have no faith that the findings in its rather shocking February piece Virtual Conferences Aren’t as Accessible as You Might Think also aren’t equally applicable here.
Disabled researchers have spent years advocating for a virtual attendance option to always be offered delegates who can’t travel to real-world events, greatly limiting the number of disabled and chronically ill scientists who can attend these meetings, as simply traveling to and from the venue can be an accessibility nightmare.
So online conferences instead—great, right? As the article states, switching to online meetings has resulted in huge gains in accessibility, but online meetings also have their share of problems, especially poor quality the automated captioning (“craptions”!) that turn portions of scientific talks into gibberish, presenters who don’t keep their cameras on, and PowerPoint slides presented in videos or on Web conferencing software can’t be seen by screen readers. Last but not least, while some conferences ask presenters to make their materials available for blind attendees on their accessibility pages, more often than not they never get uploaded to the conference website.
The only answer, says the writer, is for disability-inclusive conference space creation needing to become an active effort on the part of every conference organiser. UKAAF would absolutely welcome that step, but let’s close for this month’s round-up on an accessibility high. A special Microsoft Teams accessibility bot is reported to have been successfully used by 30,000 people at Imperial College London: available since October, the app was introduced across the famous science and engineering-oriented University as a “digital helper” for both staff and students, who access it via a tab on their Teams desktop app. There, they can quickly access, we are told, features in Microsoft 365, Edge and Windows 10 that can easily help change the look and feel of online meetings to meet their specific needs as users.
Needs covered include help with hearing, mental health, mobility, neuro-diversity and vision needs, though so far the most popular requests include provision of live captions for speech in Teams meetings, reducing background distractions while on a call, and help with turning on Focus Assist to support work that requires sustained concentration. Other common queries include how to change the look and feel of Office, it seems, plus how to work more efficiently by using the ‘My Analytics’ tool in the software.
Carina Birt
For more information or to download the Accessibility Bot being used at Imperial College, click here.
