Accessibility Education and RMIT (I)

As education migrates away from traditional classroom settings and increasingly towards online models, the prospects for more diverse access to education expand. Online learning allows for people in remote areas, of different socioeconomic statuses, and physical abilities access to educational material, due in large part to its more customisable nature. With access to online learning systems, a person who is primarily homebound or lives in a country town without the ability to commute to a capital city is now able to access education from many of Australia’s best universities. This digital dissemination of education provides the opportunity for greater democratisation of higher education, yet, at many universities, accessibility standards are not taken into consideration in the implementation of online learning systems.

Background

The decision to research accessibility considerations was personal in nature. In a previous portion of my employment history, I worked with children on the autism spectrum. Learning about the importance of attending to the specialised needs of these children helped me to begin looking at education from a different perspective—one that requires that systems be considered not only for the masses but also individuals. Not taking into account the specialised needs of people with disabilities, whether those needs be related to vision, hearing, or cognition, is a massive failing of educational systems worldwide, and it is one that needs to change. So too is this relevant in design. When I returned to design practice after years in education, I found that my peers and colleagues were proudly proclaiming that their work was research-based and human-centred. However, when asked about access considerations, even small ones, such as accounting for colour blindness, I was met with blank stares.

Continuously experiencing this lack of knowledge about or interest in engaging with accessibility considerations only reaffirmed my desire to pursue the study of accessible design. It is my hope that I can carry what I’ve learned about accessibility through this research, and my personal additional research, back into practice to advocate for accessibility considerations to be considered an essential part of the design process, and not simply a “nice to have” item on a designer’s to-do list. 

Some points central to my accessibility advocacy are as follows:

• Everyone benefits from accessibility considerations—whether it’s a person in a wheelchair who needs to use a ramp to enter a building or a mum pushing a pram up the same ramp, both are benefiting from the ramp’s design.

• Focusing on creating designs both physical and digital that can be accessed by specific portions of the population such as wheelchair users or people with vision impairments ultimately has a positive impact on the larger society as a whole.

• Another capacity in which all people directly benefit from accessibility is to remember that what we consider to be “disabled” is not specific to people who are born with degenerative or debilitating conditions.

• With a large ageing populace of people expected to live longer than any generations before, creating systems that account for varied abilities will allow current and future generations greater autonomy as they age. 

Initial Research Phase

Conceptual 

• Phase one of the research would begin by reaching out to organisations and not for profits to inquire about interviewing both advocates of the visually impaired community in Victoria.

Actual

• Reached out to multiple sectors of RMIT university, via in-person meetings as well as through e-mail. No parts of the university organisation were willing to grant interviews or answer questions. Requests for interviews with community partners received no responses. 

Reconceptualising the Initial Research Phase

The only actionable feedback I received from RMIT University came from the department of Equitable Learning Services, who told me to review the current RMIT Accessibility Action Plan. 

In 2016, RMIT University published an Accessibility Action Plan with the mission to “create transformative experiences for students […] and to help shape the world with research, innovation, teaching, and engagement” (Accessibility 2). This five-year plan, spanning from 2015-2020, focuses on several access-related concerns and considerations. These considerations include the following: leadership and culture; student enrolments; teaching and learning; program completions and outcomes; built environments, facilities, and grounds; digital information and services; and staff recruitment, retention, and development. The vast nature of the Accessibility Plan and the lack of periodic updates as to the progress made in addressing each of the areas of concern makes it difficult, if not impossible, to critique the plan as a whole. In focusing on the field of digital information and services, it is possible to both critique the student-facing changes that have been made in this five-year plan, as well as conceptualise opportunities for growth and enrichment of accessibility in student digital services.

Upon reformulating a methodological plan, it became essential to consider how to best approach evaluating the Action Plan. Would it be best to come at the plan as a whole, or would it be best to focus on a single portion of the plan? What then should be the goal of the practice-based research? To come from a place of critique and point out the apparent failings of the plan implementation to date? Or, as was ultimately chosen, could a portion of the plan be approached from the perspective of human-centered design thinking, in order to identify points of opportunity for improvement?

The decision to employ a human-centered design perspective was made out of a genuine belief that great design, and by extension, great services, and digital systems, is not generated by solution-first problem-solving. Instead, great design comes from first focusing on the people for whom products and services are being designed and approaching the design process with empathy and genuine curiosity as well as a willingness to learn and adapt.

ANALYSING the Plan

Action Plan Initial Card Sort

To fully understand the content of the existing Accessibility Plan, I chose to begin by writing every stated action, target and sub-target onto individual post-it notes, categorising them along the lines laid out in the action plan, and colour-coding each item accordingly. Following this, I positioned all of the action items in the same sequential and categorical order they were listed in the Action Plan [shown above] I realised that including every individual item from the plan would not be an effective use of time, and as a result, I omitted the large number of action items related to built environments, facilities, and grounds. While these action items are necessary and valuable to expanding access at RMIT, they were not relevant to this research.

Following the editing step, I performed a series of affinity mapping exercise with the remaining action items and targets. The focus of the first affinity diagram was to group “like” action items across the various action areas, regardless of which portion of the plan to which they initially related. The findings of this map were interesting, as the data presented showed that a large number of the action items were concerned not with actions themselves, but with producing and disseminating external publicity information about the Action Plan itself. This finding was true of all of the action areas included in the first affinity map.

Affinity Map #1

The second affinity diagramming exercise which I undertook sought to determine target groups for all of the action items, categorising the target groups into “public”, “students”, “educators”, “administration” and “service providers”. In this secondary affinity diagram, the interplay between these target groups became rapidly apparent. Taking, for example, digital services target “Prepare, implement and monitor a Web Accessibility Action Plan for every enterprise platform (including Adobe CMS, Blackboard, Service Now, LibrarySearch, SAMS) that includes...” from action item #2, is an intersection of almost all of the aforementioned target groups, with the public being the sole exception.

Affinity Map #2

Discovering the interconnectivity of action items was a massive learning point and shifted the direction of this research. Not because it was an unexpected learning, but rather that this very obvious fact seemed completely absent from the Action Plan literature. In fact, any and all discussion of intersectionality was missing from the action plan. The frequency with which action items intersected across disciplines and categories was immense, yet there was no discussion of this fact in the plan itself. One such action item that continued to reappear was ‘education of staff’ or a similar goal with slightly different wording. This was repeated across different disciplines, and its responsibility was relegated to different department heads or governing bodies. The failure to address, say, education of staff from a single perspective, and instead approach it from multiple different avenues could very likely be a contributing factor as to why little has been actualised from the plan.

It was at this point that I began to think of addressing the issues involved in the formulation of the Accessibility Action Plan from a human-centered design perspective. To my mind, shifting the discussion around these action items, as well as why they need to occur and how they should be implemented, from bullet point lists with every task delegated to a member of the administration to a more agile, design thinking approach would allow for more significant development and more effective implementation.

Greater Understanding Through Modelling

Stakeholder Mapping Exercise

In trying to conceptualise the ways in which human-centered design thinking and methodologies could practically be applied to the current RMIT Accessibility Action Plan, I performed a number of additional analyses, beginning with a stakeholder mapping exercise. While many of these methodologies relate primarily to business ventures, I believe that research benefits from challenging one’s assumptions about the material and using alternative analysis methods is an effective way of doing so.

The first approach I took in the second phase of exploring how human-centered design could shift the approach to the RMIT Accessibility Action Plan was to do a stakeholder map. This process was undertaken to understand better some of the learnings from the secondary card sort, which focused on large groups such as “administration” and “students”.

The first part of this process was to further refine these groups in order to be able to more effectively map where each group would fall into a stakeholder matrix. The “students” group was refined to the following categories: current students with disabilities, current students without disabilities, prospective future students with disabilities, prospective future students without disabilities, former students with disabilities, former students without disabilities, and current students without disabilities who are concerned with accessibility. The last category was included out of the hope that I was not the only non-disabled student enrolled at RMIT who cares about such matters while acknowledging that this is a minor stakeholder group.

Similar treatment was given to the “educators” with emphasis on tenure difference, specifically part-time, full-time, and guest, as well as “administrators” by department or title, specifically those listed in the current Accessibility Plan. Service providers were categorised by the platform they provide, i.e. Adobe, Microsoft, Canvas.

As seen in the stakeholder map above, the assumption is that students with disabilities across different stages of enrolment share similar levels of interest in the outcomes of the Accessibility Action Plan, yet vary in degrees of influence. The presumption here is that the university is most interested in keeping current and prospective students satisfied, as they are the students most directly impacted by changes in policy. Policymakers, i.e. the Chief Operations Officer and Director of Digital and Customer Experience Strategy, have been placed in the quadrant of high influence by their very nature as policymakers. Lecturers have been placed upon the centre axis of interest, in an attempt to showcase that there are presumably vast levels of interest in accessibility across the spectrum of lecturers.

Business Model Canvas

To further expand upon the work done in relation to the stakeholder map, I chose to utilise another traditional business methodology, the business plan. Associate Professor Yoko Akama teaches the students in her Service Design course to use the classic business model canvas as a jumping-off point to conceptualise potential service design solutions. Having used this suggestion previously, and having found it helpful, I chose to apply it to this project.

The current state business plan is shown below:

Using this business plan methodology as a jumping-off point to conceptualise how, exactly, human-centered design principles could help to reshape the Accessibility Action Plan as regards digital learning experiences aided in highlighting a few potential courses of action for the final phase of this research. 

Placing human experience at the forefront of improving the Accessibility Action Plan is paramount. This could be done by enlisting the input of student and faculty groups.  

1. Educating lectures, full-time and part-time, as to the importance of accessibility

2. Development of best practices guidelines for created a human-centered design-focused Accessibility Plan going forward.

The development of a solution comprises the second portion of this research, and can be found here.