Season 01 | Episode 11: Accessibility and Post-secondary Education

David: Welcome to Practical Accessibility Insights. I’m David Best, and with me is my co-host Sandi Gauder. Hi Sandi.

Sandi: Hi David. How are you today?

David: I’m doing good today. Thank you very much. So today is our second episode on education. Last time we talked to David Lepofsky about the standards that the committee had recommended to the Ontario government.

Today we have a guest with us that’s gonna talk with us a little bit more in detail about where the standards are and what expectations we might have. So Sandi, go ahead and introduce our guest for today.

Sandi: I will. Thank you so much, David. Today we have Kate Brown joining us on the podcast. Hi Kate.

Kate: Hi Sandi.

Hi David.

Sandi: So, Kate, we’re thrilled to have you on the show to give us your insight around post-secondary education standards. But before we start into the questions, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, where you work, what you do, those kinds of things.

Kate: I currently work at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, which is a medium to large size research intensive university. And for since about 2016, 2017, I’ve been working in accessibility. So I started off in legislation focused work and just general, I guess we could call it awareness raising, within the organization. So I spread the word. That was really my job at the time was to be quite vocal about the AODA’s presence and how to translate it into the organizational structure.

And since I think 2022, I’ve been working on a job growth under our Vice Provost Teaching and Learning. And there I’ve been focusing on a project to help prepare the university for the forthcoming AODA Post-Secondary Education Standards. And many community members have participated in this project over the last couple years.

Sandi: So how did you actually get into the field of accessibility in the first place? What was the motivator for you?

Kate: Well, great question. It was not my first area. I started off in languages and linguistics. Actually, I mean, I started off really primarily in language learning. So my first university, I was in a small rural town in the Eastern Townships in Quebec called Bishops University. And I really was just completely immersed in German studies, Spanish, some French. Not as much French as I probably should have taken, but I’d just done a year in Germany, so I was quite obsessed with the German language and instruction. I moved over to McMaster in 2012 as a transfer student and there transferred into linguistics and indigenous studies.

So kind of a through line of communication, learning about people and human rights considerations. But really I think it did an a great job at introducing me to human rights frameworks and legislative approaches to, I’d say, anti-oppressive practices.

I was a student with disabilities, I’m an employee with disabilities, and I increasingly was trying to find work while I was in my undergrad. And one thing that McMaster does incredibly well is find opportunities for students to participate in research ’cause it’s a research intensive university. So at that time, I think 2015 or so, 2016, there were a whole slew of projects coming through our student partner program, which is housed in our teaching and learning center called the McPherson Institute.

And one of them was on designing and accessibility and teaching and learning, training, like a guidebook for instructors and faculty. And so I had this background, I had the lived experience. I had also simultaneously been working a little bit with our human rights office, which I ended up moving into as a full-time employee eventually, um, doing some work around AODA compliance training, supporting them in that area.

So I was just really trying to find gig work everywhere. And it was the first time in my life that I’d ever seen disability positioned as a value, right? So they were looking for students with lived experience. I developed disabilities transitioning into adulthood. So I still had not come to terms with it.

Lots of internalized ableism. Really wanted to distance myself from it as far as possible, to be honest. But then as soon as I got into the work, it was wildly immersive and complex and interesting, just sort of trying to approach something that, for me, felt quite heavy and unresolved through a design focus.

I think it helped me really, I’d say develop really positive feelings towards disability and accessibility in general, and also find work that I happened to be pretty good at and was really interested in. And so, my first foray into accessibility, which full circle I’m now found myself in 10 years later, was teaching and learning.

Sandi: It’s amazing how the world kind of guides us down paths that we had no idea it was gonna take us, and you end up in a career that you didn’t even know existed. So where does accessibility awareness fit into the current post-secondary curriculum, and what are the gaps? As far as you know.

Kate: Yeah, I mean, I think maybe first to think about post-secondary curriculum as not a singular thing.

Just because universities, particularly universities in Ontario, as I’ve come to understand through the last couple of years studying higher education, are extremely autonomous. And so the curriculum tends to be dictated through disciplinary practice or through professional regulation as opposed to something that has maybe been designed intentionally by educational or teaching and learning professionals.

And so I found this very helpful. I mean, anyone who’s trying to integrate a sustainability or equity, diversity and inclusion or decolonization or accessibility focus will probably tell you how frustrating it is to try to work within a system where consistency of application and consistency of practice is impossible.

And that is certainly how I would characterize sort of a very autonomous, decentralized university environment in general. It doesn’t mean to say that it’s not possible to make curriculum accessible, it just means you have to think about it a little bit more like 60 curriculums as opposed to one curriculum, and to work with those specialists or those disciplinary experts a little bit more in a personalized way or in a peer-to-peer way, as opposed to trying to impose specific types of teaching practice that they might feel resistant to because it’s not part of the discipline.

I would say probably the biggest gap is a lack of exposure to disability knowledge, and so if disability knowledge and experience hasn’t permeated into the discipline, it can be quite difficult. And I understand why. I actually think it makes good sense why people would be resistant to external expertise, but it can be difficult to try to come in from the outside and ask folks to standardize or change the way that they’ve been teaching their discipline for years and years and years.

And so where you might see some kind of organic success would be in the disciplines where there is disability representation or where disabled leaders and thinkers have come up through those areas. So, for example, you might see this in social work or you might see this happening in legal studies because these are spaces that by and large there’s been more disability representation, but it’s, it’s not consistent.

But a lot of this has to do with the way the decisions are made. So if you’re working in a more corporate environment or more a business environment where the top-down structure might be a little bit more hierarchical, you can work with a set of employees to try to standardize practice if your leader is on board and if the leader’s really supportive of the way that you’re, it’s well resourced, people know what they’re doing, there’s good change management, you can do that.

In a system where you have more of a flattened hierarchy and decision making is distributed, you really have to get quite a few people on board. So this has just been my whole life, the past several years is really understanding how decisions are made, how supported people feel, what resources are needed, and being clear about what it is that we’re asking or trying to compel folks into practicing, right?

Sandi: David and I have been having conversations on a weekly basis, and I think we’ve both come to the conclusion that the only way that we’re going to see any kind of change around accessibility awareness, disability awareness, making the world more accessible, whether it’s digital or physical space, is through education. Are there programs or courses where accessibility is actually integrated so that you can’t graduate unless you have some understanding of what accessibility and disability is about?

Kate: It’s so complicated. Absolutely. I think that is the way forward in terms of being able to shift professional practice in particular, and the way that disability and accessibility is absorbed into professional practices.

Taking 18 steps backwards, I have to think about things like, well, who are the folks who are in charge of updating those programs? And do they sit within the university or do they sit external to the university. And do I have access to them or do I have to go through other networks of people to gain access to them?

So in the case of a program that’s accredited, for example, like architecture, engineering or medical school or social work, we have incredible faculty who are trying really hard at either at the individual level and at times more increasingly, I would say, at the sort of the group level or the, the combined level to come together and think through, well, how could we decolonize this curriculum or how could we make this curriculum more accessible?

But you know, I’ve worked really closely with senior leaders as well as faculty. And in many of our faculties, I see their willingness, their want, they’re individual efforts to shift their course. So they have maybe control over their course, or maybe they’ve got control over the program level, but at a certain point they might meet barriers.

And the barriers could be institutional or they could be accreditation. It could be, for example, resource dependent. You know, if we’re talking about, for example, updating lab spaces, which would be a logical place for a STEM focused, medical focused university to focus, we have great support for this right now.

We actually have a couple of senior leaders, several researchers, you know, we’re trying to figure out ways to audit the spaces to apply new accessible design standards, et cetera, et cetera. I think we could get to the point of having a beautifully put together spreadsheet of costed out items that we need in order to upgrade the spaces over time.

Sort of a phased approach. But the costs are unreal. And as much as folks want to think that universities are spaces of universal wealth, they’re not. You really need to have a collective of people who have expertise in all the different areas come together and try to figure out, well, how could we integrate accessibility into a broader framework of privacy, security, sustainability, all the things that we’re trying to achieve that are happening kind of simultaneously, right?

David: I’m just wondering, I’m curious, as you work with faculty, have you had any pushback?

Kate: Oh, good question. So back in 2022, the Council of Ontario University sent out notice to all the universities. And then all the universities, pretty much simultaneously, sent those notices to their AODA coordinators. And I remember those initial conversations like way back in 2022. It was difficult to get people to talk to me about it. Like I wouldn’t say that there was resistance. I would just say that there was just a complete lack of it existing permeating the environment at that time, and it was still quite locally localized knowledge that sat maybe at the level of the COU and sat at the level of our AODA coordinators group.

So I built this project. I went to one of the most wonderful senior leaders that we have at our institution. We have many great ones, but our Vice Provost Teaching and Learning, Dr. Kim Dej, who’s just incredible. She really could see the vision that I was describing. So we applied for funding from our Provost who was wonderful and funded the project for two years.

And the whole point of the project was exploratory and readiness development. So we spent two years talking to people, building projects, bringing students with disabilities into projects, having effort impact analyses, having key informant interviews.

I have a colleague who’s a wonderful researcher. Their name’s Dr. Lee de Bie. They built an accessible education fellowship for us as well as a journal. So we built out all this infrastructure in some ways to help prepare for some of the recommendations, but we also used it as this opportunity, David, to gently introduce people to the idea of differentiated recommendations ’cause there’s 185 and 110 of them sit within the responsibility of our university and to get people in to these big collective groups of like 20 to 40 people at a time collectively problem solving on, well, who has what information, who’s currently responsible for what, where would this possibly land?

Um, and whose responsibility would this ultimately be if this became a requirement? At the same time, we worked pretty closely with our faculty in a completely different project. It was still under the big branch of the big project, but separate from the introduction of new recommendations to talk to them about current issues that they might be experiencing with accessible design, accommodation processes, implementation of accommodations, et cetera, et cetera.

I would not say that any institution in Ontario is quote unquote ready. If those recommendations became requirements tomorrow, we’d have to do a lot of work. They’re very systems focused and systems change in universities takes years to, to really do well. But I would say that by and large people have awareness.

They know of the standards. They know they’re coming. We just don’t know when, and we don’t know how many.

David: Well, your enthusiasm is very encouraging. And if I was a student, I think I’d be very excited about going to university. Have you talked to any students and have you had any feedback with regard to their thoughts about the standards?

Kate: So, yeah, I mean, I, I try to bring students into all the work that I do, and so for this project, we actually created a really wonderful group of students that we colloquially call the Stack. It’s our Student and Alumni Accessibility Advisory Council. So we built that council for the project to give us feedback on aspects of the project.

And it’s so interesting. The group was great, really diverse students from all different faculties, levels of study, all different experiences of disability. The one thing that’s tricky when you’re working with students is the level of information that they have access to. But I thought the most interesting part about bringing students into the work was to take them through what the process would look like.

How would you get that type of recommendation implemented in a university environment? My god, there’s like 50,000 non-linear steps in some cases. So being able to introduce students to the way that higher education works, the way that sort of decision making work. I just think it really empowers students to have like a really good understanding about how organizations function and it can also help breed a little bit more understanding.

So this is something where I, I work with the greatest students. They tend to have limitless amounts of understanding and empathy for folks when their accommodations are not being met, which is quite remarkable to have that level of empathy when your own needs are not being met.

But even more so to introduce students to structures of teaching and learning, and have them understand how instructors come into instructing and how accommodations work through instruction.

Sandi: Was there any consistency in the kinds of roadblocks that the students run into when they’re at school?

Kate: Number one, communication barriers, because above all else, accommodation processes protect privacy for students with disabilities, which is amazing. We want that. Uh, obviously.

It also means that things like data sharing is almost impossible in that environment. So it means that either the student, the SAS coordinator or the faculty is having to navigate like a bunch of different pathways in terms of the number of courses, academic advisor support, counselor support, like anything that’s a co-op or experiential education.

It’s a totally different negotiation that any one of those individuals might have to negotiate or navigate because it’s an individualized process and the process follows the student as they move through all these different pathways. So that, I would say is probably the most complex system level barrier that all students with disabilities registered with accommodations will experience.

And it’s the very nature of an accommodations process put into an environment where you have a lot of choice and a lot of opportunity and a lot of different pathways, which we want to encourage students to explore. Like it’s my dream for disabled students to have similarly kind of wavy experiences where they’re going down this pathway and this pathway and that pathway.

But the pathways themselves have to be reinforced a lot more with accessible design to make it a smoother experience for students to be able to kind of move throughout their experience with an accommodations plan attached to them. So folks who are experiencing mobility disabilities and or are assistive device users might experience issues with some of the buildings or they might experience issues with the way finding. The way findings really tricky for anybody actually in most university spaces.

Technological barriers, you know, you’ve got some courses that are fantastic there. Really digitally focused assistive technologies, working really well with those courses. And then in some cases, you know, students are having to get their course materials converted, working with library accessibility services, who are amazing, but it’s highly dependent on timing.

So if you get a professor hired two days before a course starts, then that accommodation plan gets communicated to them maybe the first day of the course. They then have to submit their course material for conversion. That takes time. So the student then gets their materials later than other students.

And then in general, I would say time. Time is the biggest barrier that we all deal with. But when you’re in a really intensive pressure cooker situation, 13 week semester, three to five courses per student. And let’s say for example, that you’re a student who requires time-based accommodations, which is many, if not most of our students, um, registered in accommodation process.

That delicate organization of time and being able to meet all the requirements of the course, the assessments within the timeframe allotted, I think can be really tricky. And it’s not just tricky for students, it’s tricky for the faculty, and it’s tricky for the coordinators as well to be working with the students within the time-bound constraints, right?

Sandi: The one thing that comes to mind, are you integrating Universal design for learning into this process, especially from the faculty side? Because as a faculty, if you follow those principles, you tend to generate curriculum that is going to be more accessible because you’re giving students or learners different methods of assessment or different methods of learning, different types of media, like all that kind of stuff. It’s all kind of ready to go.

I’m sure that there’s still accommodation that might be required for certain students with certain disabilities but that approach can kind of circumvent some of the barriers, I would think. Do you talk about that at all in your institution? Is that something that post-secondary education institutions in this province talk about or try to do more of to integrate into their curriculum?

Kate: It’s increasingly common that teaching and learning centers, of which there’s almost in every university a teaching and learning center in Ontario, are increasingly investing in bringing in UDL specialists. Like we have, for example, two educational developers with accessibility specialty in their job title and focus that sit in our teaching and learning center, and they’re really well learned in universal instructional design, digital accessibility.

But increasingly, I feel like it needs a bit of a, a rebrand. Like really thinking more about adaptive design for learning as opposed to universal, ’cause it’s not actually universal, it’s quite specialized. You really need to have disciplinary experts who are working with that set of principles to translate it into their disciplinary context.

And then it has to be partnered with things like digital accessibility ’cause the thing that UDL does, a really not wonderful job of making clear is that yes, like alternative or multiple means of assessment is awesome, but if it’s all digitally inaccessible, like what’s the point? You’re just creating more barriers.

So we’re trying to think through calling these more like accessible education design approaches and then working on either a course or a program by program basis to figure out what it is that they do and what approach do we need to integrate into that particular program or course in order to really make a difference.

So does it need a bit of UDL? Does it actually just need accommodation data? So you can see what are the accommodations that are coming up the most in the course? And then you could use a type of UDL to try to address a more targeted course design. Or does it really need like a digital accessibility or built environment assessment, which is then a bit beyond the level of an individual instructor?

Because then you’re talking about publishers, you’re talking about courseware, right? So I try my best to figure out what is actually within the control of the instructor. What could the instructor actually do that’s not gonna be so stressful and so time consuming that now they’re resentful of having to do all this work.

And what is actually the work of the quote unquote university? What is maybe the work of the faculty? What is the work of the SAS? ‘Cause the, the accommodation office is always gonna have a place in this type of environment, and we really should be working to bridge accessibility and accommodation practice as opposed to trying to position them as either oppositional or that one will replace the other.

I mean, I always have to like remind myself and others that like disabled people fought for accommodation protections for decades before they became a thing. And we can’t just get rid of that system. People are so dependent on it because without it, without the system level fixes, it’s a long way off to get to the level of complete system level fixes.

So that’s where we’re at. I’d say our phase is how does UDL intersect with an accommodation process, if at all? And if it doesn’t, how do we bridge those two things together to support the faculty in a way where they’re not making design choices that now counteract the accommodation process? Because that happens too.

So we just don’t want more work for faculty if possible. And we want a better experience for students always, right? That’s always sort of the balance that we’re trying to maintain. And it’s hard, like I’m saying this, like this has been like three years of obsessive work on my end to try to understand these concepts.

And we’re still at infancy in trying to figure out how to do this. So this is not something that’s widely practiced. It’s not widely described or talked about or you know, et cetera, et cetera. So again, not easy work, but definitely the most interesting and meaningful work that I’ve done in my career so far. For sure.

David: Thanks so much, Kate. This has been fascinating and I thank you for sharing the important information about the proposed Ontario Education Standards, and I hope the province doesn’t delay too long before actually passing it into legislation. What kind of resources are available for people that wanna learn more about the Ontario Education Standards?

Kate: So there’s the standards themselves, so folks, if they’re interested, can go and read. I think their called the Development of the Accessibility for Ontarians Disabilities Act Proposed Accessible Education Standard, something very long, but you can find it on the Ontario Government website. So reading the recommendations themselves, great resource.

I would say that almost every university in Ontario at this point, at a minimum, has some form of digital accessibility or accessible education openly available content on their websites because these are both requirements under the current AODAs. Communities of practice, like I can’t speak highly enough about all the small groups of people.

You know, I work, I’ve mentioned a couple of times with this AODA Coordinator community of practice. These folks are the menchiest, most wonderful people. They’re just like the backbone of the work in their institutions. And they’ve done an incredible amount of work to move forward these particular recommendations.

In fact, there’s a lot of work happening at the level of the sector right now through combined advocacy from the Council of Ontario Universities and our AODA coordinator groups. So that’s really hopeful to me is that the whole sector is now engaged in analyzing and better understanding the standards.

I mean, it’s a lot of self-teaching. Sandi knows there’s no one centralized program yet in Canada to teach digital accessibility or just accessibility in general. But yeah, those lots of stuff. David. Just gotta Google it.

Sandi: Before we say goodbye to you, Kate, we like to ask all our guests the same question.

Can you tell us one practical tip that our listeners can put into practice today that would help improve accessibility or perhaps remove barriers in the field of accessibility and disability?

Kate: Download a captioning app onto your phone if you have an opportunity. Ava is fantastic speech to text recognition. You run into anybody who’s deaf, nonverbal, or anybody who’s just nonverbal. Fantastic for communication device. I love this app. It’s built for and by deaf community. It’s A V A.

The second thing you can do? Learn how to build an accessible Word doc. I swear to God, it is the foundation of like every digital accessibility practice can find its way back to either an accessible Word doc or an accessible webpage. And I just think Word is a little bit more user friendly and familiar to the average person. So learn the heading styles, learn the basic alt text, the embedded links lists. It makes such a huge difference if you can replicate that practice across your emails, your PowerPoints, your websites, et cetera.

You know, this Sandi, it’s the building blocks of every good website is to know basic authoring tool design.

Sandi: Well, thank you Kate. I know David and I, I’m sure I’m gonna speak for David, but I think we both enjoyed this conversation with you. Lots of information. Your enthusiasm is definitely contagious, which is wonderful.

So I don’t know how anybody could say no to you and all the best of luck with implementing standards at your institution.

Kate: Thanks to you both very much. This was so awesome to get to come onto your podcast. I’ve seen it posted on LinkedIn from time to time, so I just, I really appreciate the opportunity.

David: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast.

Are the speakers own and do not necessarily represent those of the podcast team and partners. This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. The Practical Accessibility Insights podcast is hosted by CMS Web Solutions. The intent of this podcast is to raise awareness for practical advice and strategies for making digital and physical environments more accessible to everyone.

Thank you for joining us in this time of discovery and sharing for a more inclusive society. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at info, I N F O, at david dot best or Sandi, S A N D I, at CMS Web Solutions dot com. For more information and resources, go to www.CMSWebSolutions.com or www.BestAccessibility.consulting.