Defining reasonable adjustment: using visual impairment as an exemplar
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Presentation at the Learning and Skills Improvement Service Launch “Supporting diverse learner need: an embedded approach to equality and diversity in further education”
Date: 14/10/2008
Venue: Professional Development Centre, Lewisham College, London, UK
Article
Let me introduce myself: I am the founder Director of humanITy, a UK Charity specialising in e-Inclusion; I am Vice Chair of RNIB; and I started the work on the accessibility tools and guidance materials for the Excellence Gateway by setting out a framework and completing the first module which was on blindness and visual impairment. As such, I think that what I have to say about my sector of work will largely apply to people with other disabilities.
In the past two decades there have been two major trends in connection with the way we think about the education of people who have a disability: the first is the growing tendency to talk in terms of rights of access; the second is an even stronger tendency to think that technology is the answer to all known problems. I want to begin by suggesting that both of these propositions have been put firmly into context by my work on making educational materials accessible for blind and visually impaired people.
There are two related central points: first, the right of access needs to be qualified by an open, realistic discussion between a course provider and a trainee to establish whether a provider can deliver what the trainee expects. The training materials I worked on were all concerned with tourism which presented such significant problems that it constituted an example of marginal viability; but if a blind person applies to take an examined course in the history of cinema, no amount of rights rhetoric is going to deliver the content in an accessible form. We need, therefore, to understand 'reasonable adjustment' in the context of a dialogue.
The second central point is that in the majority of instances I came across, a few well chosen words from a tutor or peer are more effective and more efficient than a technological solution. A tutor might say: "This picture of a horse and cart is simply decorative and is not part of the course content." It might be argued that this imposes unreasonable burdens on tutors and peers but the technological solution simply shifts the increased burden to other people and budgets.
On the other hand, the technological potential is enormous and if it is handled sensibly and proportionately, it can deliver very fine results at a reasonable cost which in turn suggests some minimum standards:
- First, the ability to manipulate files is crucial; and this means that the minimum standard for acceptable files must be that they are manipulable; in the case of text this will mean that all Roman Script language files should be captured in a word processable form and/or HTML before they are converted into less flexible formats such as PDF;
- Secondly, file construction should separate style from content so that customisation, such as enlargement, can take place within the digital system rather than outside it; for example, it is much more acceptable and cheaper to enlarge a digital image than to use an enlarging photocopier;
- Thirdly, the plasticity of digital material allows a great deal of information to be multi-modal, to provide a variety of outputs, as long as there are a set of essential tools;
- Fourthly, and contrary to popular prejudice, 95% of people who are blind or visually impaired want a multi media experience which includes pictures as well as language in hard copy or audio; again, image enlargement is much more effective within a digital system than outside it.
In summary, we need to be a little more careful in our procurement policies to ensure that systems meet basic accessibility requirements and we then need to ensure that tutors and trainees understand what systems can deliver; and it is precisely the kind of populist prejudice which I mentioned a moment ago which needs to be avoided. The problem is that the incidence of any kind of disability in a trainee cohort is so rare that the requirements of one blind person are frequently generalised, stereotyping which blind people not infrequently adopt themselves.
At the heart of the work which I have undertaken there is a core of good practice which is replicable but, unfortunately, it will only be replicated if tutors and trainees recognise that they have a concrete responsibility to understand what has been learned. For example, if you want to turn a data table into braille or enlarged print, it is best to make the shorter axis horizontal; on a number of occasions I solved a severe accessibility problem by simply changing the orientation of the two axes. This in turn illustrates the advantage of digital files where such a conversion can be executed simply and reversibly.
Perhaps the largest area of complexity is the description of the static and moving image; and here again we need to agree some basic approaches which can be widely used. And again, contrary to popular assumptions, most people are not good at description. To complicate the issue, we first have to establish the role of the image and whether it needs describing at all; but, if it does, then different images require different approaches; for example, the photograph of a steam engine may require a technical description of the visible parts for a technology course or it may simply require an aesthetic description for a tourism course. Surprisingly, perhaps, there has been much more work on describing moving pictures because of the legal requirement for audio described television. Yet we must be careful of exaggerating the effectiveness of description; words will never describe adequately to a congenitally blind person the aesthetic and the significance of the aesthetic of the Mona Lisa; any general picture of, say, an urban landscape, actually possesses so much content that the describer is forced to edit and in quite naturally opting for the functional may miss the essence of the work; and, in a way that it is not easy to say without being accused of descending into mawkishness, it is almost impossible to understand the level of deprivation suffered by blind people and, to a lesser extent, by those with visual impairments; and this deprivation is bound to worsen because of the radical shift in the terms of trade in favour of pictures over text which will accelerate as the price of high quality images fall while the price of high quality language will continue to rise.
It seems to me that there are three strategies which we should adopt:
- First, where possible, authors should take care of accessibility, particularly in the area of the images they create or employ as they are in the best position to understand the purpose of the image;
- Secondly, where this does not happen, we should use experts such as creative writers in describing images; and,
- Thirdly, the last resort, rather than the first or only resort, should be guidelines.
In conclusion, I would like to make two points:
- First, I think that the work on blindness and visual impairment provides a useful set of principles as well as providing a rich variety of practical suggestions; but as technology advances so rapidly, the process has to be iterative. Since I undertook this assignment I have been working on haptic force feedback, rapid prototyping equipment which 'prints' solid objects; the use of server-side rather than client-side audio; and the rapid evolution of digital book readers.
- Secondly, at a time of some economic stringency, I am glad to report that the accessibility of information for blind and visually impaired people is not a financial issue; people who complain that they cannot do their job because they don't have the money don't know their job. The real issue in technological terms is not hardware and peripheral devices but the construction and migration of files; but behind this, the central issue is what it has been since the Athenian Gymnasium, a commitment to collaborative teaching and collaborative learning.