Making learning inclusive of everyone

Teachers are so creative! This is something I have come to appreciate more than ever since coming to work at Firefly Learning; meeting teachers from around the world, seeing examples of their work, and discussing what they need in order to do what they do best. From every lesson plan they create, the variety of tasks they set their classes, and the plethora of learning resources they provide, I am continually blown away by how imaginative teachers are to ensure that learning can be fascinating for every individual student in each class.

With the diversity of students even in one class, let alone when you consider all the students that use Firefly around the world, challenges to learning come in many forms. I want to make sure that simply using our product is not one of these barriers. I decided to strengthen my understanding of the challenges students may face, and learn how I can design more inclusively, so that teachers can inspire all learners in their care, and trust that our product will support their goal.

I found an online course, Inclusive Learning and Teaching Environments, which helped me understand what inclusive design means, how technology can help us to be more inclusive, and some of the measures we can take in our day to day work to design inclusively.

Impairments are not the thing that disable people, it is the things in the world around us that create a barrier.

Dr Lucy Foley — University of Kent

Sometimes these impairments will always be present, sometimes they will be temporary, and sometimes an impairment will be situational. And as we become more mobile, the chance for exclusion increases. When you consider all the opportunities for exclusion, you realise that inclusive design is not about making exceptions for a minority, it is about making your product usable for as many people as possible. Just check out this fantastically presented study by Microsoft to get a sense of scale.

TL;DR 26000 people a year in the United States suffer from a loss of upper extremities, but when we include people with temporary and situational impairments, the number is greater than 20 million. (page 40)

Inclusive design is just more fair. From a teaching perspective, if everyone has access to the same learning resources, fewer special adjustments need to be made. It means students can be evaluated on their knowledge, not on skills that are independent of the subject, such as writing speed, ability to cope with complex language, attention span, or physical dexterity.

Having learning resources available digitally for remote access is a great way of teaching inclusively. It gives students control over their learning, where otherwise they may need to make special arrangements. If a student uses assistive technologies, if they can’t take notes fast enough, if they need to take breaks, if the subject is not taught in their first language, or if the subject uses complex terms, then the student has the freedom to learn at the pace that suits their needs, whilst the digital access become a revision resource, benefiting everyone.

So when we are designing a product, what are some of the things we can do to make it inclusive?

As an example, let’s look at students who use assistive technologies.

These technologies mean that they may not consume the information in the same media it was originally created in. Content may be output as:

• Audio
• Translation
• Transcription
• Image descriptions
• Magnification
• And speech recognition could be the form of input.

To help make content readable by any assistive technology that a student might choose, there are a few easy things we can check when we’re designing: (recommended by Dr Abi James, University of Southampton:

Text

• Check that text can be copied to another application.
• Think about where you provide copy protection.
• Think about how you flatten text to images or PDF.
• Choose a default font size that is easy to read.
• Be aware that a user may wish to override this with built in accessibility options to increase readability.
• Plenty of contrast between text colour and background colour — use the WCAG contrast test to check it meets the standards.

Document structure

• Screen readers will identify headers and navigation on the page, so using the correct markup will help communicate the document structure to the user.

Images

• Use captions
• Use alt tags
• And when using these, think about how you would describe the image if someone couldn’t see it to make these captions meaningful.

Graphs and tables

• Check that a screen reader reads it in a logical order
• Avoid using colour as the only means to represent information. Label the things on the graph and use a key to explain what the parts of a graph mean.

Keep these checkpoints in mind throughout every stage of designing and building the UI to assess how accessible your design is, and therefore, how inclusive. There are built in assistive technologies in most operating systems you can test with, and many on the internet you can try out to experience your design as interpreted in other forms.

If we all aim to improve our inclusive practice it helps it become the norm in society, and simply raising awareness to others around you can start to affect change. From just reading this basic checklist above, we can see that inclusive design is not only the designer’s responsibility. Inclusivity is in how the product is scoped, how it is built, what it looks like, how we test it, how we teach people how to use it… everyone can do their bit to support a culture that embraces the creative opportunity to be inclusive by design.