Work Group: Accessibility in Education

Work Group Facilitator: Tobias Christian Jensen <tcj@siteimprove.com>
Slack channel: https://w3ccommunity.slack.com/archives/C04CW8854RE

The group has discussed adding accessibility to university curriculums but found this a big and challenging task.

Instead, we decided to start out by providing guest lecturing about accessibility to schools and gaining insight into what knowledge schools lack.

The group has created a list of schools, determining interest, and potentially arranging interviews with schools: Higher Education in Nordic Countries (Google Docs) The next step is to contact these schools to hear if they would be willing to be interviewed about challenges for getting accessibility on the curriculum, and determine whether they’d be willing to pay for guest lecturers coming to talk about accessibility.

The group has also published a survey for designers, developers, and others to gauge the general level of accessibility knowledge and training received: Accessibility Survey (Google Forms) Please share far and wide with your network.

Action items for our next meeting:

1. Review initial survey responses.
2. Discuss responses from the schools that have gotten back to us after we contact them.
   • Then, we will add contact information for each school.
   • Then, we will clear individual schools’ interests in having lectures on accessibility and determine if they are willing to pay for guest lectures.
3. We also plan to create a reusable presentation with a script/notes for guest lecturers to minimize workload.
4. Bonus: Potentially get in contact with employer panels that exist in university structures to push universities to focus more on accessibility.

For anyone interested in joining some of our meetings, you can let the Work Group Facilitator know, tell us in a comment here, or tell us in the Work Group Slack channel, and we will make sure to add you.