Category: Critical Reflection

Reflections on accessibility practices – digital and human-to-human

A couple of years ago I presented at a conference on Accessibility & the Arts for VSA/Kennedy Center. The conference organizers required all presenters to submit their slideshows, plans, and handouts months before the actual conference, and to use specific templates. This was not the way I usually work – I like continuing to shape my workshop plans up to my actual presentation, and was reluctant to commit to something that might still be evolving. I probably spent more time trying to align my presentation to all of the formatting requirements and checklists than I did planning the presentation itself.

But I understood the reason.

Conference organizers were attempting to make materials available to attendees well in advance so that they could provide large-print paper versions and allow attendees to plug materials into their various readers and support software, and to prepare ASL interpreters. I was reminded that inclusive practices take time, and that this work deserves that time. However, for all the advance work to supposedly help make things run smoothly for attendees, on my end, things felt clunky and stressful. I had a dozen things running through my head from the checklist – make sure I speak slowly, make sure I audio describe all of my slideshow images, make sure I warn folks before I turn on the music, make sure the volume is not too loud to start. These are points I try to attend to anyway, but in this setting, I felt the pressure of doing them “right”. Ironically, a technical error on the conference app rendered all presentation materials inaccessible – no one could open them! I had to rely on being responsive in the moment to the attendees in the room. All I could say was, “I am continuing to strengthen my inclusive practices and language, but if there is a specific way I can support you – for example, turning up the volume or explaining something in a different way – please let me know. Let’s have this be a dialogue.”

This experience, while expanding my mind about what I should consider when I prepare a workshop for a diverse – or any! – audience, reminded me that it’s my responsibility to 1) design materials to be as inclusive as possible and use the digital tools available, and 2) connect with my participants, and build relationships with them so that they feel safe enough to share what they need from me. Both the digital support and the human-to-human support are necessary.

Why do we overlook digital accessibility practices?

There are so many reasons I think we overlook digital access. One is that content creators are unaware of how their digital messages may appear to different audiences, and another is that they don’t have the training to test and improve accessibility. Also, as I stated above, considering all access needs takes time, and aligning with accessibility practices may conflict with branding and aesthetics, or the desire to be eye-catching in a content-flooded digital world. For those who do not regularly consider access needs, the process can feel cumbersome and tiring – there’s a lot to think about! – but some very basic tools, like font-to-background contrast, headings, and alt-text for images require minimal time and skill. They are accessible accessible practices. While I can’t invite audiences to be in dialogue with me about how I can support their access needs, like I did in my conference workshop, I can use these tools to try to meet new audiences where they are. Because if I’m not considering inclusivity, I am inherently being exclusionary.

Somehow I’ve found myself in the role of tech expert in my nonprofit workplace. I am far from an expert, but have more experience and confidence using WordPress, Adobe, Zoom and other digital tools than my coworkers, and so I create screencasting tutorials to talk them through. One of the benefits of these video tutorials is that my colleagues can access them at any time and watch them multiple times over. Because they can do this without reaching out to me, it supports their sense of resourcefulness and independence, which in turn supports their tech confidence. While I’ve also written out step-by-step tutorials, the videos have been more effective because they can follow along, watching and listening, as they try it on their own. Reading and trying to interpret the steps in a written tutorial seems to bog down the process.

Using screencasting for tutorials in an educational setting, particularly in language revitalization and plant identification, is exciting because, while in-person teaching/learning is preferable, video tutorials have the potential to incorporate connection and context. The website and social media platforms of Jared Qwustenuxun Williams that I explore below are a good example. Qwustenuxun is an Indigenous food and language educator in the Cowichan Valley who layers Hul’q’umi’num pronunciation, written words, mouth-shape tips, and place-related video content in his tutorials. He generously shares his language, food knowledge and culture with his viewers, and brings himself into his videos so that they are relationship-based and connective. We see him as he patiently teaches the pronunciation of a word, repeats it several times slowly, and relates it to the video’s setting. In this way, his videos are gifts we can open again and again.

Not all videos are designed with such mindfulness and generosity, despite them being free to watch. As I create and explore more free content online, I wonder is it really free? What is the cost of having all these files out in the digital world, taking us space and energy? When we store things on the cloud, or on the internet, they are often tucked away, out of our vision. We can feel unburdened by their weight, and happy that we’re no longer surrounded by stacks of paper. Think of all the trees we’re saving! But let’s also consider all the energy we are consuming by creating, storing and consuming online files – the electricity it takes to run the servers, the water it takes to cool them. And what happens when the server becomes bloated with everything we’ve stuffed in there? I am learning to become more mindful of my digital excess, and am remembering that there is impact to what I do, even if at first glance it is invisible. I wonder, how can I create content that can be a gift?

After many years of teaching on the periphery of the education system – as a teaching artist, a nature educator, an ESL teacher, and in charter schools – I am choosing to pursue a teaching certification because I believe the education system needs to be reimagined. I had been attempting to make changes from the margins by offering alternate models that prioritize creativity, land-based learning, and child-centered practices, but I realized that, more often than not, these experiences were isolated in a sea of systemized schooling. It was no longer sustainable or made sense for me to be emphasizing creativity in my school dance classes when my students went straight back to their classroom, where compliance, and not creativity, was rewarded. And so now, instead of developing an alternate model on the margins, I want to be in the classroom itself and change education from the inside out.

These thoughts crossed my mind today as I watched the film Most Likely to Succeed. I was also reminded of my year teaching English in Japan. Why are we asking educators to teach to standardized tests when we know that 1) students do not retain the content, and 2) the tests don’t mirror anything students will see in their professional lives? I went to Japan because I had been hired by the Japanese government to teach conversational English. However, what the government wanted was different from what universities, and thus parents and students, wanted. My students wanted to pass their university entrance exams to be accepted into English programs. The exams were extremely difficult, and I myself would probably fail them because they were using an archaic form of English that no longer (if ever?) made sense. It was a non-communicable form of English. Why were students being asked to learn something that literally made no sense and was useless? I was never able to answer that question, but what was at the root of it – bigger ponderings like why are we teaching how we’re teaching? Or why are we teaching what we’re teaching, or why are we teaching who we are teaching – continue to ripple through me as I consider teaching for justice, liberation and change.

Some of the obstacles to changing the education system are universities that gatekeep access to knowledge and prestige, and some are parents who would rather play the universities’ game than risk their child’s ability to survive and be self-sufficient. But university degrees no longer guarantee jobs and livelihoods. I think a bigger obstacle is that our systems are driven by capitalism and racism – not everyone can succeed and not everyone can have power. Some of us must be compliant and powerless so that we don’t question the systems.

Ken Robinson, in the TED Talk below, talks about how creativity can counter compliance and help us imagine what is possible – beyond the realities of what we see today. As I reimagine education, I seek to centre creativity, to help my students tone their creativity muscles and to repattern the habits of compliance.

References:

Sir Ken Robinson. (2013). How to escape education’s death valley. In TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley

Whiteley, G. (Director/Writer/Producer), & Dintersmith, T. (Executive Producer). (2015). Most likely to succeed [Motion picture]. United States: One Potato Productions.

I was excited to set up my blog today using WordPress, which I’ve used extensively through my non-profit work. I was reminded that while we have been programmed to expect smooth, instantaneous responses from the internet, things still take time, and get tangled and jammed up behind the scenes. For example, my initial blog title “Rooted Reciprocity” caused a mysterious jam in the Wordpres server, but my secondary choice, “Rooted in Reciprocity,” set up successfully. Was it the name itself, or the link I clicked to complete setup, or just my timing that made the difference? I’m not sure, but this seemingly arbitrary differentiation illustrated that, despite what often feels transactional and uni-directional, my relationship with digital technology may be more complex. I ask technology to be responsive to me, but when things go awry, I must be responsive to it. We are in relationship.

I notice I wrote that last sentence reluctantly. I love to think about how I’m in relationship with plants, soil, water, people. I consider these elements part of my ecosystem community – we give and receive gifts from each other. We are reciprocally related. I don’t want to admit that I’m in relationship with digital technology. I want to believe I use it because I have to, because of our societal dependence upon it; I want to imagine that we’re not so intimately connected. And yet, I hold my phone more often than I hold my partner’s hand. I gaze into a screen longer than I look into my kids’ eyes. While I am working on switching up that ratio, I wonder, what if I also switched up how I thought about my relationship with digital technology? What if I grounded it in gratitude and considered what I received and could give in return? Can I root my relationship with technology in reciprocity?