Module 5. Inclusive Teaching
Across the world people are often discriminated because they are in some way different to others. This may be on the grounds of race, gender, religion, nationality, class or any number of other features. But we often don’t think about disability as one aspect of diversity that leads to exclusion and discrimination. It seems to some that disability is a fixed condition that needs medical or charitable help. But we will emphasise that disability is actually the social status that is created and maintained by barriers in society. So, while we recognise and understand that all types of exclusion and discrimination need to be addressed, and that much of this can be done in inclusive education, we make a special effort to highlight inclusive education as a way to address the issues that people with disabilities face.
There are no specific requirements to do this unit. The only necessary thing is a computer and internet connection.
How digital accessibility can help a person with visual impairment.
Meet Maria who has a visual impairment
Maria is 50 years old, married, and lives with her family in Madrid, Spain. Maria has macular degeneration, a disease that mainly affects central vision by causing “blind spots” directly ahead. The loss of central vision profoundly affects Maria’s visual functioning. She has trouble distinguishing colours, especially where contrast levels are poor such as a dark colour on a dark background.
Today she has to upload an assignment that involves the analysis of the financial data from a large European company;
Challenge 1: dynamic website elements make key website information difficult to locate
Maria needs to gather the information online: she needs to run through reports about the company and use the company’s website. As the blind spots in her vision have grown, she is only able to read the headlines of web pages.
She can no longer read the content without using magnification software, which enlarges a part of the screen so that she is able to read the text, but the letters are so large that she often has to scroll around.
The company’s website looks fancy, has a modern user interface and a lot of dynamic elements that change when you hover the mouse over them. For Maria this site is a total nightmare!
With magnification, she only sees a very small area of the screen, so locating information is difficult. She is desperately trying to find the company’s balance from last year but is unable to find it. After half an hour she finds the link to the data appears when she happens to hover over a certain menu item with her mouse. The link is positioned in such a bad place that she did not notice it at first.
Challenge 2: insufficient contrast between background and content
To speed up things and to relieve her eyes, Maria uses text-to-speech software that reads the company’s balance report aloud. She is good at multitasking and is able to take notes while listening to the information. At 11pm she finishes her assignment, the only thing that she needs to do is upload the file to the course online platform.
Maria has used the platform for several years and knows the navigation and structure by heart. However, on navigating to the site she finds it has changed and the upload page now has grey text on a dark grey background, so Maria has a hard time distinguishing between background and content.
Thankfully, a friend showed her how to use the settings in her browser to alter the background colour in a way that enables her to read the text although this may not work for all websites. Ten minutes later, she has finished uploading the document and goes to bed — tired but happy to know that she finished the assignment in time.
This experience has been retrieved form the MOOC platform Future Learn. It is part of the course “Digital Accessibility”https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/digital-accessibility/4/steps/389058
For more experiences and personal stories, have a look under the following links:
Education is very important to integrate into the society, for this reason we should pay special attention to the education of migrants and persons with disabilities, as it has often been neglected in the past. The first step is getting them to enrol in education by making them aware of its importance and then, trying to keep customising the courses and adapting them to their preferences.
To achieve this, it is very important that the education is inclusive. Inclusive education seeks to address barriers to learning and to enable every person to reach their potential. It is important that everybody feels as they are part of the class and not that they are getting special treatment.
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