1. Professor Jane Seale, Open University, UK
Making Higher Education More Accessible to Disabled Students: Do We Need New Technologies or New Technology Practices?
Professor Jane Seale, Open University, UK

2. Aims /מטרות
Orientate audience to the main aims of the Leverhulme-funded International Network on ICT, disability, post-secondary education and employment (Ed-ICT)
Provide an underpinning critical framework for the third symposium of this network in which we examine issues of technology design

3. The Ed-ICT International Network / רשת בין לאומית
To explore the role that ICTs play or could play in creating barriers and mitigating disadvantages that students with disabilities in post-secondary education (PSE) experience
To examine how practices of educators and other stakeholders can craft successful and supportive relationships between learners with disabilities and ICT
The aim of the Ed-ICT International network is to explore the role that ICTs—including computers, mobile devices, assistive technologies, online learning, and social networking sites—play or could play in creating barriers and mitigating disadvantages that students with disabilities in post-compulsory education experience both generally and specifically in relation to social, emotional and educational outcomes. The network will also examine how practices of educators and other stakeholders can craft successful and supportive relationships between learners with disabilities and ICT.

4. The Ed-ICT International Network
Synthesise and compare the available research evidence across the five countries regarding the relationship between students with disabilities, ICTs and PSE
Construct theoretical explanations for why ICTs have not achieved the dramatic reductions in discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion hoped for
Provide new perspectives about potential future solutions regarding how PSE institutions can better use ICTs to remove the ongoing problems of disadvantage and exclusion of students with disabilities.
Synthesise and compare the available research evidence across the five countries regarding the relationship between students with disabilities, ICTs and post-compulsory education;
Construct theoretical explanations for why ICTs have not achieved the dramatic reductions in discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion hoped for when equality and discrimination related laws were published across the five countries;
Provide new perspectives about potential future solutions regarding how post-compulsory education institutions can better use ICTs to remove the ongoing problems of disadvantage and exclusion of students with disabilities.
In order to meet these objectives we will hold five international symposia over the next three years, each with one of the following broad themes:
Effective models and frameworks
New perspectives
New designs
Effective practices
New solutions.
For each symposium, we will accept 20 stakeholders from the host country. They will include members of the following groups: students with disabilities; faculty and professionals responsible for faculty/staff development; professionals responsible for support services for students with disabilities; campus information technology staff; digital textbook and resource publishers; and senior institutional administrators.
All outputs from our symposia will be available from our website:
There is an discussion list to support conversations outside of the symposia: To join please go to:

5. Critical framework for thinking about designing technologies for disabled students in PSE /מסגרת קריטית
Do We Need New Technologies or New Technology Practices?

6. Asking questions about ICT design….
Is the community willing to design better, more accessible ICTs?
Do tools exist to assist us in the design of better, more accessible ICTs?
Do all stakeholders need to be involved in the design of better, more accessible ICTs and do we know how best to involve them?
Will more accessible ICTs lead to better outcomes for disabled students?

7. …..Leads to new design practices
Addressing institutional unwillingness to change
Developing a design movement focused on freely available, open- source technologies
Embedding empathy into design curricula in a way that is not insulting to disabled people
Employing participatory R&D methods
Being able to produce and critique evidence of ICT impact

8. Is the community willing to design better, more accessible ICTs?
We can find examples of individuals being willing to design better
iPad apps for cognitive support
Portable Wi-Fi network and mobile technologies to support field-work studies
Lecture capture technologies
Automatic conversion of documents
Sonification of graphs
We can also find examples of institutions being unwilling to design better
Continuing and sustained inaccessibility of university and college websites

9. Practice implication 1: address institutional unwillingness to change
Will an institution that is unwilling to create accessible websites be willing to install lecture caption technologies?

10. Do tools exist to assist us in the design of better, more accessible ICTs?
Models
Not clear if and how any innovatory new designs have stemmed from the application of a model such as Universal Design
Guidelines
So many…
Focused on improving design of existing technologies, rather than promoting innovative new designs

11. Practice implication 2: Perhaps we need a new design ‘movement’

12. The maker movement as applied to ICT, disability and PSE
Freely available open source designs and apps
“I personally find the idea of cascading the new design products of a relatively few able and willing accessible designers to be a more pragmatic approach than somehow hoping we can cascade accessible design practice across the whole community. We have been trying that for the past 16 to 20 years, with limited success”

13. Do we know how best to involve stakeholders in improving the design of technologies?
Design students- the future generation
Change the curriculum
Embed empathy-building activities
Interaction with disabled people
Technology delivered, disability simulations
Simulating disability- temporary, self-imposed experience- can it really build empathy? Is it insulting to the disabled

14. Practice implication 3: Perhaps we need more disabled designers!!
Recruitment practice

15. Do we know how best to involve stakeholders in improving the design of technologies?
Disabled students
Usability testing
After the fact-once something has been designed
Participatory Design or Participatory Research

16. Practice implication 4: We need to employ participatory design/research techniques
Involving disabled students in all aspects of design from the conception of the idea, to the making, to the testing, to the dissemination, to the evaluation

17. An example:

18. Will more accessible ICTs lead to better outcomes for disabled students?
We have lots of evidence of two kinds:
Prophesies based on values, opinions, ideology
Qualitative, ethnographic, students’ lived experience
We have little experimental, quantitative evidence
No standardised outcome measures
Unlike the AT and Rehabilitation World
We need to integrate the qualitative and the quantitative evidence
But in order to do so, we need to sharpen our critical evaluation skills

19. Practice implication 5:Being able to produce and critique evidence of ICT impact

20. An example: Kent et al. 2017
“Captions benefit a range of students, particularly those considered to be at risk – such as students who are deaf or hard of hearing (Stinson et al. 2009; Wald 2006a; Maiorana-Basas and Pagliaro 2014; Marschark et al. 2006; Elliot et al. 2002), those with learning difficulties (Evmenova 2008; Evmenova and Behrmann 2014; Knight et al. 2013; Reagon et al. 2007; Stinson et al. 2009)”

21. On closer inspection….
One of the cited papers is not education focused;
two of the papers do not involve students in PSE;
two of the papers focused more on how the ICT was used rather than the impact or outcome of ICT use;
of the four experimental studies cited, none of them found any evidence that disabled students performed better with captions compared to other alternatives or no captions

22. My concern
“Uncritical acceptance of the benefits of ICT for disabled students may be symptomatic of a technological determinism which says more about our positive attitudes towards ICT than it does about our positive attitudes towards disability”

23. Conclusion
We need to question those things that are ‘taken-for granted’ as truth or fact in the field in order to produce new creative spaces where future possibilities and directions can be designed