SUMMARY: Accessibility checklists are increasingly becoming offered as ways to improve inclusivity in Higher Education. However, they rely on the presumption that those delivering education and thus using them have no accessibility needs of their own. Moreover, in seeking to codify what counts as inclusivity, many students’ requirements get overlooked. In this post, Dr Kelsie Acton and Dr Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg outline the problems with accessibility checklists and propose a praxis of ‘relaxed pedagogy’ in their place.
BLOG POST
This blog post was originally published on LSE Blogs on 19 Nov 2020.
Higher education institutions (HEIs) have a history of inaccessibility – marginalising, among others, disabled and neurodivergent (people whose bodies and minds process and experience stimuli and information differently from what is deemed ‘(neuro)typical’ in society) students and teachers.
A specific manifestation of inaccessibility has been the unwillingness of HEIs to offer disabled students digital access to learning, whether through distance learning or using digital devices in the classroom. As the world has rapidly shifted in 2020 due to the pandemic, HEIs have taken much of teaching online. Digital teaching, however, does not guarantee accessibility. To welcome a wider range of students and teachers and to make our teaching and learning more welcoming, we advocate for using this moment as an opportunity to radically shift how we think and go about creating more accessible classroom environments.
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