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.

This blog post, by Dr Dyi Dieuwertje Huijg and Dr Kelsie Action, was originally published for the flipped conference ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’ (published 10 Sep 2020, panel on 18 Sep 2020)

Digital and distance learning in the pandemic university has created access to higher education teaching (HET) for disabled^[1] students – and staff, to some extent – where this was not offered before by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Despite disabled learners’ need for proper digital access, HEIs insisted for years that digital learning was impossible. When faced with the pandemic, they rapidly pivoted; within weeks they transitioned to digital and distance learning. After years of debates about mobile phones and computers in the classroom, all of a sudden students were ‘allowed’ to always use their digital device; and, at least hypothetically, learning and teaching while lying down became an option. At the same time, disabled students and staff, as well as disability practitioners, have addressed the access gap in the pandemic university, which nevertheless seems to have low priority in policy. Unsurprisingly, there are concerns how this will develop in the post-lockdown university.