Students with Disabilities as Partners in User Testing
Full Title
Author(s)
Centering Voices
Year of Publication
Media Type
Media Access
Free/OPEN version of this article has significant digital accessibility issues. Manual, page-by-page selection of the text provides the most uninterrupted reading experience, though that requires the reader to visually perceive the text for selection. Automated text-to-speech readers experience the following issues:
- Inaccessibly authored line-breaks (that prioritize visual layout over reader comprehension) are interpreted by text-to-speech tools as periods, pausing reading and indicating the completion of a thought. These line-breaks interrupt the reader’s perception of the complete thought. The cumulative effect of line-by-line interruptions is a reduced comprehension of the article as a whole.
- Formatting occasionally causes the reader to skip words, sometimes skipping half of a paragraph.
- Repeatedly voiced headers and footers interrupt the reading experience.
Usefulness to Educators
This case study makes a unique contribution by delving into the ethics of digital accessibility testing in post-secondary education. It offers a Disability Justice informed, disabled-learner-centred model for participation that could be replicated by researchers and those involved in the development, testing and procurement of educational technology in post-secondary.
The article further adds a disabled-learner lens to scholarship on participatory course development and pedagogical partnerships, where disabled-learner voice is often missing.
The case study shares experiences from staff and students with and without disabilities who worked in partnership to test the digital accessibility of the website McMaster points students and faculty to for accessibility-related concerns and supports
Premise
There are many ICT-related facets of campus life that could be improved if students with disabilities were being meaningfully included in the development, decision-making and deployment of educational tech and supports.
Purpose
- to demonstrate that post-secondary ICT user experiences differ between users who use assistive technologies and those who do not.
- to illustrate barriers that are distinct to learners who use assistive technology
- to give voice to the lived experiences and expertise the disabled learner community can offer to ICT testing
- to illustrate the serious gaps in pedagogical partnership literature around the inclusion of learners with disabilities and to problematize a homogeneous “student experience” that doesn’t include the voices of disabled learners.
Research Methods
- case study
Conceptual or Theoretical Frameworks
- disability studies
- participatory, learner-engaged research and scholarship
- epistemic justice
- disability justice
Reference with Published Abstract (when available)
Points of Connection
This short case study deeply situates the project and findings in the literature. Repeatedly, it demonstrates disconnects between the disability community mantra of “Nothing About Us Without Us” and the lived experience of learners with disabilities who are regularly expected to adapt to systems (technological, programmatic or otherwise) that were not developed with or by people with disabilities.
The paper takes on the myth of a homogeneous student experience in both ICT user-testing and the day-to-day experiences of students on campus.
Scholarship on Students as Partners often describes students as bringing homogenous student knowledge with them to the partnership: “[student partners’] experience and expertise typically is in being a student. . . . They understand where they and their peers are coming from” (Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten, 2014, p. 15). While we certainly did bring “student” experiences, these were from a disability perspective. For example, although it may be a common experience for students to be time-crunched and need access to information quickly, many do not know what it is like for this information to not be readily available because of the inaccessibility of a website.
I can’t overstate the significance of this paper’s contribution to exploring the ethics of digital accessibility in post-secondary education. Specifically, in the selected quotes from people with disabilities, the authors call attention to the isolation that many learners with disabilities feel in post-secondary and how their experiences of isolation are intertwined with their experiences of institutionally sanctioned, and in many cases institutionally-developed, technologies. Technologies that work for “normal” students and fail to work for learners with disabilities. Technologies that push them firmly into the margins of the campus community.
“A number of us have found university life particularly isolating as disabled students facing institutional barries…”
“Contributing to [the ICT user testing project] and to making the campus more accessible helped me feel more connected to McMaster and pushed me a little further to that feeling of ‘belonging’.”
“As a student with a learning disability, I am reminded of educational inaccessibility and frustrated by very fixable things on a daily basis. This ranges from course readings that are not compliant with screen readers, to poorly organized modules or course content, or to the basic format of exams and tests. I felt this project provided me with the opportunity to actually fix some of these things and make a meaningful difference to our campus that will directly affect me and many others now and in the future.”
Points of Contention
I have none.
Findings
- Involving disabled students in user testing specifically, and student pedagogical partnerships more generally, benefits the individual students involved, as well as the broader campus community.
- student-faculty/staff partnerships contribute to greater equity on campus
- the inclusion of students with disabilities (and other equity-seeking groups) in these partnerships improves equity on campus
Moving forward, we encourage partnership programs to proactively address barriers—not only in recruitment, but throughout the entire partnership process and experience—that may be restricting the participation of disabled students and those from other equity-seeking groups (Bindra et al., 2018; Felten et al., 2013; Marquis et al., 2016, 2018; Mercer-Mapstone & Bovill, 2019).
Future research that would benefit from involving learners with disabilities as partners include technology use, institution-learner communications, institutional policy, accessibility legislation compliance projects and accessibility in learning design and praxis.
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