Why I CanDARE
When I began grad school in 2018, there wasn’t a lot of research into digital accessibility issues in post-secondary education. Dr. Jane Seale was, and remains a prominent voice. As was the late Catherine Fichten, the former co-director of Canada’s Adaptech Research Network, as were Technical and Professional Writing, and Communications scholars including Sushil K. Oswal and Lisa Meloncon, and Sean Zdenek.Their work resonates but we need more.
We need more voices. More experiences. More nuance. We need more people thinking and talking about the education system’s complicity in the silent marginalization of people with disabilities from the digital commons.
and decorations pushed to the side.
The CanDARE project is done in service of broadening our understanding of digital accessibility in education, and improving technology-integrated learning experiences for learners with and without disabilities.
Digital Accessibility Research in Education (DARE)
The global landscape of research in this field changed dramatically when the COVID-19 Pandemic forced the world to close our doors, and isolate.
Educational institutions that could, made an overnight pivot online. As students with and without disabilities were forced into remote, technology-mediated learning environments 1, the pivot brought much-needed attention to digital accessibility and digital inclusion issues.
This site currently focuses on research in post-secondary environments.
Millions of learners and educators collectively experienced the trauma of the pandemic, alongside the trauma of emergency remote teaching and learning.
Although circumstances were less than ideal, DARE researchers began swimming in data, and since 2020, research into digital accessibility issues in post-secondary has flourished.
Learner and Learning Experience Designer
During the pivot, I was both an Educational Technology grad student and a Learning Experience Designer, hired specifically to help educators understand and meet the needs of learners disabled by and in their new online learning environments.
My colleagues and I helped educators understand how certain pedagogical choices impacted learners with disabilities online, what steps they could take to be more inclusive in Zoom, how to add time extensions to online exams, and so much more.
It was a ground-shifting time for all of us, but I worked with a stellar team and I’m genuinely proud of the work we did to support educators and learners to get through the crisis as best we could.
Then, I got COVID.
In what is now being referred to as a “mass disabling event”, I became one of the thousands profoundly disabled by COVID. I lost 18 months learning to live with my new normal.
Unable to work, study or stay engaged with research in my field, I felt both grief and frustration over not being part of the digital accessibility discussions that flourished between 2021-2023.
And in a bizarre twist of fate, I found myself swimming in new experiences of learning and being with my new disabilities. After two years of re-learning how to learn, pace myself, and adapt, I’m very much back in the world and ready to begin making my contribution to this field.
Though circumstances were less than ideal, researchers in this field began swimming in data… I found myself swimming in new experiences of learning (and being) with my new disabilities.
CanDARE Research Project
Returning to this research with more disabilities than I had when I began, I feel immense gratitude for the contributions to the field that were made in my absence. That said, my research into digital accessibility in education has become more personal, more experiential and hopefully more relational.
CanDARE is my way of re-entering the digital accessibility research in education (DARE) conversation in ways that:
- Support community-building and showcase the work of researchers, activists and learners who are talking about digital accessibility and inclusion issues for post-secondary learners with disabilities.
- Add my voice to the conversations and share my unique perspective as a former post-secondary educator and learning experience designer, and as a person who lives and learns with disabilities.
- Engage with the lived experiences, specifically the learning experiences obscured by policies, checklists and legal frameworks.
Acknowledgements
Knowing I’m far, far from alone, I conceived of this website to showcase how we – a community of learners, researchers and educators – can dare to make fundamental improvements to digital accessibility in education.
With encouragement from the good people at BCcampus who originally funded the development of the CanDARE site, and from my supervisor Dr. Michael Paskevicious, I could dare to contribute to digital accessibility research in education in new ways.
I also want to acknowledge the learners, scholars, and loved ones with disabilities whose experiences and teachings inform the flexibility and respect for multiple ways of researching and knowledge-sharing embraced by BCcampus, as well as my MEd educators Dr. Valerie Irvine, Dr. Mariel Miller, Dr. Todd Milford, Dr. Catherine McGregor, and Dr. Jennifer Thom.
CanDARE shares the work of scholars, educators, activists, writers, artists, learners and so many people living and learning with disabilities. I don’t speak for them. I do speak with them.
I am also grateful to and appreciative of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical and contemporary relationships with the human and the nonhuman world, and specifically with the lands around my home in Victoria BC, inform my experiences of learning, sharing knowledge and being in community with others.
Publishing, Presenting and Teaching
Academic Publishing
Ashbourne, K. (2025). Disability and digital justice: Embodying ways of knowing and being. In S. Collins & M. Jay (Eds.), Decolonizing health, healing, and care: Embodying culturally responsive and socially just counselling. (Chapter 5.4) Counselling Concepts.
Collins, S., Jay, M., Arscott, J., Ashbourne, K., Kundi, J., Lei, X. Y., Lengyell, M., Sivakumar, S., & Wong, G. (2025). Re-visioning counsellor education: Centring justice, accessibility, inclusion, diversity, and equity. In S. Collins and M. Jay (Eds.), Decolonizing health, healing, and care: Embodying culturally responsive and socially just counselling (Chapter 7.5). Counselling Concepts.
Ashbourne, K. (2025). Digital Accessibility Practices in Post-Secondary Education: A Transformative Path Toward Socially Just, Digitally Accessible Education. University of Victoria.
Ashbourne, K., & McGregor, C. (2022). Educational Policy Analysis. In D. E. Clover, K. Sanford, & W. Samara Allen (Eds.), Academic Project Designs and Methods: From Professional Development to Critical and Creative Practice. University of Victoria.
Ashbourne, K. (2021). Reframing Web Accessibility in Post-Secondary Education: Examining the Role of the Educator in the Curation and Creation of Accessible Digital Course Content. The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Conference, 1(1), Article 1.
Conference Presentations
Ashbourne, K., & Miller, M. (2025). Critical Perspectives on Using UDL, Digital Accessibility Practices, and Accessible Pedagogies to Foster Inclusive Learning Communities in Post-Secondary. Digital Pedagogy Institute, University of Waterloo.
Ashbourne, K. (2025). Developing a Personal Transformative Digital Accessibility Praxis. Accessibility Summer Camp Wichita State University, Online.
Ashbourne, K., & Paskevicius, M. (2025). Transformative Digital Accessibility and Post-Secondary Teaching Praxis. The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Conference, Online.
Ashbourne, K. (2024, October 29). Centring Digital Accessibility in Research Praxis. BCcampus Research Speakers Series, BCcampus Online.
Ashbourne, K. (2024). A Sensory Exploration of Inaccessible Digital Practices: Culturally acceptable marginalization in praxis. The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Conference, Montreal, Canada and Online.
Paskevicius, M., & Ashbourne, K. (2021, August). Access and Accessibility: Are Our Course Content Choices Creating Unintended Short- and Long-term Barriers for Learners? Let’s Talk about Teaching, University of Victoria.
Ashbourne, K. (2020). Reframing Web Accessibility in Post-Secondary Education: Examining The Role of the Educator in the Curation and Creation of Accessible Course Content. The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Conference, London, Canada and Online.
Ashbourne, K. (2020). 5 Things Educators Need to Know About Accessible Course Content. Let’s Talk about Teaching, University of Victoria.
Guest Lectures and Panels
BCcampus (2026, October 29). Teaching and Learning with Text-to-Speech [Zoom].
Trent University (2026, July 15). A Praxis-Informed Approach to Digital Accessibility for Educators: Transformative Digital Accessibility [Zoom].
University of Lethbridge (2026, January 22). Introduction to Digital Accessibility for Post-Secondary Communications and IT Teams [Zoom].
Manitoba Flexible Learning Hub, University of Manitoba (2025, October 14). Accessibility Considerations for Engagement Activity Design. Panel on Student Engagement with Digital Tools in Flexible Learning [Zoom].
Royal Roads University (2025, May 9). Transformative Digital Accessibility In Praxis for Learning Designers.
University of British Columbia (March 20, 2025) Developing a Personal Transformative Digital Accessibility Praxis: Moving Beyond Accessibility Checklists MEd cohort for ETEC 565C “Ableism, Equity, and Educational Technology” [Zoom].
University of Victoria (July 14, 2020) Reframing Web Accessibility for Educators presentation to MEd cohort for EDCI 565 “Research & Practice of Learning Design” [Zoom].
Footnotes
- The term “emergency remote teaching and learning” was used early in the 2020 COVID pandemic pivot by Educational Technology scholar Valerie Irvine and others to clearly differentiate the type of teaching and learning that occurred during the pivot from other, pedagogically thought-out approaches to technology-integrated learning.
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