For me, Global Accessibility Awareness Day is always an ideal time to take stock and set some new goals to actively improve any areas of accessibility within our business.

Promoting an inclusive culture at work

As a business that operates in the Disabled Students Allowance (DSA) sector, we are lucky to be right on the pulse of new assistive technology launches or updates that can support accessibility.

Plenty of this stuff also makes for brilliant workplace tools and it’s not just for people with specific disabilities – and that’s the key – assistive software publishers have designed their products with total inclusivity in mind from the start. Real design accessibility means a product should be usable by everyone – it does not mean it is designed for one specific disability.

Our staff always use the latest assistive technology to support them at work; for instance, I like to use mind mapping tools when we are coming up with product development ideas. You can put everything down in one diagram and it’s easy to share with the team.

We also run a monthly Lunch ‘n’ Learn programme with workshops often led by staff members for staff members. This has included a sign language workshop, which we recently put into practice to help celebrate Deaf Awareness Week. This was a lot of fun and helped bring the team together whilst we are all working remotely (you can watch a video of our efforts here, which proudly for me includes a guest appearance from my kids).

Our CPD Revolution Online programme has been running for the last two months whilst in lockdown for DSA professionals, this has offered over 6 hours of free CPD on nine different assistive technologies, plus a keynote on mental health. Thankfully, mental health is starting to become a much more prevalent area for people to talk about but is another area which we will be continuing to put a particular focus on in terms of raising awareness in the coming months. Over 95% of our staff were able to log in and attend themselves, helping them to better understand the mental health & accessibility needs of the end users we are supporting every day.

Supporting end-user accessibility

There are a multitude of tools available to disabled internet users. Since 2009, mobile screen reading usage has increased by 70%. It is therefore important our e-learning portal is designed to enable these devices to interpret content correctly. Imagine walking into a cinema and joining a film halfway through or, more likely in my case, being woken up half way through by your disappointed Son. You’ve no idea who is who or what is happening – is the person on screen a hero or a villain? You lack context to understand what is taking place. Website page headers, hover descriptions and alt text provide users with the purpose and context of that particular webpage and of its content. Screen readers can communicate this information to the user aloud, supporting them in their decision making on the page.

The last few years has seen a significant rise in the popularity of video content, but how effective is it if only 78% of your audience can engage with it? This is why captions are so important, and if this isn’t possible then an equally informative, alternative content option should be easily accessible.

At Learning Labs, we don’t want to just tick a box and assume our portal is accessible. We are constantly looking at functions we can add that will support diverse needs. When users now log into the Learning Labs portal they are greeted with their own personal ‘My workspace’ page, as well as personalisation settings to further customise their experience. You can read more about the science behind this personalisation in Chris Collier’s latest blog. Although we are proud of these latest developments, we will never be ‘finished’ because there is no end point to true accessibility – we see our responsibility towards accessibility as a long-term commitment.

In any normal year, students’ mental health will play an important role in how they adapt to university life. This year has been anything but ordinary so it’s no surprise students’ mental health has reflected this. A recent survey found that 26% of full-time students reported feeling hopeless as well as 36% saying they felt lonely. How can you combat loneliness during lockdown? Different strategies work for different people but just by being aware of the issue is a major step forward. We now need to take the challenge of students’ mental health and use it as an opportunity to empower students, and society, to have a greater awareness of mental health as a whole, and for individuals to have greater awareness of their own personal mental wellness status at any given moment in time.

A recent survey found almost nine in ten students struggled with anxiety, which was an increase of almost 19 percentage points when compared to 2017 figures. With mental health it’s not always enough to have someone there to talk to. Sometimes you need that person to make the first move.

Historically mental health and physical health have not been seen as equals. How many places have you worked where there has been at least one trained first aider? And how many places have you worked where there has been at least one trained mental health first aider?

This is partly due to mental health first aiders being a relatively new initiative. Mental Health First Aid England launched as a community interest company in 2009. During that time more than 114,000 Mental Health First Aiders have been trained in England. A special mention has to go to Arts University Bournemouth which has recently been named as having the highest ratio of mental health first aiders to students. More than 200 of the staff at the university are trained mental health first aiders which accounts to 58 qualified staff members per 1,000 students. The next university is the University of Leicester which has 38 mental health first aiders per 1,000 students.

Arts University Bournemouth is taking this idea further. Not only are they ensuring there is an effective amount of mental health first aiders available to students but they are also offering a mental health first aider two-day course to all graduating students, setting them up perfectly for the world of work.

Something we have considered at Learning Labs is that if we were able to combine remote, digital resources and the subject of learning about mental wellbeing at this time we could make a huge positive impact on student mental wellbeing. All I will say for now is watch this space…!

Rather than draw a line under it, we immediately started thinking of innovative ways we could maintain our CPD Revolution community and the most obvious option was to deliver it online. Internally, our staff were already staying connected remotely with daily stand-ups on video calls. However, there were also new ‘pandemic world’ challenges we would face in presenting an external event online. This would no longer be the ‘hands-on’ experience we had marketed – how could we still create the sense of interaction, connection, and socialising people experienced at our live events? Would people even want to attend now?

We started with clear communication, sharing honest updates on email and social media, keeping our community informed. We were aware that many people who would like to attend may now be juggling other commitments such as caring for ill family members or home-schooling young children. We therefore made it easier to attend by splitting the day into two halves. This allowed people to choose to attend as much, or as little, of the event that time permitted.

It wasn’t just a case of moving all the offline content online. The topics covered would have to differ slightly to reflect the world we were now living in. DSA assessments and AT training were now moving to a remote setting, something that many assessors, trainers and students have rarely experienced before. We made this the main focus and ensured all the partner-delivered content related back to the main theme of assessing, training, working and learning remotely.

We were also acutely aware that people were now, more than ever, becoming concerned about their (and their loved ones’) mental health. We worked with our keynote to create a headline address for the conference that would give attendees motivation and resources to support their mental health and wellbeing during lockdown.

To encourage people to interact and feel engaged, even while attending remotely, we would pose questions, using live polls and the chat feed. This really gave a sense of being part of the event, even when you may be sat in a flat, 300 miles away, living completely alone.