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ADCET/OZeWAI Podcast: Myth Busting Accessibility in Australian Tertiary Education
This ADCET/OZeWAI podcast is the audio version of our webinar: Myth Busting Accessibility in Australian Tertiary Education. This joint presentation between ADCET and OZeWAI brought together a panel of staff from across the education sector to challenge common myths and misconceptions around accessibility and supporting students with disability. With a focus on practical insights gathered from staff and students, the panel explored barriers, debunked persistent myths, and highlighted strategies for creating more inclusive learning environments. (July 2025)
Hello everyone and welcome to this ADCET podcast. This episode is an audio recap of a recent ADCET and AussieWay combined webinar titled Mythbusting Accessibility in Australian Tertiary Education. Presented by a panel of staff from across the tertiary education sector, including Andrew Downie, Amelia Dowe, Kim Neville and myself, Darren Britten, this webinar sought to challenge common myths and misconceptions around accessibility and supporting students with disability. We hope you find this presentation interesting and engaging and you can find additional information supporting this podcast on the ADCET website. Now, over to me to introduce the panel.
Darren Britten:Hello everybody. My name is Darren Britten,
Darren Britten:I am the National Assistive Technology Officer with ADCET and I'm glad that so many people are able to join us today. We were very surprised that so many people are able to join us today. We were very surprised by the numbers of reactions and we haven't done a myth-busting session for a while, but lots of myths are starting to creep back into the system and into narratives and communications and, talking with colleagues and those from across the sector, we thought it was probably time to do another one of these myth-busting things and this is why they're important. And joining with Ozzy Wei, who again are the experts in a lot of the web accessibility certainly part of things and do meetups et cetera, but we'll get to some of that later on. But thank you everybody for joining us here today. I'll quickly go around our other three panelists that are here today and get them just to very briefly introduce themselves and let us all know why are busting these myths important to them. I might start with you, Kim.
Kim Neville:Yeah, hello everybody. My name's Kim. I am the Digital Accessibility Practice Lead at the Australian National University. Very glad to be here today to bust some myths around digital accessibility and super pleased to be part of this ADCET and OZeWAI collaboration. So thanks for having me.
Darren Britten:Excellent. Thank you, Kim Andrew.
Andrew Downie:Hello, my name is Andrew Downie. I work as an accessibility consultant at Uni of Technology Sydney. I work one day a week and my specific role is in the area of technology assistive technology. I also am a committee member OZeWAI, so I'm wearing two hats at the moment, and the whole myth-busting thing is so important because getting the technology right resolves so many problems and if we can get rid of some of the myths and provide some input, that's going to be extremely helpful. Thank you excellent.
Darren Britten:Thank you, andrew. Um, and, absolutely true, and uh, Amelia oh, hi everyone.
Amelia Dowe:My name is Amelia. I'm from the University of Tasmania, um. I work in a um in a role called online learning support officer and I do a whole range of digital things related to transition, but also related to accessibility as well. I'm really keen to help us some. It's because, you know, let's focus our efforts on the actual barriers rather than the imaginary ones, if that makes sense.
Darren Britten:Thank you, amelia. Imaginary barriers and again a lot of them are, which brings me to probably a little bit of a asterisk on today's session. You know any one of the myths. When we started to put this list together, we came up with a list which would take us a day to even start getting through. So we've kind of condensed it down as much as we can into ones that we think would certainly be um more applicable, uh, for this joint audience, um so, but any one of these we could do easily an hour and a half um seminar webinar on.
Darren Britten:So we're not going to get too in depth with any one of them, but we just wanted to point out, you know, some of those myths, um, that are going around and a lot of the invisible um barriers that come up because of those myths that are going around and a lot of the invisible barriers that come up because of those myths, etc. And reasons not to do things. We want to focus, as Mila said, on what we can do. What should we be doing at the same time? So I might kick off with one of the first myths, which is still very pervasive even post-COVID, and that is that students with disability only make up a small percentage of our students at our institution.
Darren Britten:I hear this from across the sector um and I don't know whether that's we haven't done a good job of informing staff um, and I hear that often, in conjunction with the, every student has a learning access plan or an access plan um like we can't have both um you know in in a way. But look, the reality is there's anywhere, depending on the institution, there's anywhere from high um eight, nine percent, anywhere up to 18, 19 percent of students that register those that actually go and register um with an equity area um and that's it's the biggest equity group um at most of our institutions now and the numbers have been rising steadily over a few years. So, um, that myth has been well and truly busted for a few years now um, and it's certainly worth countering that and I think it's worth putting that into um comms and things that you put out. It's good.
Darren Britten:I've seen on a few different institutions um now where they put up their you know their stats and information for the year about. You know courses that they've done, number of students enrolled, and they've also put up you know percentages of students with disability that they're supporting and things like that and just making commonplace knowledge for everybody, which helps, helps remove some of the barriers for some of the other myths as well, and reasons for some of the other myths. This is a lot of work for one student. It's a lot of work for no, it's not. At your institution, you may well be dealing with thousands of students that are registered with the disability service, et cetera. So I just wanted to touch on that one very quickly, which probably leads me into our next myth and I'll throw to Amelia for this one and that's getting staff to engage with and learn about accessibility is difficult.
Amelia Dowe:Thanks, darren. Well, for this one. I was sort of thinking that it's a little bit yes and no, like it sometimes can be difficult. I think the vast majority of people out there are really supportive of the goals of accessibility and inclusion. If you talk to most people, they're not going to say no. I don't think a whole range of students should be welcome here, and there are lots of people who are really keen to learn about accessibility, but trying to make things happen in practice can be a little bit difficult. So there are some of those barriers there. So I think it's really important to try and understand exactly what those barriers are and also what the enablers are.
Amelia Dowe:There'll be different structures and cultures in place in different places. So, you know, maybe it's time pressure that makes people seem like that they're hard to engage with, and so is there a way that you can counter that with like something really tiny, like really small amounts of time or working out. You know, maybe there's a particular time pressure that in in one team, they have to be really accountable about how they spent every single minute of that day, and so is there a way you can work with the manager of that team to value that time it could be about, you know, people feeling stressed and so maybe is there a way you can make it feel like a really welcoming, low stakes environment to be learning. So I think, unpacking all of those things, you know, if it's really overwhelming, definitely break it. I think this whole thing you need to break it, break it down into the, into the little, the little parts, um yeah, absolutely, and I think thank you, amelia you're getting um different people to engage in different ways.
Darren Britten:Not everybody's needs are the same um, and it probably goes back to that, as you might hear a few times um during the uh, the webinar today, and that is, you know, accessible. Accessibility is everybody's business. It's not just on one person. There's multiple people at your institution probably, um, that are there that are involved with so, you know, reaching out, working with others, can make it seem less um, less difficult um, and you don't have to achieve everything all at once. Um on to our next uh myth. That's here, um, and hopefully we won't spend an hour and a half on this, because there's lots to say on it and I've got a lot. I'm sure Andrew probably wants to contribute as well, but I'll throw to kim to start with, and that's the myth that we'll just do the accessibility testing at the end of the project yeah, thank you, darren and um.
Kim Neville:So the context of our work in digital accessibility is really about ensuring that our digital environments at the university are accessible for work and study, and so we're involved a lot, obviously, in IT and technology projects.
Kim Neville:Technology projects and one of the myths I've encountered over the last six years a lot is that it's cool, just do some accessibility testing at the end and that will be all that we need to do, which unfortunately reduces accessibility work to a bit of a ticking a box exercise and obviously renders accessibility improvement work too late in projects, too hard and out of scope Ideally for IT products engaging in digital accessibility.
Kim Neville:We'd like to have that work done much earlier, well, actually from the beginning, so we can discover accessibility opportunities for these digital products. We can discover how people who work and study with disability can use these products. That would inform the design of solutions and we can design them accessibly and we can procure more accessible solutions instead of introducing accessibility problems into our work and study digital environments, and we can test accessibility in the right context of work and study, and we can also ensure that accessibility support is embedded with the technology changes. So we think that if we address some of these stages of work that these activities can offset very costly fixes after the fact, reduce the risk of introducing accessibility problems into our work and study and deliver more accessible products. So yeah, so that's kind of the myth-busting we do a lot of the time and it's an ongoing challenge. Slash opportunity, Andrew Darren, you might have some more to add into that.
Andrew Downie:Oh yes, I could go on for the next half hour, but I'll try not to. I've had people approach me and they say look, we're going to launch this tomorrow. Can you just have a quick run over it? And I suddenly find this minefield of problems.
Andrew Downie:So checking from the beginning is really important. It costs vastly less if we start working on making the product accessible at the beginning rather than trying to fix it at the end. I think it's something like a third of the cost extra. There's also a really important concept and I'm going to get a bit geeky, but it's called progressive enhancement. So we start off with the basics, make sure that everything is working first and then start building in some of the nice-to-haves.
Andrew Downie:And the nice-to-haves is not making the thing accessible. It should be made properly accessible in the first place, which involves just doing proper structure and I'll probably say a bit more about structure as we go through, because it's one of my hobby hauls. But if we get that right in the first place, we can then start to do embellishments. But if we do it all in the first place, make it look pretty, and then we discover that lots of people can't use it properly for any of a whole lot of reasons. Colour contrast screen readers won't work with it. People can't access parts of it. Then trying to fix that is a very costly process, and that's when people get a bit grumpy and they say, oh, we can't afford to do that, oh, shut up now.
Darren Britten:It's a very valid point, though, Andrew, that you know, and we see it often, and it does fit with this myth and this last minute kind of doing accessibility it's an afterthought, and we'll ask a staff member quickly that we know has a disability. So therefore, they represent everybody with a disability and they can go have a look at this in an hour and tell us everything that's wrong and that's just wildly, wildly inaccurate. It's unfair to the staff member. They're not being paid to be the expert. More often than not they're just.
Darren Britten:Well, just because you've got a disability, you can comment on this, and they don't speak for every user. They don't want to either. So you know again, the little bit of time that's added at the end costs a lot of money later on. It's better to invest at the start of the project, build it in, get it with the vendors, get it with the tool, the development, and then everything's so much easier afterwards for all students. Again, it's not just about some students with disability that may be affected by accessibility. Accessibility helps everybody. But, yes, it's certainly a topic we can talk at at length, and we'll try and move on to the next one here, and we'll try and do this without this being an hour and a half one as well. So, andrew, um, a common myth that still goes around is perpetuated that pdfs are the best format for putting material online. Um, and try and contain your rage, if you can, or your enthusiasm.
Andrew Downie:A bit of both. Back in 2005, I read an article by a Canadian accessibility advocate called Joe Clark, and I actually reread it again this morning and if people want the link, I've got it. It was on PDFs and Jo's significant comment was that most PDFs on the web should be HTML. So that's the starting point. I worked on reviewing some online learning material several years ago and I made the comment yeah, this is just PDFs joined together with conjunctions, and it was a really, really tedious way to work for anyone, but particularly people with a screen, really, because I had to download the file, open it and close it and then go to the next one Really messy, messy stuff. So if it's to be presented online, then HTML is the best format. I'll say a few things about PDFs, and I suspect that by the time I finish, some screen reader users will be sticking pins into wax models of me.
Andrew Downie:Screen reader. Sorry, pdfs got a really bad name when people started scanning paper documents into the PDF document and distributing them, because what we then had was a document that contained only images of text, and certainly then, and to a large extent now, pdfs done like that are not accessible to screen readers. There are some workarounds, but they're messy and it's not a good thing to do and shouldn't be done. My comment about PDFs is if they are well structured, that's a big if. If they are well structured, they are a quite useful resource, particularly for something that you're going to go back to from time to time.
Andrew Downie:So, for example, my phone manual. If I want to go to a particular section on that, I can find the section very quickly because of the bookmarks and so forth. Now, for screen reader users in particular, there's a little bit of learning to know how to navigate the PDF, but if you master that, they really are very nice. But it is still the case, I suspect, that the vast majority of PDFs that are created are still not done very well, and some are done really, really badly, and this includes most documents put out by commercial organizations. So if you do it well, they are accessible, but most aren't done well. And so for online material HTML if you're going to distribute material that people would take away, then PDF, in my view, is okay, as long as you have structured it correctly, and that's a whole new topic. Thanks, dan.
Darren Britten:Yes, as long as you have is a condition on most of these things. If you go and do the groundwork and make something more accessible by default, then the formatting really shouldn't matter, but it certainly gives you those options. As you're saying, you know, an accessible pdf is probably desired over an inaccessible web page in some cases as well. So, yeah, look, but it still persists the myth that we just have to put things as pdfs and that means students can't change things, and all of those is long held and it's still being perpetuated in many circles. So that one has come up quite a lot. Yeah, another one here. That certainly and I might start this one off and hear this quite often, and I'm sure there's probably thumbs up in the chat. Certainly, if you have, we'll give a reaction that I need to know the student's disability in order to support them. We hear that quite often the student does not need to disclose the disability. Part of getting an action plan or learning access plan access plan, whatever it may be called at your institution is to say this is what's needed, not for you to understand the student's disability or for you to do something about that. That's there. So I need to understand what you need not your disability.
Darren Britten:Paraphrasing from a student very quickly. I know a student that then, or two quick quotes I've got here a student that spoke back to an academic. That asked the academic when they kept getting asked around I need to understand your disability, and they just kept poking and poking about it. The student said well, I need to see your qualifications in your educational history in order to work out how I can best learn from you. So I need to know how you teach badly so I can work around you. They said, well, I just teach. And so it started a whole different conversation and said well, that's what you're asking me. You need to break me down to work out. I just need you to teach well and then I, I will learn from that. Um, uh, yeah.
Darren Britten:And then from another student again, one of the replies with that was um, my disability is not the reason I struggle with your subject, it's the content that's not available to me. Um, you know, yeah, my disability isn't the issue, um, here, it's the inaccessibility of the content. Um, and look, I, I don't know. This myth seemed to go away, this idea of I need to know the student's disability in order to support them. Um, but it's certainly come back post-covid. Um, I'm not quite sure why. We gave a lot of leniency there and a lot of trust during COVID, particularly on the East Coast in Australia, and things have certainly clamped down, tightened down a lot more with that. So it's yeah, it's an interesting myth that continues. Amelia, you've probably got some things to say with this as well.
Amelia Dowe:Yeah, yeah, I was thinking too, because part of my job I do sit with students and show them through different software options and troubleshoot things. It's actually not as helpful as you might think to. Well, you know, if you're coming in new to have the diagnosis and all like a whole lot of diagnostic reports and that kind of thing On paper, people might have the same condition, but the impacts will be really different for different people. So actually the most valuable thing is to talk with a student about where the trouble spots are, accessing their learning and then working together to resolve that. Yeah, people also have different preferences in the tools and how they use them, um, what sort of voices they like or don't like or anything. So it's actually um, for anything I'm doing related to it. It's. I don't need to know really, unless someone wants to chat about it, but you know.
Darren Britten:Look ideally it it ends up being extra work as well. You know, unpacking all of that um and it shouldn't ideally be about um and speaking with you know, certainly some designers, academic staff, it's. It's not about building for that one person. Ideally, while they might have that need, you should be looking through that lens of how can I build um or modify. This would then be useful to all students post this so that I don't have to do this again. So taking a little bit of a universal design lens with that, but I might, speaking of designing and stuff coming from accessible by default, kim, I'm going to throw with you the great myth that the vendor, our third parties that we procure things from, so the vendor has said that it's accessible, so we're all good to go.
Kim Neville:Yeah, and this ties into the last myth as well, because it's really important for digital accessibility really just to know what the barrier is, not why the barrier is there, and because we want to. That's what we're most interested in is removing those barriers that people have to the digital environment. We know that in universities and across the sector there's a huge emphasis on buying off the shelf or buying software third-party software from outside the universities, for example and there's a bit of a myth amongst IT and digital products and procurement teams that if the vendor says it's accessible, then that's that tick box dealt with. So anyone in digital accessibility would be familiar with this particular myth. To bust that myth, we spend a fair whack of effort testing things in the context of people who work and study for our university.
Kim Neville:We work with the human-centered design team to make sure that we've got the right user flows, that we're testing for the context of the work and the context of the use of products, and we always do that sort of sense checking even when we've been told that the product is accessible, and I have to say that really 98% of the time the findings that we make are different to what we've been told from vendors, so it's really useful to do that checking in-house it's. Also we find those corded accessible procurement guidelines really useful. They're very good guidance on stepping through accessible IT procurement and so, yeah, that's the kind of resource that we rely on to ensure we're doing good quality work. Andrew, I see you have your hand up.
Andrew Downie:Once you're finished. Once you're finished.
Kim Neville:I've always finished, especially when you've got something to say.
Andrew Downie:Last year I anOZ on an subcommittee looking very specifically at accessible procurement and it is a huge problem to find products whether we're talking hardware and or software where the product is accessible. Vendors sometimes produce a document called a VPAT that's a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template and very often they either don't know what half the stuff needs that they're filling in or they just lie. I hope I don't get sued for that. And it's a real problem. And it can be very difficult to test the product before you pay the hard earn for it and then you get it and you find it doesn't work and then the vendor says, oh, that's not really my problem.
Andrew Downie:It is a huge problem and the solution to it is difficult to achieve to. It is difficult to achieve because until we can get people who are doing the procurement to be well aware of what the pitfalls are and until we can get vendors to be more responsible, it is a big problem. One of the new standards in Europe may well help this because a lot of the products that are developed in Europe are going to have to meet accessibility guidelines and if we get those products here, that'll help us as well and that standard carries on to Australia, but I think it's actually law in the EU now, so that could be helpful. Thank you.
Darren Britten:Thank you.
Darren Britten:Andrew. Thank you, kim you, thank you and thank you, kim. Look, um procurement is one of those um things that will change a lot of things if we get, you know, the tools right in the first place. There's two quick things I'll add to that um. I've certainly seen a few of those voluntary product accessibility um templates, or vpats, that just have a lot of not applicable, not applicable, not applicable because they don't think it's relevant that it doesn't perform these accessibility things. But that's how the tool is going to be used in some cases. So they haven't been filled in necessarily by experts either.
Darren Britten:The other side to that is you can get some tools which certainly have some good accessibility options, but when they're then integrated into our institutions, those features are generally off by default in a lot of cases. So we get something which is accessible and then we turn all those accessibility features off when we then install it and make it available to staff, because it wasn't followed through that we've got it for these reasons and these things need to be turned on. So, yeah, do some due diligence and make sure that those features are then followed through and make sure that they're installed at the time. And, yeah, the ADCET quarter guidelines are there on accessible ICT procurement. There's a link in chat there, a good reference to go through to make sure that at all stages of procurement, that you're thinking about what is this tool or software that we're getting and making sure that that's accessible.
Darren Britten:And there's some good, good good, the clause bank, and some good things you can ask vendors to do, even from show us the accessibility features when they're doing one of their demonstrations, not just talk about it, actually show us the features. And if they can't even demonstrate the features to you, then I wouldn't necessarily trust um, the information that's there and let them know that you're going to be asking that. So then I'll put on the spot and they can go and come back and show you those features because, um, if they can't, then buyer beware, um, unfortunately, speaking of um things that are sometimes difficult but not Andrew, Andrew, I'm going to throw to you a great one Making mathematics accessible is difficult to do.
Andrew Downie:Yes, there goes another half hour. So again, this will be a bit of a potted summary of the whole mathematics area summary of the whole mathematics area and it's been one of my areas of quite strong interest for a long time, going back probably 25 years ago. We had the emergence of MathML, so that's a combination of mathematics. The ML is as in HTML or XML and that code will produce very accessible maths so screen readers can read it and literacy assistance tools can read it. The problem is that to write MathML, particularly if you don't have is that to write MathML, particularly if you don't have a tool for doing so, is extraordinarily tedious. It requires many, many lines just to write a fairly basic equation A product then called MathType. That has since been discontinued. There is now a product written by the same guy, actually called MathCat, that's available certainly for JAWS and NVDA. I'm not sure about VoiceOver on the Mac yet. So that's presenting the MathML very nicely.
Andrew Downie:As I mentioned, writing the MathML is a problem. However, some of the recent developments have involved Microsoft Word for one, involved Microsoft Word for one. So putting an equation into the, the word equation editor, is now fully accessible to screen readers. That's a really good thing in itself. Using MathCat and there's another product, a free add-on I have called Access8Math, I think it's called Axis 8 Math, I think it's called they can copy that equation out and save it either as MathML or as Latex or as ASCII Math. And I'll say a little bit about Latex and hope you all don't go to sleep.
Andrew Downie:It's pronounced La-tex, I think it's L-A-T-E-X, but it's capital L, small a capital T, capital X, and there's some learning involved to write it, to write maths using LaTeX, but it now enables a screen reader user, among other people, to write and read math content completely independently and it's really, really a huge step forward. Some learning involved, true, but we now have the facility for producing mathematical material that can be fully accessible, and a blind student, who used not to be able to write maths in such a formal manner, can now do so and send that off to well, whether it's for their exam or whether it's for professional work or whatever. So yeah, progress has been made, but again, I won't prolong the discussion or Dan will cut me off.
Darren Britten:Thanks Dan. Thank you, andrew. Look, and just history. We'll tell you to be very careful if you're speaking to some academics that, as Andrew said, it's pronounced latex that you don't speak with a colleague or an academic and say we need to talk about LaTeX, you can sometimes get some very interesting looks or refusals to even meet. So LaTeX is how it is pronounced, as you said capital A, capital L, small, a capital T, lowercase e x, latex. Moving on from that one, before I go down a rabbit hole, another myth making learning resources accessible takes more time and effort than not doing it.
Amelia Dowe:So, amelia, yes, so it takes less time and effort than going back and retrospectively redoing everything. So you know, learning how to make your resources accessible from the start should save you time and effort rather than take your extra time and effort. Yeah, so, for example, andrew was talking about PDFs that have proper structure in. If you set your Word document up with the proper heading structure and then you're going to turn it into a PDF, you've already got a head start in having that structure there. Or even, you know, then you've just got a lovely Word document that's really nice to use and find things and it's accessible, so it actually sets you up.
Amelia Dowe:It's just a really good habit to be in, actually, even if you're not planning on doing anything else with that, for example, word document, um, to set it up well to begin with, um just means that, well, you can save time in a whole lot of ways and um, you've got more options as well. Then, yeah, and I suppose, taking that sort of thinking for everything else, um, whether you're creating online material, just thinking of the different options that you might need to have in there, or even, I think, say that that thinking coming back to the word document, because I mean, that's where. That's where I spend a lot of my work life in, work in in word documents and structuring those. If you've got that habit there, that's a habit you can take over into the learning management system that you might be using and so just having that habit of always checking for heading, structure and that type of thing.
Kim Neville:Yeah.
Amelia Dowe:What would anyone else add to that, Wanda?
Andrew Downie:I touched on it earlier, but this is really one of my hobby horses. If you get the structure right, then, as you mentioned, you just save yourself a huge amount of time afterwards. Not only that, you save. If you know how to structure a document correctly and use styles for the different appearances that you want, you save yourself a huge amount of time when you're creating documents. So it's not just a matter of making the thing accessible, it's just saving you a whole lot of time.
Andrew Downie:I'm a huge fan of templates. If you're going to be producing the same sort of document over and over again, that saves a lot of time as well, and it just means that it's going to come out right. It's a bit like when you go to cook a cake. If you follow the recipe, it's mostly going to work. If you start experimenting, it might go wrong. It is just so important, and someone near and dear to me, when they were going through uni, I kept saying you're not structuring your documents and they kept saying I haven't got time. And they have since realized how much time they save by structuring documents correctly. It takes a while before dad gets listened to, but anyway, yeah, if we learn how to do it. We don't just benefit students, we benefit ourselves. Thank you, absolutely.
Darren Britten:Look, and the good thing about structuring things and building them to standards also means that your resources are more sustainable as well, and all our universities are in the crunch for dollars and value for that. We do so. Making something that can easily be converted into different formats, put into different systems, moved across different platforms as we do. Making them accessible by default, or as accessible as you can by default, certainly helps, so for sustainability of the curriculum and saving money down the track, it's worth investing that time.
Andrew Downie:Sorry, darren, and it's hugely helpful if you have to modify the document later or update the document later on. If you've applied that structure in the first place, it is so much easier to revise the document.
Darren Britten:Absolutely All right. Sorry, quickly to one of my bugbears, I suppose that's here um, and I hear this quite often um, and that is around automatic captioning. Um, or the automatic generated captioning we now have in many of our tools, um, in zoom and teams and in some other um formats and platforms we put our video media content in, and that's the myth that automatic captions are good enough so we don't need 100 accurate captions. Um, it depends on when you tested them, how you tested them. Um, and certainly for some students, it's fine, um, for a lot of students using automatic captions, but for a deaf student, um, not having 100 access is just not equitable and just assuming, oh, they'll know what words are wrong, um, you know, it's one of those ones that I often hear. Or they can, they can hear when the word's wrong. Well, they can't, um, and it can be completely misleading. And if you're going to do that, then you want to be putting a proviso on on your learning resources, saying this should be not taken as 100 accurate and not be used for assessment, because you're really asking somebody to start at a default or a deficit position by giving them something that's not applicable to what every other student's able to get you know while they are getting. Again. It's still about the input. I might cover this a few times Rubbish in, rubbish out. You know AI is still not that great at the moment.
Darren Britten:Even though that's being used in a lot of the automatic captioning tools at the moment to help improve the accuracy of them, they're still not to that level where it can clearly do some things with multiple accents, with different dialects, different languages, different environments. We know even, like a lot of lecture rooms, an academic will walk away from the lectern if that's the only microphone that's recording or it's the ceiling microphone that's picking up the whole room and students typing on their laptops and other things, microphone that's picking up the whole room and students typing on their laptops and other things. So the quality of the recording that goes in also desperately affects the captions and a lot of these companies will test their captions against, you know, a really good quality headset microphone in a dead room with no echo, with all of those things. And so we've reached 98 accuracy, but in the real world environment you'll often find it's probably somewhere around 70 to 90 percent, depending on what's there, and that means every third word is probably wrong in the context and put that into some disciplines where there's specific terminology.
Darren Britten:It's just not good enough to say automatic captions are good enough and we don't need them to be 100 percent. No, you do, and it helps learners learn in different ways. A lot of people turn captions on just by default. Now, whether you are deaf or hard of hearing, captions just help everybody, so make them as accurate as you can. I don't know if anybody else wants to add to that.
Andrew Downie:Just briefly Stepping to the fray, just briefly. I was talking to a deaf student, uh, last year and I said, what are the automatic captions like? And she said, uh, they're normally pretty good, but what they get wrong is usually the really important bits exactly.
Darren Britten:Um, look, we might just do one more I'm just looking at the time and then we might take a quick break because I know this is probably going to be. A few people probably want to talk on this one, and so, kim, I might start with you, but this myth or misconception that fits into as well that privacy rights supersede accessibility rights, supersede accessibility rights.
Kim Neville:Yeah, thanks, darren. This is a complex one and it's a big one that comes up in universities a lot, and so I definitely went to the Brains Trust, which is a small group of digital accessibility practitioners across universities on this one, and one of our key collaborators, andrew Norman at the University of Melbourne, and I were talking about this one and he's made some excellent comments that I'd love to share. That conversation about this issue, about privacy versus accessibility. Obviously they're both competing human rights and they've been both enshrined in Australian law. What privacy people have done effectively is establish a set of Australian privacy principles, and these were added as a schedule to the Privacy Act. We don't have any Australian accessibility principles, but maybe we should have In 2021. The Human Rights Commission and Technology Final Report did recommend establishing digital communication technology standard, but there hasn't been any further action on this at the moment. In the meantime, what we want to see in digital accessibility is how we can raise the profile of accessibility.
Kim Neville:The phrase right to privacy seems to carry more weight than the phrase the right to accessibility. Andrew was chatting to an associate professor in law who is blind about how the associate professor might sell it, and their suggestion was to simply claim that equality trumps privacy. To simply claim that equality trumps privacy In a matter of reconciling competing rights as best we can. Or it is a matter actually for reconciling competing rights as best we can and, for example, some of our deaf student sorry, deaf staff members want to use otterai to produce high-quality transcripts of Zoom calls, but otter says that they use transcripts to train AI. So there's privacy risks in that.
Kim Neville:So we put in place a range of measures to mitigate the privacy risks, such as downloading transcripts and deleting the originals. We do all of this via a privacy impact assessment, which includes the assessment from our security team. Considering and documenting the concerns associated with accessibility initiatives is healthy and gives accessibility professionals credibility and gives accessibility professionals credibility. So yeah, it's a tricky one, this one privacy and accessibility but basically it is interesting to think of it in terms of privacy and security, which try and prevent something, and it would be good to have a stronger voice with accessibility, which is trying to enable something. Um. So yeah, darren, did you have some thoughts too, or anyone else?
Darren Britten:just very quickly, just to um, not so much comments, but just a question I suppose around that. So a privacy impact assessment. I like that idea. So that's an assessment that's done for when these queries come up at your institution.
Kim Neville:Yeah, so privacy impact assessments are a component of procurement and it's an assessment of a proposed digital solution and it goes through a number of steps. It looks at the data security, it looks at the privacy and confidentiality implications of particular data solutions and it involves the cybersecurity team doing an assessment as well.
Darren Britten:So, yeah, so I wonder if there's a way to integrate accessibility into that at the same time. So while we might be looking at privacy, where can it also enable accessibility or disable accessibility as well? Functions that say but again another. We could spend hours on the one topic. Just quickly, anybody, andrew, you got anything to add too? That's there. But again another. We could spend hours on the one topic. Um, just quickly, anybody, andrew, you got anything to add to I?
Andrew Downie:just thought, darren, that you might want to comment on the privacy versus accessibility when it comes to some of the note-taking assistance tools, such as junio notes yeah, look, there's, there's.
Darren Britten:There's lots of tools that are doing this. There's um, where things are currently being stored, is certainly the biggest one there's. Also, with the training of this information. I know a lot of institutions are certainly pushing towards, you know, copilot, because they can lock things around. But with some of the other tools, be very careful. I'm not sure of the latest one with Genio, which is a note-taking tool, but things do get scrubbed from the server. It's not used in training and bits like that. But beware. I know Otterai has been removed from some New Zealand institutions again because they passed a Privacy of Data and Security Act there which meant Otter couldn't be used at a bunch of institutions anymore because the company just said no, we're going to keep the data over here, we're not going to set up local servers or anything else. So they lost out on a lot of contracts for that.
Darren Britten:So I would say watch this space. It's very contended but one should not as I think, kim, you rightly pointed out trump the other. Necessarily. They're both equally there and we need to look at what's equitable again for a particular student where this might be needed. Um, I'm looking at time. It's 150 and rebecca did say that we would have a break around this time, so I will honor that. Um, we'll give everybody just a quick five minutes. Um, if you want to just stretch your legs, go grab a drink or listen to something less droning than my voice for five minutes, and we will resume. Let's get into our next bit of a myth a misconception myth and again a loaded question, but so I'll throw all the loaded ones to Andrew and that is compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, otherwise known as WCAG, is not a legal requirement.
Andrew Downie:Wrong Found that it is in that the Disability Discrimination Act says that all government organizations must comply with WCAG version AA, which is the middle level and the most important one. So let me correct that Must comply with A and AA. That's a better way of putting it and I won't bore you with what these guidelines are at the moment. But if you suffer from insomnia, I suggest you go to the webpage and start reading through the guidelines, because that'll put you to sleep.
Andrew Downie:No, it's pretty heavy reading, but very important reading, because that says how or what should be done to make a page accessible, and they also have some very useful what's the word I'm looking for suggestions for techniques that can make a page compliant. So, getting back to whether it's a legal requirement, so government agencies should comply, and I suspect most don't, but that's another story. When it comes to private organisations, the DDA doesn't cover web content specifically, but if a private organisation produces a web page that a person with a disability can't access because it hasn't been done properly, then they are in breach on the Act anyway because they have discriminated against the person by not making the service available. So, in short, yes, it is a legal requirement that your online material should be accessible thank you, andrew.
Darren Britten:Um, yeah, that one keeps popping up for some reason um, show me where. It says I have to do this. Show me where, um, legally, I have to do this, even though a lot of our institutions um and go to the home page on most of our websites we have an accessibility statement that will say we adhere to um, and so the university or the institution said this is what we do, then we're going to do it as a point of reference.
Andrew Downie:And the other component of that is the I'm going to forget the name exactly, darren, but you'll help me the standards for education for people with disabilities.
Darren Britten:The disability standards for education. Thank you.
Andrew Downie:Darren. Thank you Darren. Thank you Darren. Yes, so that's a useful read for any of you in education because that helps to quantify exactly what you should be doing.
Darren Britten:Yep, exactly, you know you should be providing reasonable adjustments and making things accessible by default as much as you can, which this falls into that category, amelia.
Amelia Dowe:I just wanted to add that you know Andrew's saying yeah, it's dense and a lot of information, but there's a really good visual map overview that Intopia have put together that I find really helpful to go and look at just to actually I've got it on my wall because I always need reminders of what actually it means. Is that okay if I put that in the chat and share that with people? Absolutely, if they're interested.
Darren Britten:No, we all need a good reminder. I think having stuff up on screen can certainly help. Look, I'll just very quickly touch on this one and then I'll throw to Kim, possibly and that's this next myth that digital accessibility can only be done by experts. It's yeah. I'll go back to my original statement. I think that you know accessibility is everybody's job. The same thing. I always counter this argument with this idea that you know that it's like saying your gardening can only be maintained by somebody who has recognised qualification in formal horticulture. No, that's not the case. We can all do something to help with the garden. We can all help make things better. We may not be qualified to chop down the tree. We may not be qualified to do digging and certain things like that. That's where you can get some experts in and assistance to do that, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't be part of that. Kim, did you have anything to add to this?
Kim Neville:Oh, just super quickly, darren. It's a good one, because I think it is important that people remember that you can make a big impact in your everyday work and Amelia brought this up before with accessibility checkers and so forth. All the Microsoft products have accessibility checkers and we've spent a bit of time going around the university and talking to staff about accessibility checking and it's a very achievable thing that when you produce, create a document, create a spreadsheet, write an email, do a PowerPoint presentation, you can just check it and remediate it yourself. And it does speak to that what you said, darren, that it's everybody's responsibility and it's actually very achievable to make a big impact for people in your day-to-day work. So, definitely, making accessibility improvements is something that we can all do together and from what I find across the university, people want to be part of that solution together. And, speaking to people with disabilities and with screen, who use screen readers, it just makes such a massive difference to their everyday working when people chip in and just do those extra steps and do accessibility checking.
Amelia Dowe:Basically, Amelia, yeah, those extra steps and and do do accessibility checking. Basically, amelia, oh, I just wanted to say that I'm very, um very much not an accessibility expert, but I have a lot of fun working in this area and like just chipping away at whatever I'm able to do, and there's um so many ways to keep learning. So I just wanted to say self-identified non-expert yeah.
Darren Britten:Absolutely Andrew.
Andrew Downie:The accessibility checker in the Office product. Not only does it sort of pick up mistakes, but it can be quite a useful learning tool. So if it starts showing you that your headings aren't hierarchical or the table's not right or the colour contrast is poor, then it's quite a useful learning tool. So yeah, we can become more expert by learning as we go.
Darren Britten:We can pick up skills, absolutely. Look, and Bree's just posted into chat there as well a link for getting started with accessibility an Aussie way resource, which is great. Yeah, where do I start? Is often the other question. That kind of fits with that and probably ties in a little bit with the next question I've got I might again throw to you, kim, and that's this myth that accessibility risks can be mitigated by hiring specialists you know unicorns actual specialists is the only way to mitigate these risks.
Kim Neville:Yeah, and I think it's a maturing concept really having digital accessibility specialists in universities. But then there's the the risk associated with that, where by universities then think that they've solved the problem by bringing a resource in, which is a great progressive step. But, as we've all just said, it's a collaborative effort across the community to make accessibility improvements and, in fact, to identify accessibility problems, to solve and engage in accessibility in a constructive way. So I did read an article recently that said accessibility specialists are expected to be unicorns. There are so many layers, as we've discussed today, for digital accessibility work, and one person can't solve all of them. So, yeah, it's just great that we get to collaborate and work together.
Darren Britten:Absolutely, it's great that we get to collaborate and work together, absolutely. Look, and it's also important in all of that as well that it's not just again on a few, as we're saying it's everybody's business, but also to include people with lived experience, you know, in testing, in procurement, in all facets of kind of thing that, as we touched on earlier, it's not just the final check that we might do afterwards. We may have actually gone with a better tool if we'd involved people with lived experience in the decision making. That would have benefited everybody and we wouldn't then be doing all this post fitting afterwards or we'll do that in the next update, or we'll add this to the next generation, as the vendor will promise, and those kind of things. So having people with with lived experience and those voices at the table during that project and planning and not just at the end of that process, is key as well.
Andrew Downie:Just a quick comment about people with lived experience Useful to get a range of people too. If I, as a person with lived experience, use it by screen reader to look at a website, I will often approach that quite differently to someone who's just starting out with their screen reader or hasn't developed a lot of coding knowledge, and both views are important and useful. Yeah, just keep that in mind. Just a range of people to have a look at the material.
Darren Britten:Yeah, absolutely. And good point, Andrew. And you know, again, we can't assume all our students know how to use them. That's another myth which is kind of on this list here that fell off, that all our students are, you know, experts in the tools that they use. Um situation. So, um, if we've got time we might get to that one as well, um, a common one as well which is popping up, and that's again with the range of tools that are now available, etc. So, amelia, I might throw to you, because I know you've got some recent experience with this, but this myth that this web page tool overlays we're kind of referring to, makes our website accessible. Yay, our work is done.
Amelia Dowe:Yeah, it would be really nice, wouldn't it? But no, I mean, I suppose, as we've been hearing about, there's so many elements to accessibility. Some of these tools, they might pick up some things, not be able to do other things. They may create more work for you, they may make things more inaccessible. There's a whole range of these ones out there, I think. Yeah, I think often an organisation might be looking to identify all of the places where they need to be fixing things, so auditing web pages so that they can direct their energies um, instead, probably you're better off developing staff capability so that you can, you know, once you've found those things, um fix them, um, you've got that in-house um capability there, but also knowing that those tools are not necessarily going to do what you think they're going to do, um, or or resolve all your problems, um, yeah, well, um, I have a lot to say, but I know we don't have a lot of time there's this question in chat of um.
Darren Britten:You know, give you give particular examples. Look, there's a range of tools. We won't mention some tools by name necessarily. They're the ones that you often see floating along with some websites. It has a little disability icon you click on that can change the font and the colors and those kind of things, which is they're useful functions, but it doesn't mitigate the need for accessibility. But they're often sold, as this makes your website now accessible and that's the real risk. That's there. And there's lots of litigation going on when you name certain companies. Yeah, there's lots of cases in the States, particularly with this. Sorry, andrew, you were saying.
Andrew Downie:Yeah, just to distinguish between overlay tools and tools that are actually checking the website for structural errors, and there's a big difference between the two. Some claim to fix your website and usually don't, whereas tools such as the WebAIM tool and a host of others will actually go through the site and do a checking of your website, which I always regard as a good start rather than a definite answer.
Darren Britten:Absolutely Look, and these tools, I think, have their place, but they are not the solve. All this solves all your accessibility problem. It can add some extra functions for some users that those tools can be really useful for, and I know AdSense got one on their page that helps with some different bits and pieces, but it doesn't negate the fact we're needing to make sure that your content's accessible. It just means this adds some variety for users. It doesn't replace the need to go and do things. So, again, we could spend a lot of time on that one, so we might quickly move on or I'll get embedded with that one as well. Andrew, I suppose a more recent misconception we're talking about AI and generative AI more specifically, coming out that I've heard this several times this year now, so I'll get your take on this. We don't need to do image descriptions because AI can do that for us now.
Andrew Downie:Yes, I'll start off by saying it is. The developments are extraordinarily exciting. I was going over the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the train and took a shot out the window and got a description of what was on the harbour and the building. It was just wonderful stuff. So there's some huge potential for getting descriptions of a scene or the images and such.
Andrew Downie:But what I don't want to have to do is to run my tool every time an image appears on a website to find out what the image is about, because most of them probably won't be of interest to me because they'll be decorative. If the image contains useful alt text, I may then decide that I'll go and give a longer description of that particular image, but most of the time not. So alt text remains really important. One thing also that the robot can't do is to understand the context in which that image is being used. So if there's a picture of a tree, was the tree put there because someone's going to show me how to prune the tree or because it was just a nice tree to have a look at? We need to know the context. If it's a diagram, then the expert in that diagram needs to provide a useful description of it Now. What the AI tools can do for authors, though, is sometimes to give you a very good starting point. If you're trying to rack your brain and say how am I going to describe this image, the AI tool can give you a nice way to start. Oh yeah, I'll do that and you'll chop stuff out and you might add stuff, because you know what you want to say about the image, so that's really helpful. But, yeah, the image should still contain all text.
Andrew Downie:I've written an article, which is on the Aussie website recently, about ways of providing longer description of images too, because that's the other issue. If I get an AI-generated description of an image, it's going to take quite a bit of half a minute or more to read through that description, some of which will be relevant, some of which won't. But if you're writing particularly in an educational setting a description of the image or, more appropriately, conveying the same information that the image is conveying, that's important. You might limit your alt text to I think most people say up to 140 characters or something, but you may need much more description, and there are some really nice tools HTML tools now for providing that longer description without cluttering up the page, and people can open that quickly and look at it and go back. Yeah, so yes, it is a myth that AI tools will replace alt text. It's a great resource, but alt text is still required.
Darren Britten:Look, and I think it comes down to AI, a generative AI, in a lot of these spheres, even format shifting and doing some of those things, or doing summaries, et cetera. Ai is not very good at understanding context. Um, you know why have I put this here as the academic? Why is this resource here? What do I expect you to do with this? What's this image for? Um, it doesn't know that. It doesn't know the history behind, why it's been added into that page, um, etc. So you can get a description that's completely off task with it. But yeah, we won't hone in on that one. We've almost reaching finish time, so I'm just quickly going to go through.
Andrew Downie:Very quickly. Before you do that, there's a comment in the chat about diagrams. There is some material that still cannot be presented to screen readers really effectively in an online environment. There's some progress being made, but very often it will require a raised line diagram, a physical raised line diagram or something like that. Yeah, exactly.
Darren Britten:Kim, I might throw it to you for this one Again, this myth that implementing a WCAG AA criteria or criterion is harder than doing a level A or a AAA level, which are the hardest of all to implement, which is the ratings or the levels of accessibility for websites.
Kim Neville:Yeah, just super quick, darren. Thank you this. We hear a lot that those levels are harder because there's more to do. So. Again with the Brains Trust, glenn Byram, who's been quite active in the chat here today, digital accessibility specialist at UTS just reminded us that the AAA distinction is entirely based on the number of people affected. So colour deficiency, which affects about 5% of people with one X chromosome, such as males, so colour contrast is a level A criterion. Similarly, with the age being the biggest cause of disability, partial vision and hearing loss are very common, so relevant solutions are level A. At the other end, deafblindness, for example, is not as common, so provision of transcripts which can be converted to braille falls into triple A. So it's just really that myth-busting around what those levels, determinations A, aa and AAA are all about. And in digital accessibility we're often confronted with but isn't that a lot harder because it's AAA, or isn't that a lot harder because it's AA? So that's just that debunking of that myth there.
Darren Britten:Yeah, absolutely, look at that. The AA is that myth there? Yeah, absolutely Look at that. The double A's that middle ground and that's pretty much, I think, where most institutions have set their standard at to say double A, because it's the medium between those, and double A also picks up everything in A in order to be double A, something else to be Another whole webinar on it as well. There's another point, or covers this in some of their content.
Darren Britten:Uh, really well, so you know, keep an eye out with them, um. I might ask one last question then we'll go to um, the q a from people here. Um, and amelia, I'll throw this one to you working with students, um as well. But this myth that technology and software is just very intuitive these days, so we don't need to train our students on how to use the tools that we're asking them to use. Um, which is probably a bit of an extension, I think, of the, the myth, which has hopefully been busted but still persists, that students are all digital natives yeah, so it's really important that there's like training and help for using this software is available.
Amelia Dowe:Um, some people you can just hand them the software and off they go, because some people are really just great like that. But for a lot of people it doesn't matter what their age or generation is. It's really important to have someone to give you a tour, show you around, show you how to apply it to your learning. You might be able to get it to work, but how can you use that to get the best out of your studies and you, yeah and um, have someone to help you troubleshoot when things go wrong? Um, yeah, so the training, yes, important still absolutely, thank you.
Darren Britten:look, I might wrap the official part of um of our uh things there um, but let's get to some of the q and a. Look some of these have answered, so I won't go through all of these, but comments that have been put in to these Q&As will also put up onto the website with the resource, with the video and the transcript et cetera from this, so that people can see some of the questions that are there for everybody. That's there. There's some questions on disclosure which have pretty well been answered so I won't go into that which have pretty well been answered, so I won't go into that. Sources for the myths that we've busted. Juliet, possibly we've spoken about some of those, so hopefully we've answered some of those questions today.
Darren Britten:Nick has asked in here a question around. You know, do inclusion advisors normally consult with subject coordinators before recommending specific apps and assistive tech to students? Katie's put a reply in there, but I would also add to that Generally, my experience no, they'll say what adjustments need to be put in place, not necessarily what software that the student will be using, and get that checked, necessarily with the academic, but it might be cropping up a bit more, certainly with the journey of AI. I'm not sure. Does anybody else have any thoughts on that question?
Andrew Downie:Andrew, yes, Sometimes it might be useful. So if a student is recording a lecture, for example, it might be. Or I think it would be courteous to let the lecturer know the reason for that, so that they don't get their nose out of joint. Or even if they do, then too bad yeah. Or if the student is using a device for feeding their hearing aid, for example, they need to be near the microphone, et cetera. There may be circumstances where it's useful for the lecturer to know what's going on, but by and large not, I suspect. But as a rule, of thumb?
Darren Britten:I don't think it's part of it. Look, I know working with some students that working with the unit chairs, particularly if the student will be using some programs that have some generative AI or they're using some generative AI to assist them with their studies in ways and showing academics and going through how it's being used and the student documenting, that can certainly be really useful for getting engagement as well and going oh, that's fine, that's what it's being used for. It's not being used for AI versus the other AI, academic integrity but again, another whole webinar that we should spend on that, so we won't get into that. One Natasha was asking about is there an accessible product accreditation program like Energy Star ratings for appliances or HLL certification for food and Bree's put in the link there to standardariorg, which is Aussie is a partner of that, so please go check that one out.
Darren Britten:Here's a great question from Jason. How can the new disability funding arrangements facilitate participation between ADCET and universities to explore student voices and strengthen support for students with disability, specifically around procurement and deliverable of suitable advanced technologies? Again, great question, jason. I think everyone's trying to find where this funding can be used so we won't focus too heavily on it here today. But I would say, watch this space. There's a lot happening in this space. There's lots of things going on at different institutions around how that funding can best be used and particularly I know of you where the procurement and delivery of what technology should be using. Along with that AI discussion, it's probably really important Anybody else want to add to that.
Andrew Downie:Just to say that it's very exciting.
Darren Britten:Yeah, very exciting space to be in. I think Juliet has then asked which transcription AI software do you recommend? Thank you, matt, and Matt put several answers in there, which, which is great, and we'll make sure they're posted up there. Look, it's fit for purpose, I suppose, when the student needs it, how they need it, when they're going to be learning, where they're going to be learning, you know, remote sessions versus in class, in person, on your phone, different devices, yeah, in terms of accuracy, again, it will come down to the input as well as the tool you know, even most dictation software.
Darren Britten:A lot of students and a lot of universities have certainly gone just using Microsoft Dictation for text to speech, you know so, going the other way with that, but there's lots of options out there and it's worth, you know certainly, playing with, as I said earlier, not using the scenario that's been tested in the best possible conditions, you know, how does it actually work in the lecture room, how does it actually work in tutorials, how does it work in a windy environment or wherever that student might be, is probably worth there. So just quite quickly, because we've got a lot of other questions here um, is there a good guide on writing image descriptions? Um, yes, there's several of those out there, particularly online interactive e-learning possibly not for some of the interactive ones, but there's the diagram center, there's the poet tool and we'll put links um to these up. I haven't got them off the top of my head. Um, the recommender can step you through how to write image descriptions as well, what you should include, what not to include.
Darren Britten:But AI can certainly support that. As Andrew was saying before, with AI generating image descriptions, they can be a good starting point and then work out okay, well, it doesn't need this and it doesn't need this or it's saying the wrong things. So they can be great. I might just, given the time, I might just call that to an end. Um, any of the other questions, we'll try and get up onto the web page and do that. But I might very, very quickly just get everybody to quickly thank um our panel for joining us today. But I'll just quickly go around and ask um very quickly and I might start with you, kim, and ask for the same thing what are two things you think that you'd like people to leave with? That we can all do to improve accessibility in our tertiary environments.
Kim Neville:I think let's advocate together to have lived experience, participating in governance and at every stage of the work that impacts them. So more asking of people who study and work with disability what improvements they'd like to see happen, and we're all doing it. But this sort of collaboration with AusUA and ADCET and the melding of all this expertise in the room today not so much the panellists but everybody that's here today who works in this area those collaborations across universities are so important. Digital accessibility, working with accessibility services and HR ongoingly, it's just so important. So , and ADCET thank you.
Darren Britten:ADCET Excellent. Thank you, Kim Amelia. Your two takeaways you'd like people to think on and what they can do to improve accessibility.
Amelia Dowe:Well, I think, find other people who are interested in similar work. Like we're saying, you might be scattered throughout the organisation and, you know, see what you can do together and learn and, you know, find an accessibility meet meetup maybe. I go to one in Tasmania um, aussie way, have some. They also run a whole lot of really great sessions. I always go to those, um, and also celebrate your wins, even if they're little ones, really important really, really important.
Darren Britten:I love that one celebrate your wins. Um, you should do that all the time. A lot of people working in the darkness, so to speak, and doing this out of their goodwill quite often. So celebrating those wins is great, andrew. A couple of quick takeaways from you.
Andrew Downie:I would like everyone to make an effort to structure their documents using formal styles. It's much easier than it seems. And the second one is to apply UDL Universal Design for Learning principles in what you do.
Darren Britten:Absolutely Look. And my two takeaways would be, to sum up kind of today and that's be part of the solution, not part of the problem. It's easy just to say not my job. Find out what you can do to assist with that. And one big thing you could certainly do, particularly if you're, as we focused on some students today, don't assume any of this stuff asking the students. Fine, for that. It's also okay to ask the disability liaison officer or ask the person that put together the learning access plan.
Darren Britten:We're not assuming anybody has all the knowledge in this space and it would be impossible to do so. So please ask the question, go speak with somebody, have that conversation, as we're saying, find some like-minded people as well. But I'll throw back to you, rebecca. Thank you everybody. Thanks for listening to this ADCET podcast. We hope that you learned something new about making tertiary education more inclusive and accessible for students with disability. You can keep up to date with our future webinars and podcasts by signing up for our fortnightly newsletter at our website adceteduau forward slash newsletter. Thanks again for listening to this podcast from the Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education and Training Supporting you, supporting students.