I really believe that main problem with inaccessibility, especially in the digital world, comes from lack of knowledge and awareness. People don’t really want to make things inaccessible, they just don’t know what is needed to make them accessible.At least in most cases that I can remember.
Adding accessibility to universities helps a lot. But I think it is too late to learn the basics. There is also a fact that not everybody attends university and even when they do they have to learn a lot about other fields so there is not enough time to really learn about accessibility beyond basics. So “shifting left” accessibility in my opinion also means “shifting left” the knowledge, as in making people aware of it earlier.
Shifting left accessibility knowledge
Shifting left is quite a famous sentence in the field of accessibility and it means to consider accessibility earliest possible in the product or service lifecycle. This is the only sustainable possibility to make things accessible. Experience shows that taking things at the end makes accessibility difficult or expensive or both.
As mentioned – main problem is still lack of awareness and knowledge – so shifting left accessibility knowledge and awareness would help a lot. Now teaching Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in primary school would have negative impact, that’s for sure. They are written in a language that can be a barrier for people, especially young people. But teaching basics of WCAG before pupils make their first presentations would really benefit society in the long run.
Teachers could adapt the basics of accessibility based on WCAG and present them in a simple and more understandable way for pupils. A suggestion that comes to mind:
- Use strong contrast for texts and important visual elements (referring to WCAG 1.4.3 and WCAG 1.4.11),
- Add alternative texts to images (referring to WCAG 1.1.1),
- Explain unusual words, abbreviations and make sure to define how to pronounce difficult words (referring to WCAG 3.1.3, 3.14 and 3.1.6)
This is only a quick suggestion and I bet that education experts could extract a lot more from WCAG and make it more accessible to primary school pupils. This would serve as a good on-boarding to digital accessibility and would for sure benefit whole society after some generations.
High school should extend on this and maybe include some WCAG directly, so that university wouldn’t have to teach the bare basics but could build upon acquired knowledge.
WCAG can be overwhelming if we start with the whole thing, so breaking it up into smaller pieces, adjusted to public is the only sustainable way to make it mainstream.
I hope that future will go into this direction.
