The accessibility experiences of stakeholders

These notes are part of a series for the book.

Seale, J. (2014) ‘Ch. 9, Missing voices: What do we really know about the perspectives and experiences of accessibility stakeholders?’ in E-Learning and Disability in Higher Education: Accessibility research and practice, 2nd ed., New York, Routledge.

Outline

  1. Introduction
  2. Mediated voices
  3. Expert voices
  4. Lone voices
    1. Lecturers’ voices
    2. Learning technologists’ voices
    3. Student support workers’ and managers’ voices
  5. Reflexive voices
  6. Conclusion

Notes

This is a short chapter in an otherwise fact-packed book. Seale wants to share first-hand experiences of stakeholders as it has been published in academic articles. There wasn’t much for her to choose from.

She mentions a few surveys, but they arm you with figures but give no context or reasoning for the figures. She found ‘six publications, reporting the experiences of 10 practitioners’ (Seale, 2014, p. 157) and noted that such a small sampling can’t really represent the whole. I appreciated the effort, but felt the excerpts she shared didn’t provide much more than what is already known — some people want to do better with accessibility in their work, others don’t, some are frustrated by the technology, others are excited by the challenge.