Digital Accessibility Practices in Post-Secondary Education: A Transformative Path Toward Socially Just, Digitally Accessible Education

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dc.contributor.authorAshbourne, Kim
dc.contributor.supervisorPaskevicius, Michael
dc.date.accessioned2025-02-04T19:00:24Z
dc.date.available2025-02-04T19:00:24Z
dc.date.issued2025
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction
dc.degree.levelMaster of Education MEd
dc.description.abstractEducators, learners, librarians, and publishers don’t mean to cause pain to me and my disabled peers, but they do. Digital accessibility and inaccessibility in education is viscerally material to learners with disabilities; it touches our bodies, minds, and our sense of self-in- community. Guidance and tools to support the adoption of digital practices that would enable rather than disable people who use assistive technologies have been around for 20 years and yet post-secondary leadership, education scholarship, and educator training programs have yet to normalize them (Dolmage, 2017; Oswal & Melonçon, 2017; Palmeri, 2006; Seale, 2020a; Zdenek, 2019). That too is painful. Universal Design for Learning, arguably the most popular pedagogical approach to inclusive education in post-secondary, at an institutional level, regularly omits discussion of digital accessibility; leaving educators unaware there are problems or solutions to explore. This research project draws on 1) learners’ lived experiences, 2) scholarship on digital accessibility as sociocultural phenomena (Das et al., 2019; Palmeri, 2006; Seale, 2013; Treviranus et al., 2019) relative to pedagogy and praxis, and 3) on the liberatory, anti-oppression work of activists and artists leading the Disability Justice movement (Clare, 2015; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Sheppard, 2019; Sins Invalid, 2016). Using a transformative inquiry approach, this research offers educators multiple entry points to expand their understanding of digital accessibility, and of how learners with disabilities use technology to participate in post- secondary learning communities. This is offered in service of supporting fellow educators and researchers to learn and model a transformative digital accessibility praxis, one that includes and enables learners with disabilities in both our learning communities and in the digital commons.
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduate
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationAshbourne, K. (2024). Provocations: Digital Accessibility Illiteracy: What Happens When A Literacy Is Left Undeveloped? CanDARE (Digital Accessibility Research in Education). https://www.candare.ca/2024/03/provocations-digital-accessibility-illiteracy/
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationAshbourne, K. (2024). Digital Accessibility Literacy Skills: Reading, Writing, and Producing Accessible Media. CanDARE (Digital Accessibility Research in Education). https://www.candare.ca/2024/10/digital-accessibility-literacy-skills/
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationAshbourne, K. (2024). Entry Points for Transformative Digital Accessibility Praxis Reflections. CanDARE (Digital Accessibility Research in Education). https://www.candare.ca/2024/10/entry-points-for-transformative-digital-accessibility- praxis-reflections/
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationAshbourne, 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. https://doi.org/10.18357/otessac.2021.1.1.55
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/21057
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Web
dc.subjectdigital accessibility
dc.subjectpost-secondary education
dc.subjectstudents with disabilities
dc.subjectDisability Justice
dc.subjectassistive technology
dc.subjectliberatory padagogy
dc.titleDigital Accessibility Practices in Post-Secondary Education: A Transformative Path Toward Socially Just, Digitally Accessible Education
dc.typeproject

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