Jane Bringolf, Author at - Page 43 of 100

Inclusive Communication Strategies

There are many reasons why some people have difficulty communicating. It can arise from a brain injury, a stroke, or a condition such as motor neurone disease. Inability to communicate easily means that often people avoid social situations due to feeling inferior. The Conversation has an article on inclusive communication strategies.

The Conversation article, We can all help to improve communication for people with disabilities, lists some of the simple things that remove the barriers to communication. They range from the type of devices used by Stephen Hawking, to just giving the person time to finish what they are trying to say. Speech is just one aspect of the issue, hearing is the other. There is useful information under each of the headings in the article:

1. Remove communication barriers
2. Prepare for communication success
3. Build a conversation together
4. Use communication aids and alternative strategies when you talk.

Around 5% of the population, or 1.2 million Australians have a communication disability. It can affect their speech, language, listening, understanding, reading, writing, or social skills.

Communication disability can be lifelong (as for people with cerebral palsy or intellectual disability) or acquired (as for people with stroke and aphasia, motor neurone disease, or traumatic brain injury).

Books for everyone with universal design

Reading is a skill that some people find difficult or onerous, so they miss out on reading for pleasure. But making books more accessible is more than just applying Easy Language. It also requires thoughtful layout, font and use of images. The Books for Everyone Framework describes the book making process from writing to publication.

Matching readers to the “right book” is more than the issue of genre or reading interests. Readers have varying language skills, functional differences and are neurodiverse. So the question for the publication industry is, “How can they work for inclusion of all types of potential readers?”

An article from Norway describes a case study of how the Books for Everyone (BfE) framework was used for five fictional books. These books were written by different authors, illustrators and publishers. The article provides suggestions for the publishing industry to accommodate reader diversity in the future.

A universal design perspective

At the beginning of 2000, books in Norway aimed at adults with dyslexia were often simplified versions of more complex books that were already published. Taking a universal design approach led to an awareness that books should still aim for high quality.

Rather than just simplifying text, more attention was given to how Easy Language can create high level literature. Consequently, BfE started cooperating with highly qualified authors, graphic novel designers, illustrators, and publishing houses in making new books.

The target groups for Easy Language books was broadened from people with cognitive impairments to everyone who will benefit. The primary target group determined the main adaptation approach applied. At the same time, these adaptations would most likely benefit other readers. Consequently, the universal design aspect of Easy Language was incorporated into the BfE framework.

It is interesting to note that in the last 22 years, Norway has embraced universal design across the built and digital environments. Consequently, it is no surprise that they are now applying the concepts more broadly.

The processes and framework are described in more detail in the article, The Development and Production of Literature Within an Easy Language and a Universal Design Perspective. The article is open access.

Abstract

Finding suitable books for pleasure reading is difficult for many people with reading challenges. Consequently, authors and publishing houses must consider user diversity when developing books.

Easy Language comprises an important component, which is closely related to other elements which together constitute accessible books, such as layout, fonts and use of images. Moreover, extensive user testing and involvement must ensure that the books meet the requirements of the readers.

This paper presents The Books for Everyone (BfE) Framework, which describes the process from initiation to publication and promotion of Easy Language books, using Norway as a case study. The BfE Framework is illustrated through examples from books and related to the reception and understanding of various user groups.

Including people with intellectual disability in co-design

Picture of a large family looking jubilant outside their house

People with intellectual disability are often left out when it comes to design. Whether it’s built or digital environments, services or products, this group is often overlooked. However, with co-design methods, people with intellectual disability could and should be included. But, this is still a new idea and there is very little literature or case studies on working with this group. The literature review found the following gaps in knowledge:

- General lack of literature on co-designing with people with an intellectual disability
- No specific literature encapsulating the co-design process, in the context of intellectual disability, and housing
- No frameworks or benchmarks on co-design with people with disability
- Lack of evaluation of the design outcomes of co-design process
- Lack of research that can assist parents plan for their ageing children.

Housing design for people with physical disabilities has evolved over time but is not easily adapted to suit people with intellectual disability. There is an obvious need to consider people with both intellectual and physical disability. The title of the article is, Co-designing in Australia housing for people with intellectual disability: an integrative literature review“. You can download the web version or the PDF version.

Intellectual disability and social inclusion

Local government authorities are exactly that – local. They are the tier of government closest to the everyday lives of people. Local neighbourhoods are where people feel either socially included or not. People with intellectual disability are much more likely to feel socially excluded. A research project undertaken by the University of Technology (UTS) took a novel approach to the issue. To begin, they recruited researchers with intellectual disability to participate in all aspects of designing and carrying out the research. This was a key step for informing the research process. The purpose of the study was to understand the experiences of people with intellectual disability in their local community. They found that people with intellectual disability have valuable information to share. However, their voices are unheard and consequently their needs not understood. The discussion starter was the question, “What would you do if you were boss of your local council?” The answers were that they want their council to:

- - Provide accessible information in a range of formats about what is happening in the community and how to participate.

- - Provide someone to speak to – or even better, face to face contact.

- - Employ people with intellectual disability.

- - Help them access better transport and find ways to make them feel safer and more welcome.

- - Improve public toilets and offer quiet spaces at noisy, busy events.

A framework for change

The researchers adopted the framework the WHO Age Friendly Cities program. which is pitched to community life at the local level. This is a good framework for councils to use with people with intellectual disability as well as older people.

WHO 8 Domains Framework

Participants wanted to know what is available and how to get around the community. They also wanted respectful interactions with others in the community and said familiar faces and places were important. These findings have some important information for councils and their social policy. Grouping people with intellectual disability under the generic term “people with disability” risks leaving them out. Councils should adapt communication and engagement strategies to suit people with intellectual disability. The title of the article is, Opportunities to support social inclusion for people with intellectual disability at a local level. Published in the Design for All India Newsletter. It is based on a published study, If I Was the Boss of My Local Government: Perspectives of People with Intellectual Disabilities on Improving Inclusion. The author is Dr Phillippa Carnemolla who is also a CUDA board member. This is a comprehensive article with recommendations for local government.

Student insights into teaching methods

Much has been written about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the benefits for a broad range of students. The concept is based on teaching methods that allow for different ways of learning. Some students are visual, some like discussion, some like an enthusiastic lecturer and written material. But rarely to we get student insights into teaching methods.

Using video is one way to engage learners whether they be new students or teachers wanting to improve their skills. The video below is from Ireland where 11 higher education students answer four questions:

- - What kind of learner are you and how do you learn best?
  - What do they think of the standard lecture format and how do they prefer to be taught?
  - We asked them about the traditional exam format and what types of assessment worked for them.
  - What is one piece of advice you can give to academics to help them improve their teaching and learning practice?

See their interesting answers in the video below.

The website with the video has more information about UDL and how to apply it. It’s part of a lecture series by AHEAD, and there is a section for people who work in education with written and video material.

The CUDA website has a whole section devoted to UDL. The graphic below shows the three pillars of UDL.

Multigenerational planning and universal design

Four generations. A baby, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Multigenerational. — Four generations

There is much talk about population ageing but not much ‘doing’. Urban design is still stuck in age segmentation mode – separate places for children and older people. For example, playgrounds for children and senior citizen centres and ‘homes’ for older people. What we need is more multigenerational planning using universal design principles.

A man is enjoying himself on exercise equipment in a play space for older adults.

Playgrounds with exercise equipment for “seniors” is the new thing. But grandparents have been taking children to playgrounds since they were invented. As it turns out, small children like the exercise equipment – it’s adventure play to them! But not all places meet the needs of both young and old. Planners need to simultaneously consider the different needs of young and old in future projects. That’s the advice of a briefing paper on Multigenerational Planning. Key issues are mobility and access to services, housing affordability, walkability, and density. Younger and older generations share similar safety risks, especially as pedestrians. Parents fear of crime is for their children and their own parents.

What can planners do?

Cross-generational collaboration is a good start, but it also has to consider other population dimensions. Migrants, people with disability, gender identity, and social and cultural inclusion. The key points in the briefing paper are: Keypoint 1: Multigenerational planning creates new coalition building opportunities. Different populations don’t always recognise their reliance on each other. Each age segment defends its narrow position creating missed opportunities. Keypoint 2: Civic participation and engagement is fundamental to multigenerational planning. Children and young people have their own wisdom and older people often have neighbourhood networks. Bringing them together provides better outcomes rather than engaging separately. Keypoint 3: Multigenerational planning users smart growth principles. Programs and smart growth policies that target older people and children provide multigenerational benefits. Keypoint 4: Multigenerational planning applies universal design principles. The guiding philosophy is to design spaces with the ability to meet the changing needs of users. Universal design promotes accessibility, safety, flexibility, functionality, simplicity, and comfort. Housing should meet basic access standards too so that everyone can visit each other at home. There is much more for planners in this fourteen page paper. The title of the briefing paper is, Multigenerational Planning: Using smart growth and universal design to link the needs of children and the ageing population. It was published by the American Planning Association.

Importance of accessible software

Few would argue the moral imperatives for web accessibility but actually doing it is another matter. And it’s not just about the warm fuzzies of inclusion – it’s good for business. Quintin Balsdon and Brian Best explain why software developers still don’t ‘get’ accessibility. They even go so far as to say some software developers aren’t even sure what it means. This means you can’t assume your new website will be accessible even if the developer says “it will meet access standards”.

According to Best, some businesses think near enough is good enough. They don’t realise the scale of the issues because they think it affects a really small number of people.

Apart from the moral benefits, accessible software creates a superior user experience for everyone. That’s a big business advantage when 80% of people just don’t come back to a difficult website or app.

Practical tips for accessibility

Balsdon and Best make three points.

Shift your mindset: Acknowledge accessibility is not niche and that it’s an opportunity for innovation.

Process change: Educate your teams about the importance and look at your testing procedures. Code review is not enough – include user experience.

Ask the experts: For example, Open Inclusion’s website has a framework and a network of testers with different access needs.

Every software team should have a network of people ready to discuss designs from the start and test as the software develops.

And another thing…

Non-tech people are happy to engage a web designer to take care of their website. But how do you design a scope of works to get a good job if you don’t know what to ask for? How do you know if the designer really knows about accessibility?

The designer needs to demonstrate understanding of visual, auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical and speech needs of users. If they have a network of people with different access needs and actually practice user experience design (UX), so much the better.

The title of the online article is, Accessible software solutions: Discover why inclusive software is so important for your people and your business.

Hospital design for healing

Hospital design is incorporating features that reflect the concept of healing rather than sickness. Older people make up a significant proportion of patients, and that means we need more age-friendly approaches to care. Physical environments are getting slip resistant floors, indirect lighting and large print wall clocks and calendars. Some hospitals are replacing harsh florescent lighting with systems similar to day – night cycles. An article on the AARP website discusses this and how hospital design is about healing.

Other ideas are a piano at registration, walking paths and gardens – making the place feel more hospitable rather than hospital. It’s about customer convenience and comfort. And this must help when people are in pain and feeling stressed. Many visitors feel stressed and anxious in hospitals and they aren’t even sick.

As for coffee bars in waiting areas – the sound of grinding beans in coffee bars adds to noise levels and the smell can be nauseating. Small things can make a difference to comfort and reducing stress levels.

Other changes involve telehealth services which can be delivered to patients at home. For more on this see the AARP article.

Making Accessible PowerPoint Slides

People are gradually getting the hang of putting alt text for their images in Powerpoint slides, but there is more to do. Sheri Byrne-Haber provides advice on making accessible PowerPoint slides by using the inbuilt accessibility checker. Some of her advice is reproduced below the screenshot of the accessibility checker.

The screenshot below shows an example of the Accessibility checker tab in PPT

Screenshot of PPT slide showing accessibility tab for making accessible powerpoint slides. — Alt text is really important if the slide deck is being shared either in PowerPoint or saved as a PDF. It allows screen readers to access the picture descriptions. PowerPoint has a handy accessibility checker within the Review tab. It picks up any images without descriptions and a few other things.

Some presenters use only picture slides and in this case it’s essential to provide alt text descriptions. Providing the text of the speech in the notes section increases accessibility. The notes section is also the best place to put long descriptions rather than in alt-text.

Use the master template for repeated images such as company logos. This hides the information from the screen reader so it doesn’t have to swipe through every time. Graphics marked as decorative in the alt text box will allow screen readers will ignore them.

Captioning is essential for videos, but people need to have choice in whether to use it or not. Not all videos need described audio, but first running the video with eyes closed will give an indication. Byrne-Haber’s article has many other useful tips.

Future of tourism should be accessible

While the tourism industry thinks “accessible tourism” is for a separate type of customer, the concept of equity and inclusion will remain elusive. Assumptions and biases show up in our language, and those who are on the wrong end of these biases are the ones to call it out. Ryan Smith called out this bias when he saw a Tourism Australia infographic depicting the future of tourism and made his own infographic.

The Tourism Australia infographic depicts six strands, adventure, wellness, youth, agritourism, accessible, and events. The bias is in the assumption that the five other strands aren’t going to be accessible. However, the graphic shows sustainability and Indigenous culture across all six of the strands.

Tourism Australia's infographic showing accessible tourism as a separate entity. — Tourism Australia’s view of the Future of Tourism

Ryan Smith reproduced the infographic to bring the concepts into the 21st Century. The five strands are depicted as resting on three key elements: Accessible, Indigenous, Sustainable. He also replaced the photographs with icons for an easier read.

Ryan Smith's version showing Accessible as part of all other types of tourism. — Ryan Smith’s version showing Accessible as part of all other types of tourism.

This is a good example of exposing biases. It also shows why we should involve all stakeholders in publicity and promotion. That’s what makes co-design a good thing for everyone and for business.

Essential elements of co-design

Co-design in an academic context is part of participatory action research, or PAR. It’s used to understand, inform and change the design of policies, programs and services. But what are the essential elements of co-design?

As we know, community engagement or consultation is not the same as co-design. Including diverse stakeholder and user perspectives is essential for developing best practice.

Gabrielle Brand and her team have identified five core co-design principles in the field of health education. Briefly they are: inclusive, respectful, participative, iterative and outcomes focused. These principles apply in other fields too.

Core co-design principles

Inclusive: Involve key industry stakeholders and consumers from the initial proposal design. That includes the development and framing of learning focus to final educational outcome and delivery.

Respectful: Health care consumers are considered “experts by experience”. All input is equally valued in design, development and delivery of education.

Participative: The research process is open, responsive and empathetic in co-creating education. It generates new understandings of health and healthcare experiences.

Iterative: A cyclic, collaborative process that takes time. It embraces movement towards a shared education vision. It includes the risk of failure.

Outcomes focused: The focus is on achieving a shared educational outcome co-created during the co-design process.

Brand and her team used conversational interviews transcribed verbatim for analysis. An organic iterative approach to data analysis developed shared understandings. Artefacts were also used in the process for eliciting sensory triggers for participants and for developing vignettes.

The article details part of a vignette to explain how it was used with learners. It’s based on a mother of an adult son with a psychosocial condition. Members of the research team benefited from knowing they had valuable and legitimate expertise on a research project.

Title of the article is, A research approach for co-designing education with healthcare consumers. It has a mental health education focus, but the methods are applicable in other fields.

One of the issues with co-design and PAR is passing ethics approval processes. When an ethics committee labels particular groups as ‘vulnerable’ they apply different approval criteria. However, including the voices of a broad range of people involves the participation of vulnerable groups.

The end result of this kind of research is to “transform hierarchical health care relationships towards a more humanistic model of care”.

From the abstract

Context: Community and consumer involvement in health professions education (HPE) is of growing interest among researchers and educators. It prepares health care graduates to effectively learn from, and collaborate with, people with lived experience of health issues.

Approach: We describe the background to our work with health care consumers including the five core principles for successful co-design and how to apply them as a research approach in HPE.

We used arts and humanities-based teaching methodologies including engagement, meaning-making and translational education strategies. This illustrates how this research approach has been applied to reframe mental health education and practice in Australia. Furthermore, we share some reflective insights on the opportunities and challenges inherent in using a co-design research approach in HPE.

Conclusions: For the consumer voice to be embedded across HPE, there needs to be a collective commitment to curriculum redesign. This paper advances our understandings of the educational research potential of working with health care consumers to co-design rich and authentic learning experiences in HPE.

Co-design research approaches that partner with and legitimise health care consumers as experts by experience may better align education and health professional practice with consumers’ actual needs, an important first step in transforming hierarchical health care relationships towards more humanistic models of care.

Assoc Prof Gabrielle Brand is based at Monash University Peninsula Campus.

Health professional education research

Two New Zealand researchers in health science say it is time to apply universal design principles to health education research. They take the universal design principles that originated in architecture and translate them to universal design for research.

The researchers use the The three pillars of universal design for learning (UDL) as the means to crosswalk from architecture to research. The aim is to embrace and enact diversity in research design. This, of course, means engagement with people most often excluded from health education research.

The title of the article is, Designing for justice: How universal design theory could bolster health professional education research.

Author: Jane Bringolf

Inclusive Communication Strategies

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