9 Making Accessible Media An Interview

Zbitnew: I took a number of online courses when I was a disability studies student at Toronto Metropolitan University. Some of them were really good; some of them were really terrible. The terrible ones were the ones where you access the course on the first day of class, and everything has already been posted—you just follow the dates and hand things in without any engagement from the teacher or any discussion or collaboration with any other students.

I did take some very good online courses, too, though. One of my favourites was a course about the representation of disability in the media. There were many ways to engage in the course. The instructor, Eli Clare, would post an image and have us deconstruct it as a group. Or we’d listen to a clip of a podcast or watch a video and discuss what we thought the person was saying. It was fun and interesting because it wasn’t just reading and writing.

Ihnat: I took some online courses while I was a Humber employee, taking on the student role. I completed several of the online Teaching Effectiveness Certificate program courses and a few similar workshops and courses offered through what was then called the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Humber. Up to that point, I had never been a true online student beyond doing my own massive open online courses (MOOCs) and a few other courses just for fun.

The MOOCs, in particular, were often quite dated: read content, post to a discussion board, read content, post to a discussion board—not unusual, unfortunately, for many online courses. There weren’t a lot of expectations beyond that.

At that time, issues of accessibility were barely on my radar. Some of the ideas around basic web accessibility were colour contrast, size of font, that kind of thing. But, to the degree that we understand accessibility and even Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles today, I wasn’t thinking at all about that.

Grimard: I recently took online courses at the Ontario College of Art and Design for my Master of Inclusive Design studies. For some courses, all the content is prerecorded: the instructor creates videos with her slide decks and a voice-over. After watching these videos, we participate on discussion boards. This isn’t the best learning environment for me. I’m a big believer in the dynamic of the room, which is why a lot of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act training I do is in person.

Before working on the MAM project, I had very little knowledge of accessibility issues, which is part of the reason why I wanted to be part of this team. I had an idea of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines requirements and a vague sense of why we needed to make things accessible but no in-depth knowledge.

Zbitnew: In the first photography class I ever taught, in 1995, I had a student with a moderate intellectual disability who came to class with a facilitator. In that first class, I asked students to go out with cameras and take some pictures. Then the next week, when we looked at the photos, they were all pretty good, but the ones that were really quite great were those of the student with the disability. That made me think that we tend to privilege reading and writing as tools of communication but given a camera and some instructions many people can tell stories, they can communicate, even without words.

In 2016, I went to a one-day conference on accessibility and inclusion at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where I attended a presentation by Richard Cavanagh, who is the CEO and funding officer of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund. It got me thinking about the idea of building something that was open access, online, inclusive, and accessible, that would teach people how to make their broadcast media accessible and inclusive for all Canadians, including our students in the FMCA at Humber.

I put together an advisory board of disabled people and people with lived experiences for the project. I needed to understand from as many people as possible what we needed to do to develop this project.

The next step was writing the grant application, and in August 2016 Humber was awarded a $130,900 Broadcasting Accessibility Fund grant to build the course.

Ihnat: Anne came to me and said, “Mark, I just got a pool of money to build something really fantastic.” I was impressed with the grant but wondered how my team would fit into the project. She needed the Digital Learning team. The topic itself excited me because I thought at that time that we weren’t doing enough in the area. I thought it would be beneficial to my entire team to be exposed to a project like this because we were just kind of getting our feet wet when it came to accessibility and UDL. We knew that accessible e-learning ensures that all potential students, professors, and instructors have fewer barriers to participate in web-based learning activities and online courses. And we also knew that it was a requirement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act to accommodate people with disabilities in teaching and learning. Ontario is the first province in Canada to pass a law that mandates accessibility standards, with the goal of making Ontario fully accessible by 2025. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act lists rules for organizations to create, provide, and receive information and communications that people with disabilities can access, giving those who may not have had the chance to learn and be active in their communities opportunities to do so.

Grimard: Initially, my role was simply to make graphics and select images for a website. But based on the content Zbitnew was developing, we had to start thinking about how people would engage with the material. Maybe we need a video here to make this more interesting? Maybe this is too long? And so my role evolved and changed, and I began to act as a consultant in terms of how we would present Zbitnew’s content. We worked together to develop the assessments, which needed to be worthwhile and demonstrate learning but not involve writing an essay. By the end of the project, I was the graphic designer, project manager, one of the content contributors, and the French translator.

Wen: I was a web design student in the FMCA, and I learned my skills there, so I felt quite honoured to be part of this project and wanted to try my best to do my part.

Ihnat: The learning curve early on was pretty steep. It was a unique build—we had Zbitnew as the content creator and expert, and Grimard on the graphics side, and we had Li Wen from my team on the coding side. Wen is a wonderful coder, but building and coding in this way is different, so it really challenged her. Juan Olarte, the accessibility consultant, was vetting content and vetting the experience. And even he was stumped in some cases. So everyone learned together. Everyone who was involved in the project was accommodating and open to the vision. We all wanted to see something beautiful come out of it.

Zbitnew: This course, and all the information in it, come from hundreds and hundreds of people—people I know, the advisory board, the consultants, the team, academic literature, the research we all did. It all fed this initiative. I’ve been teaching for long enough to know how to build a course, and I know how to take that course and write it out on a piece of paper, but the idea of putting it online? I had no idea what to do. One of the first things that we did was come up with the idea of modules. We came up with six modules that would speak to different aspects of making media accessible. We wanted these modules to work together but also to stand alone so learners could customize their experiences. The modules could be done in any order, depending on what and how learners wanted to learn.

Grimard: In the early days of the project, we worked with an instructional designer who helped us to determine the right template for the e-course. The content was created with a particular e-learning template in mind, but it became pretty clear that the variety of content that we wanted to showcase required a lot of customization. There were a lot of miscommunications: Zbitnew and I would meet to massage and tweak the content to make it fit our vision, and then there would be a series of emails sent to Wen, the web developer. We were also working with an accessibility consultant who was checking each module after we finished it to make sure it was compliant. Poor Wen was getting emails from everybody, and it got overwhelming and confusing for her. She’d get an email from one person that said “Do X” and then an email from someone else telling her to do the opposite.

Wen: I think the team roles/responsibilities were not very clear at the beginning. Everyone wanted to do their best, and wanted to contribute their all to this project, but that meant we ended up with too much information, direction, editing, from too many sources. After everyone’s responsibility got clarified, we formed a clear working plan. We were working simultaneously with images, code, and text, so we had to be very clear with each other and would communicate in person right away if things got mixed up.

Zbitnew: We worked with Juan Olarte, an accessibility consultant with over 20 years of experience who really challenged us. We would complete a section and think we were done; then he would check it and send back a few dozen pages of notes on things that needed fixing. Juan was very thorough and found things that we hadn’t even thought of, such as making tasks and knowledge checks accessible to as many people as possible. For example, Juan reminded us that some of our audio tasks might not be accessible to people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing even with transcripts. With Juan’s recommendation, we acknowledged in the home page that the course is written in plain language, but there is also the use of media terminology and jargon, and noted that some of the tasks may not be accessible to everyone.

Grimard: Working with Juan Olarte definitely gave us a different perspective. We were using online accessibility checkers and building the course to be as accessible as possible, but then Juan—who has lived experience and expertise—would tell us, “Yes, it works, but here are some of the challenges, and here are some ways it could be better.” Juan suggested we try to include a broad range of users as much as possible. We knew that we would have transcripts, captions, sign language interpretation, and write in plain language, but we also learned about website navigation tools for people who are blind or have low vision or people with mobility impairments. Bringing the accessibility consultant to the project right from the beginning would have been better. What we did was build a module, code it all, finish it, and then have the consultant look at it. We built everything with inclusivity in mind, but having the consultant involved in the process earlier on would have saved us from having to go back and undo or redo things.

There were multiple occasions when I wouldn’t quite understand the feedback we would get. I really wanted to understand where the accessibility consultant was coming from, so I started going to accessibility conferences and events. That helped me to identify my own limitations in terms of understanding and areas that still required development. I realized that there are still a lot of things that we’re trying to figure out in terms of accessible web development.

Ihnat: Even Juan was stumped in some cases. So everyone learned together.

Zbitnew: From day one, Grimard had a design idea in mind. She did all the research about contrast, colours, and fonts, so the website looked beautiful right from the beginning. Every time we added a module, it felt as though we were seeing exactly what we’d been hoping to see. And then Wen put into action what Grimard was designing. All of Wen’s code for the site is open access because, when we talk about access, something like this needs to be accessible to everybody. Anyone can use the code. Watching Grimard and Wen work together was amazing, because Grimard would want something that Wen had never done before, and Wen would try a number of different approaches. She would experiment and ended up making things that didn’t even exist.

Wen: I researched many ways to make the page readable. Existing screen readers such as JAWS could not solve this problem: once it is embedded into a learning management system (LMS), it does not work well. Finally, I created a text-to-speech screen reader by leveraging Google’s text-to-speech technology. It’s free, bilingual (French and English), doesn’t need to be downloaded, and can be controlled by a keyboard. Moreover, even when the course is embedded into a learning management system, the screen reader works very well.

Zbitnew: The accessibility toolbar that Wen created is now being used in all of Humber’s online courses. She also built in a screen magnifier that can enlarge areas of the screen. None of that was in our minds at the beginning, but we all pushed and challenged each other, and we all tried things we had never done before.

Grimard: There were always things we were changing in the site—bringing in new resources, switching out videos, et cetera. We kept changing it up until the day it was launched.

Zbitnew: The module we wanted to start with was about the representation of disability in the media. Because, before you learn how to make media accessible, you need to know why you make it and who it’s for. In that first module, we also have a language guide. One of our amazing team members is Mike Karapita, who teaches journalism at Humber. Karapita has been a journalist for 30 years; he knows his stuff. He worked for years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and knew that the CBC had its own language guide, so he put our language guide together.

Karapita: The CBC’s language guide has, for decades, been used every single day by people across Canada and is very useful in solving day-to-day questions on language and style. When I really started taking a hard look at it in the context of this project, however, I realized that we could expand on it, because while it was an all-purpose guide it was not specifically designed for making media accessible. So we really had to make our own.

Designing a language guide for a project like this is a never-ending project. Working with the team, we identified the main kinds of words and areas we wanted to cover and address, and we looked at what existing guides were out there, not just at places like the CBC, but also at universities, colleges, advocacy groups—any kind of institutional language guide that has been posted on the internet. It was like an online scavenger hunt for information. You come up with terms, and then you realize some of those terms are not correct or are outdated, so you change your language, you refine.

Zbitnew: There were sometimes conflicting opinions within the advisory board on particular language or terminology, so we would go back and forth, talking these issues through. For example, some people preferred capital-D Deaf, and others wanted us to use lower-case deaf and hard of hearing. There was a fair bit of back and forth about the word crip, with some advisory board members very much disliking the term and others insisting it be used. Sometimes we would compromise, sometimes we’d include more than one term, and sometimes we would simply leave a term out. These are live, changing, dynamic issues. They aren’t historical issues that you just want to clarify and for which you have the data.

Karapita: I think for each of us on the team, we expanded our own understanding and knowledge exponentially. And a lot of that stems from the realization that the people who almost certainly have the best answers on identity and experience are the people themselves, not outside authorities or areas of opinion. You get much better buy-in, from anyone you’re working with, if you say “Tell me about yourself. You take the lead. You tell us what needs to be said and done here.”

Grimard: A project like this is a living, breathing thing. It’s never finished. Any online course needs to be constantly updated, revised, and changed, so we may never stop working on MAM.

Karapita: I think, whenever you work with a project with this kind of scope, you have to acknowledge that you need a starting point and a finishing point, at least in the framework of the project as it’s currently envisioned. You do the best you can with those limitations, but you also build in the ability to keep your project going, keep it fluid, keep it updated. Terminology changes, technology changes, attitudes change, the world changes—and all we can do is to keep adapting and keep up to date. I think the real advantage of creating an online resource guide like the one we have in MAM is the ability to update all the time.

Grimard: In September 2019, we completed the third revision of the site and the course. We’ve added a lot of new content and moved modules around based on feedback from learners. We are planning another major overhaul and want to add new modules on web design and development guidelines, accessible video games, and a more robust discussion on the representation of disability in the media. But even before then, we are constantly going in and fixing typos, adjusting images, updating statistics, and that kind of thing. Sometimes links will stop working or videos have been taken down, so we must go in and update them.

When I’m teaching accessibility workshops, there may be learners only interested in captioning. Now I can give them the link to the course and say “Have a look at module three—that will give you a sense of what captioning is all about.” Each module is a good introduction without being overwhelming.

Ihnat: Early on, Anne and I realized that there was only so much we could do in terms of the range of accessibility; we didn’t know how to make the course accessible for everyone. In some cases, there was nothing we could do: there are definitely people that would still potentially struggle with the site. At some point, there are limits, and we hit them in terms of time and resources.

But we continue to tweak the MAM course and the other resources we developed as part of this project. For example, Wen’s accessibility bar only understands two languages, French and English, but we’re looking at developing a way to translate MAM into up to 70 different languages. The project has also inspired many of our online course builds—so many of our online students are benefiting from the project.

Grimard: I feel that we have made some significant changes just by starting the conversation with this project. More and more faculty are using it in their classrooms and introducing students to these concepts. That’s what really makes me happy about being involved in this project: the fact that we started this ball rolling. There’s so much more work to be done, but we kicked it off in our institution with this course.

Karapita: In terms of where this MAM project can go from here, it’s open access, so other organizations can have it and use it whenever they want. Any institution can simply go to the public-facing website and run through the course on their own. I think online courses about accessibility built by Humber or by others need to be open access. It shouldn’t be something that’s going to make people millions or that gets held onto or has proprietary coding. For example, the accessibility bar that was built for this project is now fully available to anyone—it’s available at our GitHub repository.

Zbitnew: I would love for this to become a mandatory course for postsecondary students across Canada. The text is written in plain language, the information is up to date and interesting, and it contains multiple ways of learning.

In 2019, we received another Broadcasting Accessibility Fund grant to create Accessibility as Aesthetic: Three Films and a Podcast, a series of accessible, open-access films and a podcast led by disabled black, Indigenous, and people of colour who are also media makers who creatively promote accessibility in their own broadcast projects. These disabled media makers led a cohort of senior-level students in creating the films and a podcast and in becoming industry leaders in inclusive production design. The films are included in the latest MAM update (September 2021).

We also recently received a generous grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage to research and develop an additional module for MAM that focuses on accessible book publishing—specifically, the integration of accessible publishing features into the production and distribution of digital books, providing an invaluable resource for Canadian publishers, designers, and production managers and increasing the availability of “born-accessible” books.

Karapita: We have a real advantage working within a postsecondary environment that values learning and teaching and that gives us time to develop these kinds of projects. It’s heartening to know that work done in academia can then find direct applicability to non-academic centres. It would be great if MAM can be useful far beyond the college.

Wen: I am much more confident when it comes to developing web pages that are compliant with legislated accessibility standards, and I believe I can do it even better than before. This project was a great chance to learn and improve myself.

Zbitnew: There are so many online courses that are just these ugly pages that you click and open, click and open, click and open. I wanted MAM to be accessible and inclusive but also beautiful. Because access doesn’t have to be ugly. Just because we’ve always done something a certain way doesn’t mean you can’t try something different. That’s what got me really excited about this project. MAM was just the start. The next big push is around attitudinal and systemic change.