HREOC Forum: Meeting the Challenges of Providing Tertiary Materials in Accessible Formats For Students with Print Disabilities

Tertiary Education Disability Council of Australia (TEDCA Ltd) Perspective

Introduction

The Tertiary Education Disability Council of Australia Ltd (TEDCA Ltd) is an umbrella organisation seeking to draw together state and territory networks that reflect the experiences and concerns of those who have a stake in tertiary education and employment for people with disabilities. For instance, the network, HEDN (Q) Inc, has members who work in the university, vocational education and training, schools and community sectors as well as interested individuals. Their representatives on Council reflect their members' views to Council. This paper briefly outlines some of the issues that have been raised either at Council meetings or on the austed-list.

TEDCA commends the Commission for taking the lead role in relation to this challenging issue and notes that the discussion paper developed for the Forum has been most informative and thought provoking and has afforded us an opportunity to reflect on the concerns of each stakeholder.

Need for broader collaboration with stakeholders.

It should not be surprising given the cross-sectorial nature of TEDCA representatives when we emphasise that any discussion of issues related to the provision of materials in accessible formats for students with print disabilities needs to include representatives from all sectors involved in the educative process: schools, vocational education and training providers, higher education institution and of course, students.

While each sector has its own distinct role to play in providing educational and training options for students with disabilities, many challenges related to the delivery of quality educational services are shared. It is vital to take a more comprehensive view for a number of reasons, but especially because:

· Working collaboratively with staff and institutions in these sectors and others such as the Regional Disability Liaison Officers and the proposed Disability Coordination Officers may result in the identification of more creative and cost effective solutions to the issues at hand. For instance there is clearly a need for the early identification of prospective students and their support requirements. Where do these prospective students come from? Some come from the schools sector, others use pathways through vocational education and training, while others come from employment. What better way to gain an insight into prospective students, their needs and their proposed destinations than to outreach directly to where these students are!

· There is a need to recognise and understand the implications of the fact that in some states and territories, institutions are dual sector institutions. Staff from these institutions often remark on the challenges that this poses for them. For example, resources for providing support to individual students with disabilities may be sourced from different budgets and so while the support for one student may be easily funded, this may not be the case for another student at the same institution.

· Various pre-forum discussion papers have also identified the urgent need for students with print disabilities to have the skills to be able to use assistive technology effectively. It is logical that our efforts would be best directed at working with schools and VET institutions to identify how students are currently being prepared for further study, what programs currently exist that may be useful in developing skills and if necessary extend existing programs or develop new programs to meet the needs of the students for the development of specific skills. This would impact on the readiness of students currently at school and those mature age students planning to return to study. For example, discussing this issue with colleagues at a HEDN (Q) Inc Management Committee meeting, we discovered that the Open Learning Institute of TAFE in has developed a module that assists students with disabilities to develop the necessary skills to use the various assistive technologies.

· Finally there is the issue that NILS raised in their paper regarding the need to address the skilled staff shortages in the area of the production of materials in accessible formats and the lack of ongoing training and professional development for current staff. Training may well be most appropriately placed within the vocational education and training sector. We need to work closely with training organisations, industry advisory bodies and ANTA to have the need for this training recognised, the necessary accredited training packages developed and the resources necessary to delivery this training allocated.

The promise of technology

Clearly advances in technology are enabling students with print disabilities improved access to the educational environment. However the application of technology in the learning environment needs to be informed by sound educational theory and practice.

It is vital to ensure that students with print disabilities are involved in the process of determining the most appropriate format for materials for them for specific subjects/courses. For instance, each of us has our own unique learning style and this may vary from task to task, course to course. The format of the required text, the method of delivery of the course and the assessment requirements all need to be taken into consideration when decisions are being made regarding formats for resources. For example if a student has an open book exam as part of their assessment, how would they like to be able to access their texts – is it likely that some of the questions may involve the interpretation of graphical material? One student may prefer a brailled version of the text while another may be more comfortable using an electronic version. It is not possible, nor is it desirable to make assumptions about the requirements of students with disabilities without extensive discussion about their program of study and preferred learning style. We need to be flexible in the options presented for students to consider – not wedded to a particular format because it is the most convenient.

Issues related to in-house production

Concern has been expressed that the introduction of the full-cost recovery policy by NILS will place increasing pressure on institutions to find more cost-effective ways to produce materials in accessible formats and that this will result in more institutions deciding to produce materials in accessible formats 'in-house'.

Initially this may prove to be a relatively cost-effective solution however,

· How can the inevitable duplication of resources be avoided?

· How can the quality of the materials produced be monitored and evaluated?

· Where do institutions source the staff with the skills necessary to do this – particularly in some states and territories where there has been no traditional service provider? The expertise simply does not exist and when you consider the guidelines for the production of braille as published by organisations such as the Braille Authority of North America then it is questionable whether many institutions would have the capacity to produce high quality resources.

Another concern that may have a far more profound impact in the future is that the sector would start to lose the 'big picture' perspective on issues related to the provision of accessible formats such as the number of students across the sector who require accessible formats, the nature of their specific requirements and the demand/unmet demand for services. This may negatively impact on the power of the sector to be able to lobby effectively for resources in the future.

Some issues related to outsourcing production

Frequently, Disability Liaison Officers receive materials promoting new service providers who indicate that they have expertise in the production of materials in accessible formats. Sometimes these new providers only offer one particular format and this is most likely to be an electronic format due in part to the fact that scanners and OCR software have become more affordable. In some instances, it is evident that these providers do not have an in depth understanding of the process of translating materials into accessible formats.

While no doubt, the government would applaud the initiative demonstrated by these small business operators, the job- creation and the increase in competition, for those of us at the 'coal-face' using such producers can require a giant leap of faith. What seems to be lacking in the 'industry' currently, is any form of quality assurance or regulation. DLOs have come to rely on the 'known' service providers and this in turn creates demands on their production services. But how do we know what the 'new' provider can do? Do we take a risk and send them some materials? What are we risking? For the student, we are risking a great deal and it may be too late to salvage the situation if the product does not materialise in a timely manner, is incorrectly formatted or worse still, is inaccurate.

It would therefore be helpful to have a mechanism that will assist DLOs to be able to evaluate the quality of the product from a service.

Funding Issues

There are numerous concerns related to the need to be able to access the necessary funding to produce materials in accessible formats. However there is one important comment that needs to be made before there is any discussion about funding models etc.

All stakeholders need to avoid, at all costs, the tendency for any discussion regarding funding to be merely a cost-shifting exercise – regardless of whether this is from one stakeholder to another, one sector to another or even one university to another. For example, some DLOs report receiving enquiries from prospective students requesting information about the services/support that their particular university can provide for them. The prospective student is 'shopping around'. They have a right to ask these questions and should be encouraged to do so – however the result of this may be greater numbers of enrolments of students with particular disabilities at a particular university because of the nature of the services that they are committed to providing. Prospective students should not be making choices about their destinations based on whether or not they will be able to access particular services – they should be basing their decisions on which institution offers the program of study that most closely fits with their goals and aspirations.

While the funding model currently being piloted by DEST will have the effect of offsetting some of the costs associated with providing services for some students requiring high cost support, it is not going to assist some institutions to provide consistently high quality services for sustained periods of time. In the end, institutions will be forced to make choices about what formats they can provide. This will be a most difficult decision. For staff in the Disabilities Services in most universities, it is a demanding and finely balanced task to budget the limited resources available to meet the requirements of a diverse group of students.

The position that should be being promoted to government is that providing the necessary resources to this sector to enable them to make appropriate accommodations for students is an investment that will result in long-term savings. I personally recall the comments of a colleague with a disability that were captured on an awareness-raising video when she was a student. She indicated that one of her goals in life was to become a taxpayer. After showing this video at a professional development workshop that we were co-facilitating, I asked her how she felt about being now being a taxpayer. Her response was that it was 'brilliant – just great.' Not the comments we usually hear about paying taxes.

Closing Comments

In closing, it would seem appropriate to emphasise the following points. This Forum provides us with unique and possibly 'once in a life-time' opportunity to work together to identify some strategies that will assist us to work through the issues that now confront us.

We therefore need to:

· resist the urge to paint any single stakeholder as being the villain in the piece. Each of us has responsibilities and these need to be understood in the context of the realities of the situations in which we often find ourselves. We all confront on a daily basis the issues related to limited resources – lets acknowledge the realities and respect each other's perspective.

· present a united position on the issues. This may take some time to achieve but at least we have started the process.

· pause to take stock of where we are before we embark on the task of creating new policies/protocols and procedures. This Forum has afforded us an opportunity to do this but we may need further discussion to clearly identify the most appropriate steps to progress our agenda. There are resources available which already provide a sound theoretical and practical basis upon which we can build. To begin with, there are the Code of Practice and the AV-CC Guidelines Relating to Students with Disabilities.

· look for strategic solutions first, before addressing the operational or procedural issues. For example the role and responsibilities of the publishers needs to be dealt with by government informed by our discussion. Clearly each group of stakeholders is looking after their clients. However it is impossible for each university to continue to operate independently of each other, contacting publishers every time a text is required.

· keep the diversity of the student group in mind while acknowledging the requirements of individuals. Students with print disabilities constitute an incredibly diverse group and the needs of the various groups within this 'category' need to be highlighted.

· There is no quick fix – no 'one size fits all' solution. However we need to ensure that the recommendations that come out of this Forum are progressed. Many people who have worked in the sector for any length of time feel frustrated that issues like this have not been dealt with effectively in the past. One colleague expressed the hope that with this Forum we 'might finally be getting somewhere.' We need to see the pace of change accelerated.

And a final request for the Commission. Even before reaching the point of discussing some recommendations, this Forum has been most successful at bringing all of the stakeholders together. Would the Commission like to consider adopting this approach in order that we can address some other 'burning' issues that have been in the 'too hard' basket for the sector for too long?