Closed sjmf closed 2 years ago
While Autism is a spectrum condition, these suggestions (by necessity) relate to the three main categories of difficulty which I have personal experience of: sensory; social; and organisational:
Autism can (for some) be an invisible disability. "Masking" means that autistic people may be able to 'mask' these traits and will appear to be 'okay'. Masking requires a mental energy input and autistic people may mask until they run out of energy, at which stage we risk a shutdown or meltdown. Other coping mechanisms include stimming (often in the form of 'flapping', or making repetitive body movements), which can be an indicator of sensory overwhelm. Further, it is important to remember that fatigue can also contribute to and exacerbate these difficulties.
Every autistic person is different and will present in different ways. Autism also has a high co-incidence with other neurodiverse conditions, including ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia. It is also important to be aware that the use of descriptive terminology can vary between autistic individuals.
(Some terminology within the autism spectrum umbrella is no longer used due to stigma: for example, 'high-functioning' or 'low-functioning' autism gives an incorrect impression of autism being a scale rather than a spectrum, and disguises the fact that an individual's capacity can vary from day-to-day or situationally. Further, the subtype of autism previously known as "Asperger's" is no longer used due to Dr Hans Asperger's participation in eugenics under the Nazi regime.)
A further resource can be found at: https://www.researchinpractice.org.uk/media/4166/autism_inclusive_practice_web_fr.pdf
In this issue, I have aimed to provide some adjustments to the course presentation which could help. Please feel free to suggest other ways in which we could improve accessibility for neurodiverse participants on this issue.
We can invite participants to disclose any disabilities which may impair their ability to participate in the training as part of the the sign-up process, or as a part of the welcome email. Inviting participants to declare a disability will help both the individual and the instructors to make adjustments for better inclusion of that person. For example, by adding a line to the training invitation email similar to the following:
If you have a disability which might prevent you from being fully included in the instructor training workshops, and you would like us to know about it in advance, please let us know by emailing your trainers directly, or by contacting instructor.training@carpentries.org.
Instructors can then have a conversation with an individual with regards to specific adaptations that can be made to the scheduled training to better include them. This goes beyond autism and is good practice for people with other disabilities (both visible and invisible).
Autistic participants may need to drop out of the proceedings unexpectedly, for example due to sensory overwhelm, but the policy could be clarified that there will be no detriment if this occurs.
The invitation email states, "If you unexpectedly need to miss more than 1 hour of your event, please contact your Trainers." However, it remains unclear what the sanctions for this could be, or what opportunities are available to catch up on missed content (signposting of the instruction material via the course page, for example). I felt pressure to stay in the session despite experiencing significant overwhelm and it would have been helpful to have a better idea of these in advance. This could also be an issue for people with other disabilities which might require them to leave the class periodically (IBS for example).
This could be reiterated in the training content at the start of the training session, making it plain to participants with sensory difficulties that they are welcome to manage these in ways which are helpful to them, for example by turning off their webcam in an online Zoom training session.
The length of the instructor training workshops can present significant difficulties for neurodiverse and autistic people. In particular, presenting content in 8-hour days can be disabling. Although there are 4-day workshops available in some regions (South Africa), it would be useful if there were more options for this. These could even be split into two mornings a week for two weeks.
By the 7th hour of the first day of training, I was no longer able to concentrate on the material or interact with others (as fatigue exacerbates autistic symptoms, and for me executive dysfunction in particular). This comment was mirrored in the Zoom chat by a few other participants.
Lesson episodes which require 1:n interaction or verbal presentations at the end of an 8-hour day can also be exclusionary for autistic people. The final lesson episode of the first day involved presenting the first 90 seconds of a lesson to peers. Our instructor trainers (@jsteyn, @anenadic and Philipp Schäfer – thanks all!!) showed great flexiblilty in rearranging this part of the content to become the first exercise of the second day in response to feedback.
While I think there was a general agreement between the trainers that it would be good to keep it this way in future, it would be useful to look at the lesson content from the viewpoint of participant fatigue in order to identify where other optimisations like this could be made.
While an incredibly useful teaching tool, the use of Etherpad for presenting information-heavy content may be exclusionary to some people. In particular, for dyslexic people and people who use screen readers this format may be almost completely inaccessible. There may also be issues experienced by colorblind people with distinguishing between typists as denoted by the background colour.
I found the Etherpad useful during the lesson exercises, when participants were populating content into the page shared between the group. However, the instructor checkout process requires signing up for a community discussion and a teaching demo using the pads at https://pad.carpentries.org/community-discussions and https://pad.carpentries.org/teaching-demos.
The information density of these two pages can be stressful when just five minutes is allocated for signing up within the training schedule. Being presented with this page (with no indexes or hyperlinks to find specific sections within it!) is a high amount of visual noise and it is difficult to navigate, especially when attention is also split with the Zoom call. Philipp handled this really well and clarified that I could come back to these later, but this could be emphasised within the teaching material, or perhaps a more streamlined way could be found to track sign ups to these sessions.
This could also be due to difficulties task switching: changing from a lecture-based learning approach to having to interpret large amounts of data.
Working memory is often a cause of difficulty in neurodiverse individuals, both within autism (executive dysfunction) and ADHD. In the format of the online training, the instructors used slides with the tasks to direct learners, but when moving into breakout rooms these were no longer visible. As a result, I was not always able to remember what we were supposed to do as a group.
There were a few occasions like this during the training where it was difficult to keep track of the task because these exercises were not readily visible in the course content (perhaps because I couldn't find them, or the course page did not match the slide). One example is the the Launches and Landings section on the second day.
Finding some way to ensure that participants can always see the task they are currently on, to glance back and refresh their memory, would be helpful here.
Live captioning in Zoom was incredibly useful. I only realised that I could request this on the afternoon of the second day. This allows participation with the sound turned off (addressing auditory sensitivity), and to use the transcript to catch up if a momentary loss of concentration means that content has been missed.
Perhaps trainers can be encouraged to turn this on by default! I also noticed however that when Zoom breakout rooms are used the subtitles turn themselves off and have to be manually reactivated when returning to the main room. The use of breakout rooms did really gave a sense of meeting people, however, which was great.
Hi @sjmf thanks SO MUCH for this very detailed information and specific actionable feedback. In order for us to actually act on all of these great ideas, I have created a number of separate issues both in this repository and in other places when the way the carpentries operates suggests that those changes would live in other repositories. Smaller, more digestible issues are easier for us to act on and triage appropriately, so I will close this one with this comment. All of those issues link back here, as this one links out to all of them above this comment.
If you think my breakdown of your advice into actionable chunks is insufficient, please re-open the issue and continue this discussion.
The only point I have not left in other issues is the part about the timing of trainings, we are already actively experimenting with that, though it is not well documented that we are.
Thank you @sjmf ! This is great information. I am the new Accessibility Manager for The Carpentries. Your suggestions are very timely! We are in the process of creating a Toolkit of IDEAS (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility Strategies) to better support our community. We are also in the process of making some changes/additions/suggestions related to accessibility for the instructor training and the lessons in general. If you have the time, I would also encourage you to fill out this form with any other suggestions you may have. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5PyzhE7uaAdX3jE-RWoKSYS0ILF0x42c3Y0KXMlNg3V2HKQ/viewform?pli=1
Thank you @brownsarahm for splitting these up. Very helpful.
This issue regards improving the accessibility of the instructor training for people with autism spectrum disorder and other learning and attention disabilities (e.g. ADHD), in line with the Carpentries Core Value of Access for All. I have a small number of suggestions– not a comprehensive list by any means– of ways in which the accessibility of the content could be improved. These are intended as an introduction to adjustments for the instructor training, and the start of a conversation about inclusion: not a complete guide.
I will post the detail of this issue as individual comments for accessibility purposes: please see below for further information.
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