Category: Disability

ALT-C Timetable announced


The Association for Learning Technology has just released its draft timetable for speakers for this year’s conference at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2008/timetable.html. My paper has been listed in a 4 paper session early on Wednesday 10th September, covered by the Access or Exclusion theme, subtitled Disabilities / Community Access.  This is one of ten (yes, ten!) parallel sessions.

Short papers to be presented in this session:

  • Nothing about me, without me: The use of participatory research methods to give voice to disabled learners experiences of e-learning.
  • Hear my voice: Disabled E-Learners Narratives of Exclusion and Inclusion
  • Beyond access: social experiences of disability online, in and around higher education.
  • Values and identity in community IT centres

A second notable session cited under Access or Exclusion: Flexibility and Access / Disabilities runs from 4pm on the same afternoon, featuring two papers:

  • Flexibility and Access – implications of blended learning for higher education
  • How the Web Continues to Fail People with Disabilities

These look like interesting agendas, with some overlaps – but I’ll also be interested to see how these themes are conceptualised in the wider terms of the conference.  Will this be seen as a mainstream user experience consideration for education? Or a minority interest? In a conference considering the potential and actual divisive nature of ICTs, I’m hoping for the former.

Second Life and Accessibility


At the recent NCeSS conference I was put in touch with Gareth White, from Sussex University.  Gareth is a post graduate who has been looking into the accessibility of Second Life for people with visual impairments.  Second Life is a hot accessibility topic, with some high profile instances of disability culture in evidence – most notably Wheelies Nightclub (the first virtual disability nightclub in the world!), but features some clear barriers to participation for blind and partially sighted people, amongst others.

Gareth’s blog (at http://blindsecondlife.blogspot.com/) gathers together some interesting opinions and materials in this area, including work on the use of haptics for adding tactile sensations to virtual worlds and an extensive list of relevant links.  Importantly, his work has been accepted for the forthcoming ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment &
Arts, hopefully making the detail of his research more publically available.  I’ll be sure to signpost the resulting paper.

Accessibility 2.0


AbilityNet are holding a day conference on Friday 25th April examining issues relating to web accessibility and Web 2.0. 

According to AbilityNet (and they really do hold the keys on this one), Accessibility 2.0: A Million Flowers Bloom is the first ever conference focussing on web accessibility in a Web 2.0 world. Their invited experts include representatives from Google, the BBC and the RNIB amongst others, and will look at practical solutions to the Web 2.0 accessibility problems, showing cutting edge techniques and offering realistic solutions. The day will be a very practical day. Allegedly, delegates will come away knowing what to do, and what to focus on to ensure access to all users. 

If AbilityNet can deliver on this promise, I’ll be well pleased.  As cited in these pages (and reflected in ongoing discussions Listservs in UK education and disability), the super-evolution of web 2.0 services (issues of perpetual beta, and user-created content in particular) have made accessibility audits difficult or impractical for many institutions and individuals seeking to adopt new social technologies. 

Registration closes on April 23rd, for those wishing to attend.  I imagine the conference will be well connected, hopefully resulting in podcasts, vodcasts, blogging etc for all who can’t make it.  I’ll be attending and will report back here.

Disability and HE seminar in Loughborough


I’ve just had word of an International Day of Disabled Persons Event at Loughborough University via the DIS-forum mailing list.

Professor Colin Barnes (Leeds University) will be presenting at the "Disability in Higher Education – A Challenge" seminar on Wednesday 28th November 2007 from 1.00 – 3.00 p.m.  Colin is a big name inside and outside disability studies. He is disability activist, writer and researcher with an international reputation in the field of disability studies and disability research. 

Importantly this event has free admission and is open to staff, students and the public.  To book a place or more information contact: Sheralyn Bland, Personnel and Equalities Assistant by emailing S.Bland@lboro.ac.uk.

Sheffield Hallam Disability Research Forum


I will be presenting my research at the Disability Research Forum at Sheffield Hallam University on Tuesday 26th February 2008.  My working title for this session is "Disability, the Academic and Identity 2.0: The experiences of disabled students online".  More information will follow early next year.

SEN Collaborative Research Network


This is local news for local people!  The second annual Nottingham Research Network conference has been scheduled for Tuesday 8th January, 2008 from 9am-4pm at the School of Education (Dearing Building) on Jubilee Campus, Nottingham University.  I found last years conference really useful.  It is a great place to meet people working in every area of Special Educational Needs in the City of Nottingham and to get a better understanding of what’s actually happening in the different fields associated with SEN. In the words of the organisers: The main purpose of the Nottingham Research Network is to enhance the well being of people with additional support needs and the skills and confidence of their carers and other professionals through:

  • Promoting collaborative research in this area
  • Connecting people with shared research interests in children, young people and adults with additional support needs
  • Optimising the use of existing resources
  • Attracting resources and enhancing networks and collaboration
  • Identifying areas for development and sharing insights in order to assess the impact and effectiveness of activities
  • Ensuring greater harmony and mutual benefit between research agendas and local needs/priorities
  • Changing practice through theory and theory through practice

If you want to register – please note the deadline is pressing – click on this link: http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/sitemap/services/education_and_learning/nttm-research-network.htm

If you are unable to attend, but want to join the network, you can also apply for access to the networks website and submit your own areas of interest through this link.

Accessible Blogs


Author’s note: this post was written in 2007.  At time of revision (Aug 2009) far more information is available regarding the accessibility of many blogging services.  For example Wordpress supply a detailed codex relating to accessibility for Bloggers. There are also now excellent services such as Web2Access that provide centralised resources giving advice about accessibility and tools such as blogs.

I was invited to talk to a Young Pioneers group in North Nottinghamshire at the Holocaust Centre, early last month. The group are seeking to create the first British memorial to disabled people killed during the holocaust and are considering accessible ways to get responses and discussion from other disabled people and groups across the UK and internationally.

Finding out about accessibility from blog providers themselves can be difficult, and there doesn’t appear to be a centralised accessibility resource directly concerned with blogs. Many people with disabilities’ own blogs appear to be hosted everywhere and anywhere. Evidently, general accessibility guidelines such as the Web Accessibility Initiative apply to content, but blog servers can be opaque on the subject of the steps they have taken to ensure an accessible interface for users, and accessible results for visitors. So which service should you use? Typepad?!

On what I could find, Google’s ‘Blogger’ is cited as the most friendly blog format. Their blog templates are all CSS based, standards compliant, and usability tested. But this is old information (see stopdesign, 2004). So who currently holds the blogging accessibility crown? In a very-straw poll, stemming from the favourites listed by Ouch, the BBC’s Disability Lifestyle e-Zine, I found that Blogspot is, perhaps, most popular with people with disabilities.  I’ll post more ‘facts’ as I find them.  Please contribute if you have any thoughts…

Miss Landmine Angola 2007


Miss Landmine Angola contestant

On the 25th of May I was lucky enough to be invited along to a private view of the Miss Landmine Angola 2007 Expo at the Norwegian Leprosy Museum in Bergen, Norway as part of the PhD workshop on New Perspectives in Disability Research. This was a really interesting event, with the artist, Morten Traavik present for questions. For our sins, we were interviewed by press for our responses to the work (available at http://www.miss-landmine.org/ go there and make up your own mind!).  Steve Brown and I were cornered for our opinions for Bergen’s Tidende, and you can see the article here.  Both Steve and I were paraphrased, but a rough translation of a translation provided by Jan-Kåre Breivik reads:

…"Stephen Brown is in discussion with Sarah Moore. She is from Nottingham, he directs "Center for disability research" in Honolulu. Brown believes that the exhibition provides a multifaceted and partly contradictory impression, dependant upon whether one looks at it from a social or a cultural perspective.

– The first thing that trigger me is a certain irony. First the West exports landmines to Africa. Then we import the victims in the shape of such exhibitions. Both can be approached as forms of western exploitation. But the the pictures function perfectly as portraits in their own right, as expressions of art.

– As a white woman I feel difficult seeing black women exposed like this, directed by a white man. But at the same time – these women meets your gaze in a particular way. One finds oneself a place in between unpleasantness and joyful appreciation of life. Yes, this is multifaceted. And that is a good thing, adds Sarah. ……

NNDR Poster Competition


I’ve just returned from the Nordic Network on Disability Research biannual conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, where my poster won the Studentlitteratur poster competition (hurray!).  I’ve uploaded two versions here, a PDF copy of the poster and a Word text version.  Photos of the poster in-situ to follow…

NNDR Poster PDF version: Download nndr.pdf

NNDR Poster Word file (text only): Download nndr.doc

“In My Language”


A great film about communication and autistic experience by Silentmiaow of http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc&hl=en&fs=1&]