How Communication Strategies Impact Teaching and Learning

I am asking for your help this week. I promise it is not a big ask (in terms of time commitment), but it will have a bigger impact if many of you do it. I would like you to look at the communications and marketing coming out of your institutions, your research clusters, your departments, your scholarly associations and see if it is accessible, and if it isn't then send an email to the comms person and ask them to make it accessible. 

What are some things you can look for?

• Missing alt-text on tweets with images and gifs
• Missing closed captions on video or inaccurate captions
• Websites that autoplay video
• Documents that are not well formatted and difficult to read
• Colour contrast and font choices that make text difficult to read (eg. lime green text on yellow background)

I am sure some of you are saying but how does this connect to pedagogy?  I will give you two examples of how institutional, departmental, research cluster, and association comms and marketing impacts teaching and learning:

1. It tells potential students if this is an inclusive environment that cares about accessibility and if it is a space they want to be part of. It tells already enrolled students if work is being done to create more inclusive sharing of information. It tells students if disabled folk matter.
2. It tells new faculty and staff what to model in their own communication practices when they teach. If departmental comms has no alt-text, if websites are inaccessible, that tells instructors and staff well I don't need to think about that in my own course design because that is not something people care about here. I call this "trickle-down credibility," where people think it is okay to use inaccessible technology and strategies because others around them have done it.

So what can you do? As I said you can send an email to your comms person and remind them of accessible practices and what would be good to consider. Some of you will say, well our comms person is just a student we hired for the summer and they are not trained in that. Well that's also a problem. You could advocate for training for that student and for all of the folk in your department or research cluster to learn about how to alt-text or how to create headings on documents or any of the strategies that higher education communication uses on a regular basis. Make it a half-day retreat. Buy folk cafeteria sandwiches or donuts.

The more people who ask and send those emails the more folk who are in comms and marketing will actually start to care about how what they are doing directly impacts the accessibility and inclusive pedagogy in the classrooms. And also I guarantee there is already one person who is sending these emails all the time and they are being ignored (me). So maybe if it is not always the same person sending the same emails to the same people, comms and marketing might actually start to care about what they are putting out there and support more inclusive learning spaces and more accessible practices.