Surpass Community Webinar – Accessibility in Assessment

Inclusivity is a fundamental right for everyone. Together, as a community, we need to ensure that we are heading in the right direction in order to make inclusivity a reality and not just a dream. Assessment is something that we all face at some point in our educational journey, so everyone needs to have the same opportunity to express themselves and to be rewarded for their efforts.

We tackled this complex and often controversial topic in a recent webinar for the Surpass Community. Joining the discussion were members of BTL’s Accessibility Team, Leon Hampson and Isabel Holdsworth, along with content expert Gillian Whitehouse from AlphaPlus Consultancy.

A key part of the discussion centred around the idea that to create accessible or inclusive technology, you have to turn your approach on its head. You need to create functional designs from the ground up rather than develop features just to tick the boxes of conformance.

You’ll find of interest how our change to ‘Universal Design’ thinking has underpinned the development of 155 features.

These features, and many more to come, are essential in Surpass delivery conforming to Section 508 of US federal law and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AA. Within the webinar session we used recent examples from the US and Wales where we have worked with Surpass Community members to deliver assessments to Section 508 and WCAG level AA conformance.

You can have the best assessment technology in the world, but, if your content is still a significant barrier, very little progress has been made. Using her extensive experience from assessment content authoring, Gillian Whitehouse from AlphaPlus provided her suggestions on content development and how accessibility can be enhanced for standard onscreen and innovative adaptive assessments (27:26).