Accessibility in Learning and Beyond – Episode 61

In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks with accessibility consultant Nora Loyst about designing learning experiences that truly welcome everyone. Nora shares how personal experiences led her to this work and explores the shift from a medical model to a social model of disability.

Beth and Nora also talk about:

  • Expecting and planning for learner diversity from the start
  • Naming what you know to build trust and inclusion
  • Moving from one-time accommodations to default accessibility practices
  • Designing for all through Universal Design for Learning and beyond
  • Interrupting ableism by listening deeply and acting with intention

Engage with Nora Loyst

Links From the Episode

Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast

Connect with Beth Cougler Blom

Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions

Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]
[Episode intro]
Beth 00:01
Hi there, I’m Beth Cougler Blom and this is Facilitating on Purpose, the space where we talk about designing and facilitating learning. I’m so excited today because this is the start of Season 4. I’ve just come back from a month of break away from the podcast. I did a little work during that month, but I didn’t do podcast work, so it’s nice to step away for a little bit and get some distance from the podcast and then feel like, when I come back, I’m refreshed and I’m ready to go for another season.

Beth 00:34
And I’m so excited about some of the conversations that I have booked in coming up for you in this upcoming fall season of Facilitating on Purpose. And I think I’ll just get right going telling you about this episode today. I have Nora Loyst joining me in this episode and I won’t say too much about who she is or what she does because she actually tells us a little bit about her as I ask her some of those questions at the start of the episode.

Beth 01:02
I will just say she’s an accessibility consultant. She’s working at a consulting practice here in British Columbia, Canada. While Nora and I do talk a little bit about what’s going on in BC in terms of some accessibility legislation coming up, really the whole conversation is much more broad than that. So if you’re listening from somewhere outside of BC or outside of Canada, somewhere else in the world, you’re really going to take away a lot from this conversation that you can also apply to the learning that you are organizing in your environment or in your country of the world.

Beth 01:36
Thanks so much for choosing to listen to this episode with Nora and I. We’re talking about accessibility today. Enjoy the show.

Beth 01:46
[Episode start] Nora, it’s so nice to see you. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while and I’m happy you’re the first episode of our new season. So thanks again for coming in and having a chat with me today.

Nora 02:00
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Beth 02:03
I was wondering if we could just hear a little bit about you first. I mean, it’s a big question, but just thinking about the aspect of the area of accessibility that you work in, what was it that drew you to this whole field? Is there a short story? It’s probably a long story, but is there a short story? Why did you choose this area of work?

Nora 02:23
Yeah, I think it is a long story, but I’ll keep it short. I think that this area of work, accessibility, sort of chose me. I grew up with a brother with a learning disability that really impacted his educational journey. I really saw the way that the educational system treated him and the ways that his teachers in particular really misunderstood him.

Nora 02:48
And I think I carried that with me into the start of my undergraduate degree, but I actually started in microbiology. And then again, accessibility came back to find me and brought me my best friend, Georgia, who is blind and uses a guide dog. And so yet again, I was sort of navigating systems alongside somebody with a disability who really showed me what it was like and the barriers that exist in our systems. And I think all of that just sort of, over and over again, lit this kind of like activist fire in me through getting embedded in this work after I chose to really commit myself to this career.

Nora 03:32
It allowed me to understand my own identity as a person with a disability too. I have mental health-related disabilities that have been with me for my whole life. And they weren’t always part of an identity that I called disability, but they are now. Also about two years ago, I lost part of my vision as a result of a rare autoimmune condition that I had no idea about. What was really lovely about that experience I think is because I was already so embedded in the disability world and accessibility, landing in that new disability experience was much softer.

Nora 04:13
And so I think that’s part of what keeps me in the accessibility world too, is knowing that the more we talk about it, the more we make our spaces accessible, the better our world is for people when they acquire disability, which is a really common experience that a lot of us will have over the course of our lives, whether it’s temporary or permanent.

Beth 04:34
Yeah. I think you’re right. Like as soon as we start meeting more people and asking the questions or having the conversations around in our life, we do realize that there are a lot of people facing and working through disability…I can’t say issues. Disability, like having disabilities of some sort, right? It’s more common than we really realize at first.

Nora 04:59
Absolutely. Based on our census data from 2022, it’s 27% of Canadians that have at least one disability, which is a much higher proportion than we think. That’s about one in three people, and most of them are invisible.

Beth 05:16
And do you think the number is actually higher than that? Because as you say, like maybe some people don’t even really realize that what they have or what is happening to them would be classified as a disability. So maybe it’s bigger than we think too? Bigger than the numbers say?

Nora 05:31
It’s probably a mixture of both. It’s hard to say because people don’t self-identify as having a disability to get that number. They say their health condition. So actually it might be the opposite, where people don’t consider themselves to be disabled, but based on the way they respond to the census questions, they may be considered as having a disability by us. And so, yeah, it’s really interesting the ways that self-identification comes into that too.

Beth 05:59
Yeah. And there’s a whole conversation there, I guess, about, I mean, that’s actually a wonderful thing, isn’t it? In a way. That there’s the whole thing around identifying as a disability that could be negative. But if you don’t think you have a disability, then you’re just in life and working it out. I don’t know. There’s just something interesting about that.

Nora 06:16
Yeah. Yeah. There are so many ways that we self-accommodate every day that we don’t even think about.

Beth 06:21
Yeah. I appreciate you sharing the stories of your brother and your friend and yourself. And I was lucky enough the other night, a couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine was in town and brought together a number of women. And I was lucky enough to sit beside a woman who was completely blind. And she shared that with me right away. And I thought, oh, wow, this is this is amazing because I actually don’t have the opportunity to meet people who are fully blind, you know, very often. Maybe it’s happened once before in my life. And she volunteered a lot of things about her experience and just sitting beside each other at the dinner table. And so it does, like meeting folks who are working through a disability or have a disability makes us care a little bit more and pay attention, wake up a little bit about it?

Nora 07:10
Yeah, absolutely.

Beth 07:11
Yeah, I felt lucky for the experience. Now you work for or with an organization called Untapped Accessibility. And Carla on my team introduced me to you folks, a BC company. Last fall, I think, as we were trying to educate ourselves more about the legislation that’s, that’s coming along here in BC related to accessibility. Tell me, how would you describe what Untapped Accessibility does and for who?

Nora 07:38
Untapped Accessibility is, I think, the leading accessibility consulting firm in British Columbia, and we work mostly with public sector organizations, but we do work across private sector and non-profits as well. And we work with these companies to go beyond compliance when it comes to accessibility.

Nora 08:03
When we talk about compliance, we mean the Accessible BC Act. That’s the legislation that really grounds a lot of this work in this current moment in BC. But there are a lot of organizations that we work with that are aiming to comply with the legislation, but also are doing this work from a values-based place. And so that’s really who we work with is the public sector for the most part. And we do a lot of different things with them. We help them host their accessibility committees, write accessibility plans for the organizations, and establish feedback mechanisms for the public.

Nora 08:44
What I think is really great about Untapped as well is that we’re a social enterprise. So we also have a dual mission of generating revenue for our nonprofit parent company, which is Open Door Social Services Society. And so a lot of the work that we do is to fund those employment programs for people with disabilities in our communities. And at Untapped, we have about 90% of our staff are folks that self-identify as having lived experience of disability. So we’re really representing that slogan of the disability justice movement, of “nothing about us without us”.

Beth 09:27
Yeah, yeah, and some people may not have heard that term yet, but I think it’s one that is easy for us to remember and important for us to remembe. You know, I know it’s come up for me and it’s helped me check who’s working on a project and some of the times when I’ve had to speak up and say someone else needs to be here, you know, nothing about us without us. So that phrase has been useful to me for sure, in particularly my learning design side of my work. Yeah.

Nora 09:55
Absolutely.

Beth 09:56
I like how you emphasize that you’re there to help people go beyond the legislation because there will be people listening to this episode from other jurisdictions, other countries, other provinces. Some folks are ahead of BC in what is happening with this. And so we can’t really let legislation be the only thing that dictates to us, can we? As you say, we have to start earlier sometimes than legislation is asking us to do. I know here it’s going to take a long time before people have to comply. So we have to do better than that anyway, right? Because it’s a long time to wait.

Nora 10:32
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s been a long time already, you know, the disability justice movement is not new. And it’s only now that we’re really starting to see legislation, at least in Canada, that’s catching up. But I am proud, I would say, of the BC legislation in terms of the way that it’s positioned compared to some other legislation that we see across the country and across the world. We see a real shift from a medical model of disability, which is reflected in a lot of different legislation, to what we would call a social model of disability. So maybe I can describe those models a little further if that’s helpful.

Beth 11:12
That would be great, because there’s kind of a historical aspect to it, I think, as well, and how things have shifted over time in philosophies.?

Nora 11:20
Yeah. I mean, there are a million different models for the way that we understand disability, but kind of the two central ones are this medical model and the social model. The medical model is really what most people would be familiar with if they grew up in sort of a Western society, a Western colonial society. It really states that disability is the problem of an individual. It’s something they experience like within themselves and as a result of a health condition. And it’s up to that individual to come forward about the ways that they need to be included. So to receive an accommodation or if they need to participate in a different way, they’re the ones that are going to kind of self advocate. If an accommodation is made, it’s made in that same individual relationship. So you’re improving access for one person.

Nora 12:17
But under the social model, disability is defined really differently. And disability is defined as kind of that interaction between a person and a barrier. And so the barrier is more to do with the disability experience than the person themselves. And so the environment creates disability. And what we see in that model is that it’s up to all of us to kind of take collective responsibility to identify, prevent, and remove barriers. And that takes a really different skill set for all of us. If we’re really used to, as we were talking about before, having a person come forward and say, this is my experience, it’s really natural for us to not have the skills to identify the barriers in our environment. So it takes a really long time to sort of build these new systems and ways of thinking in ourselves to be able to identify barriers.

Beth 13:21
Yeah, and it’s maybe first and foremost a mindset shift. I mean, I’m remembering the words of someone I interviewed the first episode of past season, Season 3, Yasser from Egypt, who is blind. And Yasser said that his disability has been imposed on him by the society. [Nora: Right.] And honestly, when he said that, I think it was almost like a slap in the face.

Beth 13:44
Because you’re in the field, you’re ensconced in the field, that probably wouldn’t surprise you if someone said it that way. But the field of accessibility and inclusion is part of my work, but it’s not my sole work. And so when he said that, I don’t know, it just drove home the point that that is the social model right there, isn’t it? In that phrase?

Nora 14:01
Absolutely.

Beth 14:01
That the disability has been imposed? Yeah. So just, I don’t know, meeting someone and hearing them say that really drove it home for me. That, yeah, it’s a collective responsibility, as you say.

Nora 14:14
Absolutely. And I guess to close my own loop, that’s what we see in our BC legislation is this social model of disability, which is really exciting I think for probably me and somebody like Yasser too. But it leaves us with a lot of questions because we have these really entrenched systems for carrying out the medical model of disability. You know, I go to the doctor to seek treatment. And if I need an accommodation in my workplace, I go to my boss and ask for that.

Nora 14:45
But we don’t have systems in place that help us carry out the social model of disability. We don’t have a lot of integrated ways of developing policy with accessibility in mind or ways of training everybody to see the barriers in our environment. So that’s what I think is exciting about this time in accessibility, in that world, is so rarely do we get to be part of like world building. What do we want the future to look like? And that’s what accessibility is to me, at least. It’s world building.

Beth 15:19
Yeah. Oh, that’s so neat that you use that kind of like sci-fi sort of, what is that? Sci-fi fantasy kind of term. [laughs]

Nora 15:26
Yeah. Totally.

Beth 15:26
Yeah, but I can tell you that I’m a learning designer. I’ve designed e-learning courses for clients in health care in British Columbia that have the social model in it. And so it is…health care providers and professionals are being trained in the model as we speak, right? But it’s it’s systemic. It’s slow to change. You know, we’ll get there, but it is starting to happen, isn’t it? But here we’re thinking about, I mean, we could have a whole conversation about health care and the people inside it. But to broaden us a little bit, we’re thinking about people who are training, who are facilitating, who are working with groups. I know you do a lot of this at Untapped Accessibility. So situate yourself in our shoes because you do it, too. You know, as you think about your training programs that you offer, what are you doing to prepare for that, to facilitate that? Are there models that you use or frameworks that you use to guide your work to make sure you’re designing and facilitating accessible environments for all, not just those people who need accommodations? That’s the old model, right? We’re designing for all now. What do you do to make sure you’re accessible?

Nora 16:35
Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, it’s really great to follow the principles of Universal Design for Learning, that also really follows the social model of disability. I am not necessarily an expert myself in Universal Design for Learning, so maybe we could share some resources along with this episode because it’s a great place to start, and there’s a lot of really concrete examples of ways to implement that in instructional design and training design. But I would say from my perspective, a lot of the work that I do is really helping people move from that medical model to a social model, and so bridging that gap is really where I have a lot of expertise.

Nora 17:19
And so I would say my favourite methods and framework that I use is what can we capture from accommodations and implement as accessibility? So, what are the things people have asked for specifically? If we’ve had people with disabilities come forward and say, I need this in order to participate, how can we make sure that that person only needs to ask for it once and then it’s good to go? And a person later on who experiences the same barriers doesn’t have to ask for it at all.

Nora 17:52
So that might be something like closed captioning. Is captioning available? We might put that into place for one person at first, but now we have it available all the time. So what are the things that can become accessibility practices done by default that were done just as a one-off originally? I think that’s a really strong practice. And the next one that I think is really useful is what I call “naming what you know”. So when you’re thinking about the design of your learning, I know and you know that we put a lot of thought into that. And sometimes that’s not seen by the learners themselves, but it can be helpful for them to see a little bit more of that. And what naming what you know does, so by that I mean describe the things that you know are required of participating in that learning. You know, this will take you this amount of time or we have put high contrast colours into our training platform so that it’s accessible to those with low vision.

Nora 19:02
And naming those particular accessibility measures not only tells people that they’re available, it also tells people that you’re thinking about them, that you know that people with disabilities will be accessing your content. And so it makes them feel like known, valued, and believed members of your learning community. And finally, it also lets them ask for appropriate accommodations if they need them later. If you’re telling them more about what you’re already doing, they can make more informed decisions about what they need to ask for if there’s something above and beyond what you’re already offering.

Beth 19:39
It’s so true because I’ve just started to name those pieces last year, even though for years we’ve been putting them in, as you say. Especially for online learning, because I don’t know, for some reason, it’s just easy to write it…we write a lot of stuff down, right, when we create online learning. And so we can’t put 200 bullet points of stuff in there [laughs] in a way, like there’s only so much we have time and budget to do and all sorts of, but we have some things that we do every time and we have to tell people about it. But yeah, if they see this is what we’ve done intentionally in this course, then if we haven’t ticked all the boxes for a particular person, then they know they can reach out.

Well, we give them contact information even to say, please contact this person if you have questions or if you need something else. Yeah. [Nora: Yeah.] So the naming piece, maybe not a lot of people are doing it and I’m not doing it very well myself either, this is full disclosure on my part, for virtual or in-person trainings. I don’t think I’m as good as that, right? It’s been easier or just somehow we’ve remembered to do it for online e-learning, right, when we’re writing the content down. But for the live pieces, either online or in-person, somehow we’ve been forgetting to do it. So again, a learning area, right, for all of us.

Nora 20:55
Yeah, absolutely. And it is the kind of thing, like you were mentioning, it’s hard to do it the first time, to write down that list of 200 bullets. But as you move through that work, it becomes easier and easier because it is things that we’re doing by default. So you don’t have to rewrite the list every time.

But it’s also amazing to watch the list grow as you learn more about what accessibility means and the ways that people are interacting with your content. You’re just going to see that list grow in really exciting ways. I think about one of the trainings that we hosted recently in person, we had somebody mention—who is blind as well—that they as part of the accessibility information would really love to see details about how to access the space by transit. So not only just the accessibility of the building itself, but how do I get there from main bus stations so they can get onto a bus and from there they have event instructions from us about how to get to the place where the training is being held.

Beth 22:06
That’s a good thing to mention for in-person. I just saw that actually on the I4PL conference that’s happening in November. And they have a page where all the transit and flying and whatever options are there. But it makes me think about something I saw in social media the other day, which I’ve never seen before. Again, someone who’s blind, standing outside a washroom, showing a Braille map of the washroom. And we’ve seen Braille, but I’ve never seen a Braille map of a washroom. And I forget where she was, so I apologize for where they’re doing it. And I can’t remember where it was.

Nora 22:38
Yeah, I saw that too. I think they were in Australia.

Beth 22:41
In Australia. So where is the sink? Where is the towel dispenser? I mean, again, just opens our eyes to seeing what that person can’t see in the room that we can see, those of us who don’t have a visual impairment. So yeah, all sorts of things that we haven’t seen yet and are not implementing in-person. But some of it’s organizational, some of it’s like building wise stuff as well.

Nora 23:07
Absolutely. And this idea of naming what you know, and like building that catalog is it’s important to sort of validate your list of accessibility features with people that are using those features.

I think that example of the Braille on the washrooms is such a great example, because many times in our building codes, for example, it’ll say washrooms need to have Braille along with the room number or the fact that it says that it’s a washroom. But it is perhaps just as easy to ask somebody who uses that type of system to say, what do you want the Braille to say, right? And that is a step that is often overlooked, but one that will improve accessibility by so much.

Beth 23:55
I’m so glad you mentioned that because I think it was where my brain was going next because I was defaulting, I realized over years, well not over years, but at some point I realized that I was thinking oh well I should get screen reader software because then I can check to see if the whatever is inclusive, right, or accessible. And then it’s kind of like a shake your head moment I thought why would I get screen reader software? Why wouldn’t I just give money to a consultant who uses a screen reader and put money in their pocket and get them to test things for me? So I’ve been trying to add in money to budgets to have various types of folks come and help me out right and help me see the things that I can’t see and and do the things that I can’t do. Because I haven’t I don’t know about it yet. And and also give money to those people as well.

Nora 24:45
Yeah, I think that’s such a great point too, because for a long time in the disability advocacy world, there was a practice of doing what we would call like disability simulation training. So let’s put a bunch of people who can walk in wheelchairs and have them navigate the city and see what barriers they encounter. You know, there are some benefits to trainings like that. You do see and experience more barriers than you would without that experience, but you’re also not skilled at using a wheelchair. And so sometimes it can create more pity or misunderstanding of a disability experience because you’re not as skilled with that ability as somebody who lives every day in that body.

Nora 25:36
So I think it’s the same thing you’re saying around the screen reader software. And if you or I were to just download that software and test it, you might even find, you might find more issues or you might find less issues than somebody who uses that screen reader software every day. We do a lot of testing with a partner company called EasySurf and they do a lot of website audits. And all of their staff are folks who use that software themselves. They use screen readers and also speech to text.

Nora 26:12
And something that I find so interesting about when they’re doing their audits is the way that they describe sometimes the repetition of content or the way that where links are placed in a paragraph will increase or decrease cognitive load while they’re reading it. Because if you’re using that software all day, not just to test something, you’re gonna find more and more issues and things that make it easier to use. So I think that’s just another example, but absolutely right on your part of having the people who use that technology or use those solutions is gonna make your testing way better. And like you said, it’s just better to give disabled people seats at the table than use the software alone.

Beth 26:59
So we kind of talked about basically a list of preparation activities, I guess. I mean, the list you’re developing of the things, the accommodations people have asked you for, and then you’re just doing those things, not making people ask for them. Do you literally have a checklist that you’ve made for your, like we, we do, we have back-end documents that we’re, you know, especially for the e-learning side, as I’ve said, we’ve, we’re kind of ticking boxes or seeing what’s possible within the budget, blah, blah, blah.

But how do you do that? Do you, are you writing a whole bunch of stuff down? Are you using resources from common places?

Nora 27:32
I think checklists are a great place to start, and they’re a great place to make sure that you’re sort of validating time and time again, but remembering that they’re living documents. So it’s not accessibility means this 20 check boxes. It’s something that changes over time.

Nora 27:53
And when I am using a checklist or even building a checklist, I actually prefer to try to assess the different demands of the engagement. So if I’m asking somebody to come to a webinar, what does that take? What do they need to do or be, or how do they need to act in order to be present for this service delivery? That’s what we would call it. And so we look at different areas of demand, the things that people need to think, sense, do, feel, and the different ways they need to interact.

Nora 28:41
And by looking at those demand areas, we often find that you can think of solutions and accessibility practices that will benefit a lot of people, not just people who are blind need this, people who are deaf need this. But when you think about the ways that people interact with your service and the demands, you can kind of cover more boxes. So for example, if we think about a webinar where you’re delivering content verbally the whole time, that is gonna cause a lot of demand on the thinking area. You’re going to need to take in information, process it in your working memory, and then log it and make sense of it somewhere else.

Nora 29:28
So what are the things that we can do to reduce the demand on your thinking domain? You can have the information available beforehand too. And after the fact, you can create summary documents that are not just full length transcripts of the webinar itself. When we think about it from that demand perspective and reducing barriers by demand, that would be really beneficial for somebody with a processing disability like ADHD. It would also be helpful for somebody who is blind or low vision, who couldn’t see your slides during that presentation. It would also be useful for somebody who’s deaf because they can follow along in writing and they don’t need to hear your words. So by looking at the demands, you sometimes allow yourself that grace to not understand every single disability experience because that’s a never ending checklist.

Beth 30:26
I know because, you know, as we’ve been talking, we tend to go to people who are blind, people who are deaf, but there’s a whole range of the neurodiversity minorities and it goes on and on, doesn’t it? There’s no way we can know what will, and we go to the individual level too. [Nora: Yeah.]

Beth 30:43
We can’t even just say all people who have autism are experiencing this, can we? [Nora: Exactly.] We really have to go to the individual level so we can’t do it, but we can, it sounds like an empathy map that you’re…[Nora: Yeah] [Beth chuckles]. I was actually just looking at one this morning for another project. I’m like, that sounds very familiar. So basically creating your own empathy map for the types of things that you do and creating your own custom version of it to help you out?

Nora 31:08
Yeah. And some of the ways that this also shows up is, yeah, mapping what are the unwritten expectations too? What do I think people are just going to know automatically about the ways that they’re going to be required to show up? You know, what do I need to wear to this event? What is appropriate for me to share about myself? Is this like a casual event where I can tell personal stories or is it really professional? All of those pieces also tax our cognitive load.

And so going deeper within ourselves to really break down our own services helps to, like you said, build empathy, build more of an understanding of the barriers that might show up for people throughout your service.

Beth 31:53
Are you giving your participants, like you mentioned summaries and so on after the fact, I forget if you said something ahead of time, like what are you giving them ahead of time? Because it feels like it could be a 10-page document basically [chuckles] of all the things, but yeah, what are you giving them ahead of time?

So they’re prepared. I mean, knowing what to wear or how formal it is, and these are things that most of us probably aren’t really telling people ahead of time, but they’re unwritten rules that we have to make visible in some ways, aren’t we?

Nora 32:22
Yeah, absolutely. There’s such a balance, of course, because the longer your list gets also, the more cognitive load it creates for somebody to read ahead of time. [smiles]

So I think breaking things into small chunks and giving people the options to opt into reading that information or not is really helpful. So generally, ahead of an event, I would send out an agenda which has the time allotted for each topic, for example, what we expect the day to look like, any breaks that are involved. And then generally, I like to include a, hopefully, generous and open offer-type accessibility statement.

Nora 33:07
So telling people we want this space to be as accessible as possible to everybody. We know that every person is going to need different things when they arrive in this space. Here’s a link to where you can find what we’ve thought about as far as accessibility. So you’re kind of making that a separate space so that it doesn’t overwhelm your poster or your agenda. And then generally, I like to break it down further on that page of accessibility information. Ways that you can do that are sort of by like frequently asked questions, like what do I need to wear or how long is the day or what types of materials will I be accessing, PowerPoint or documents, that sort of thing. And drop down menus are really helpful for that.

Nora 33:57
Another way to break up the accessibility information of your event or your service is to have a list of all of the things that are done by default. So things people don’t need to ask for but are just already included. And then another list of things that can be offered upon request. So we can provide ASL interpretation, we can provide CART captioning, but we’re not doing that by default, but we’re happy to organize that for you.

Beth 34:26
Right, I like that dividing it out because it is a budget consideration, isn’t it? When you start hiring professionals like ASL interpreters and so on.

Nora 34:34
Yeah, and there’s also, it’s important to be considerate of the fact that there aren’t that many ASL interpreters. And so if you don’t know that somebody needs an ASL interpreter, it’s best to leave that resource for somebody at that time that might need it elsewhere.

And so having that be available by request, but naming it specifically can be helpful for knowing that if somebody needs it, they are seen and welcome and known in our community. But if nobody requests it, then we’re leaving that resource for the people who need it.

Beth 35:06
I think that’s an important point that maybe I hadn’t thought about before that resources are limited. So if we really don’t need it for someone in our particular group, let’s leave it for another group. I think that’s really important. [Nora: Yeah.] There’s a phrase that you folks are using on your website that I wonder if you can explain to us a little bit more. And I think you teach a workshop around it. It’s called “interrupting ableism”. And maybe it’s back to that where we started, you know, with the mindset shift and just expecting diversity, you know, where we’re going to be leading sessions and so on. Can you explain that term? What does it mean to interrupt ableism? What do we have to do there?

Nora 35:47
That is a big question. [Beth chuckles] Interrupting ableism is a tall order, but it really connects to a lot of the other work that we’ve been doing around interrupting things like racism and sexism and homophobia, but it can be stickier. So there is a study that was published several years ago now and I can send this to you and we can include it in the resources as well.

Nora 36:13
Essentially it looked at people over the course of a 14-year period and it assessed their implicit bias towards different groups. So it looked at implicit bias based on race, age, sex, sexual orientation, and disability. Then, so it looked at their implicit bias at the beginning of a 14-year period and after and marked the changes. And there was really significant changes for most of those marginalizations, around 20 or 30% for things like racism, sexism, and homophobia. But we only saw a 3% change in people’s implicit bias towards people with disabilities. So it’s quite deeply rooted in a lot of us and it is proving to be stickier, like I said, than a lot of other isms.

Nora 37:06
There’s also a saying in the disability rights community that says disability rights will be the last civil rights movement. It always comes back to this idea that disability rights will sort of be hidden among other rights movements, which is interesting because we know that disability is really prevalent. Like we talked about, one in three people in Canada experience disability. It can be really challenging to find within ourselves. So ableism exists on every level, just like every other ism. There’s systemic ableism, institutional ableism, interpersonal ableism and even internalized ableism.

Nora 37:55
And so some of the ways that you can kind of find pieces of that are what do you think makes you valuable as a member of your community? And if you think that through and you trace it back and you say, well, I wanna be successful, I think being smart is part of the value that I bring. If you trace it back further and further, some of those start to sound like, well, okay, the opposite of that is being stupid or being incapable and that’s disability. We know that disability can influence our cognitive abilities, our physical abilities. And if we’re placing value on ourselves based on those abilities, the result is ableism.

Nora 38:45
So what we really need to do to interrupt ableism is come back to this idea of we know diversity makes us better. And we can see that in other areas, like when we brought more women into the workforce, when we brought more people of colour into the workforce, productivity goes up, we’re able to achieve better things in society and the same is true for disability. There is place for everybody in different systems, different brains are required for different tasks and that makes our world run. We wouldn’t be where we are without people with different brains and different bodies. Yeah, that’s a little bit of what we mean when we talk about interrupting ableism is finding it within ourselves and within our systems and fighting back against it.

Beth 39:35
Thanks for explaining that. And it makes me think about how big it is too, right? There’s pieces within ourselves that we need to keep questioning and asking ourselves about too.

But yeah, it goes right up to our teams and our organizations. Do you think that people who are in training and development or learning and development areas or, you know, people that are in companies but or even work for themselves, like, do we have the power to make a change around this area? I mean, if there’s one department or one area of an organization that is going to help us be less ableist and more accessible and just expect diversity and all the things we’ve been talking about, is it the learning and development people? Is it someone else? I don’t know. Like tell me the power that we have in our field. I’m really leading you down the garden path here. [Laughs]

Nora 40:30
Yeah, I mean, I guess my answer to that would be, yes, of course, everybody has the capacity. [Beth laughs.] And I think, yeah, I guess what I would say is everybody has the capacity. Every person in every role, in every team has the ability to either make space or not make space for disabled people, but I think learning and development and learning design is particularly important because it sometimes creates the parameters or creates the rules of what is and isn’t acceptable.

Nora 41:05
It tells us what are the expectations of our organization, and it does that through the content. So who, like, what are we teaching people? But it also really matters how we’re teaching people because the way that we design our training also influences who gets to stay in our systems. You know, if people aren’t able to learn or get more opportunities for professional development, for example, they don’t progress in their careers. We see this, there are stats around disability employment that says one of the main reasons that we don’t see more leaders with disabilities is because they’re not given the same opportunities for professional development, and they’re actually also not getting constructive criticism or feedback from their managers or supervisors for fear of, you know, being too critical of somebody’s disability.

Nora 42:00
But I think what we see there, like, the part that we can talk about here is the learning and design is when we don’t create professional development opportunities or learning opportunities that make sense to people with disabilities, we’re really limiting their capacities too. But I guess I’m curious what you think based on that sort of leading question, I don’t know what you think is the space and power that learning designers hold.

Beth 42:27
I have my own perspective because I don’t work inside an organization, right? So I, it’s hard for me to say what everybody thinks too, but I know that in my work with clients, I’ve realized, maybe even especially over the past year, that the work that we’re doing with clients to help them learn about accessibility and inclusion aspects or elements, like I need to tell the, the story better a little bit, right? To say what we’re doing here for this one e-learning course to make it accessible, you can do it in the rest of your organization, you know, and you should like this brand guide that we recreated for you and added to an added colour contrast, uh, guidelines in there and in all the other things that we’re doing. And the clients going, oh wow, we had no idea that this was all a thing, right?

Like the hundreds of things that we’re doing to create courses and what it takes. And then we haven’t, again, it’s making that, um, what did you say in the beginning? It’s like naming…

Nora 43:30
Naming what you know.

Beth 43:31
Naming what you know. Like when we do that, then it can ripple throughout the rest of the organization because I don’t know, we work with a lot of provincial and national nonprofits, particularly. They’re strapped. They don’t have a lot of time to sit around and dig into all this stuff, right? So we as consultants have a lot of power to be able to share the things that we’re learning with our clients and it does ripple. I think through, it can, if they will, if they do the work, right, it can ripple.

Nora 43:58
Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think the other thing that I would add is the way that disability is positioned in these trainings is a real power that the learning designers have. Sometimes in trainings around disability, there’s a real effort or impulse maybe to position it as sort of like, we serve people with disabilities. They are external to us. There’s us, and then there’s people with disabilities that we serve. But that’s not true.

Nora 44:32
Disability is everywhere. Disabled people are everywhere. They are the learning designers. They are the staff taking the training and they’re the people that we serve. So making sure that the way that we’re talking about disability is not only external to what we’re doing. It’s part of who we are. It’s part of who we serve and who is taking the training at the end of the day.

Beth 44:55
Yeah, I think that’s really important because you can’t look around the organization and go, oh, we only have two people with disabilities here because we can see it or whatever, right? [Nora: Yeah.]

And then there’s the idea. Have we talked about the idea of temporary disability yet? I don’t know if we really have because that’s important to recognize too, right?

Nora 45:11
Mm-hmm. Of course, permanent disability is what comes to mind first, and that’s its own experience, but sometimes people with temporary or episodic disability, things that kind of come and go, can be particularly vulnerable in that way.

Nora 45:29
They’re maybe the people, like we talked about briefly, the people who really learn to adapt based on their disabilities are sometimes the ones with permanent experiences, but people who have temporary disabilities, for example, I had a concussion earlier this year that really changed my life for a brief period of time, and I had no idea what to do with myself. I had no idea how to manage the fact that my memory was really impacted. I’m somebody who typically has a really good memory, and suddenly that was gone. So I had no ways of coping with that or making it part of my day-to-day, and so I think the temporary disabilities really show us that idea of collective responsibility, because if the people around me knew some ways to support me or had had familiarity with something like that, it really would have changed my experience. So I think the temporary disability is really important to bring into the conversation too.

Beth 46:33
Yeah. And maybe we have an opportunity, especially as facilitators, when we’re facilitating to help our learners realize that, I don’t know how you do it, really, I’ve just started to think about this too, that whatever’s happening for them today is okay. And we can deal with that, right? We’ve not accommodated, we’ve planned for that. You know, if today is off for you in whatever way, we’re okay with that, we can deal with that.

Beth 47:01
I’ll share that right now I have an imbalance thing going on, because I got off a cruise ship in February, and now it’s June and I still have it, it’s mal de debarquement. But when I was reading the materials about mal de debarquement syndrome—it’s like bad disembarkment syndrome—it said one of the symptoms could be loss of confidence. And there are a whole host of other symptoms for other types of things, right? That people might be dealing with. But if learners knew that a medical or some other issue that they’re having has these effects and symptoms, I don’t know, like there’s a lot that learners probably could tell themselves differently if they knew that whatever was going on for them actually was a real thing. And it might impact their learning and on and on and on. There’s a lot to think about there.

Beth 47:11
And I’m still turning it over in my brain, right? Because it’s, I was feeling it too, right? I’m writing a book right now and I’m like, do I know what the hell I’m talking about?

Nora 47:11
Oh! [exclaims]

Beth 47:11
Right? I’m like, why am I, I’m, you know, I’ve done this before, right? Like, why am I feeling like this? And it’s like, maybe it’s because of that, right? And so again, temporary, but just helps for us to realize why we’re feeling this way as a, as a learner or someone trying to do something in the world.

Nora 48:16
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that comes back to like facilitators and learning designers coming into that own expertise of what are the ways that learners can show up differently. And so then we can tell them, “If you’re feeling this way today, no worries. I’ve got it. I’ve prepared for you.” I think that’s a really great way to create safety in the learning spaces.

Beth 48:39
Yeah, yeah. Because it doesn’t have to be about a true disability. It could be just they had a horrible fight with someone at home that morning and they’re just really reeling from it as they walk in the room or whatever, right? So maybe they don’t want to turn to a pair and, you know, talk about their day first thing in the morning or yeah, there’s all sorts of things around that.

Nora 48:58
Absolutely.

Beth 48:59
Where do we want to go from here? I feel like, I mean, you know, we knew that this was going to be a big conversation. I can’t really ask you to teach me your whole field [laughs] in one podcast conversation. Is there anything that you think that you do want to end with that people need to hear before we close?

Nora 49:18
The real takeaway for me and what I hope people bring forward around accessibility is that idea of listening to the disabled people in your lives, in your learning environments, and making sure that you’ve really heard them when they tell you about a barrier that they’ve experienced, that you fix it, you listen, you empathize with them in that moment, and then you really carry that with you. The work of advocacy of telling people about the barriers you experience is hard work, and it’s something that people with disabilities do all day every day.

If they’re telling you about a barrier they’re experiencing, you might hear it once, but they might have to tell somebody about it multiple times a day. And so the work of accessibility is that of protecting the people in our communities and taking some of that work away and doing it with them and for them. And so I think accessibility is the work of listening to people when they tell you about their barriers and then doing your very best to make sure that that barrier doesn’t come up for them again and that it won’t come up for people that come after them.

Beth 50:40
Thank you. That’s so important for us to hear.

Maybe I can add in too, that we in the field just need to keep talking about it more. I mean, we need more conference sessions where we really talk about this and dialogue with each other and share and bring it into the spaces where we’re gathering in the field to help each other learn about this. And it is a vulnerable thing. I mean, even during this episode, I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m so not eloquent in some of the things that are in this field, right? Because some of it is new to me. A lot of it’s not, but a lot of it is. And so, you know, we just all have to be vulnerable in the conversations that we have to say, I don’t really know, does someone else? And just, yeah, come together and help each other out.

Nora 51:24
Absolutely. I think that is a result of the medical model in a lot of ways. Like I said, these conversations are isolated between two people to say, this is what I need. And the other person says, okay, I guess we can figure it out.

But the work of the social model is making it part of our normal and collective conversation. So we’re going to stumble. We’re going to have some awkwardness as we bring it more into that collective space. But it’s, it’s part of the work. It’s what we do.

Beth 51:53
Thank you so much. I encourage everyone to check out your organization and your training events particularly, but thank you so much for having this conversation and making the time. It’s been great.

Nora 52:04
Thank you so much for having me.

Beth 52:09
[Episode outro] I was really happy to be able to present this conversation that I had with Nora to you. I think just every time I bring a topic to the podcast that has something to do with diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, it’s just so important for us all to continue to learn and grow and talk with each other and share and be humble about what we do and don’t know in this area. I hope you appreciate the times when I admit I need to get better in certain areas. I’m doing a lot all the time, I mean maybe you see that as well, but there is always something more for me to learn, for my company to grow and develop in. Even just having these kinds of conversations just helps me keep doing the things that we’re talking about as well.

Beth 53:00
So at this moment, and I hope it’s going to be ready by the time the episode airs, we are making the kind of naming what you know document that Nora and I talked about in the episode. Because yes, we can’t just have these conversations and listen to them and not do anything. And so we’re doing something and we’re just taking that extra step to make a template that reminds us that there are things that we need to tell people before they come to an in-person session, before they come to a virtual session.

Beth 53:32
And of course, like we talked about, what we did to make an e-learning or an online learning course more accessible. So we are making that document right now. And again, it will be a work in progress because we can’t just, as Nora said, make one and then have that be the document that we send people forever more. So we’re going to make our first version and try to be more clear and open about the things that we’ve thought about to make our learning experiences more accessible with just the knowledge that our learners are going to teach us things as we go and we’ll keep making not only the document, but our practices better and better as time goes on.

Beth 54:11
I really want to thank Nora for coming and having this conversation with me. It’s a tall ask to just say [chuckles] to someone, oh, let’s talk about accessibility in learning. [chuckles] There’s so much involved in that, but I think that she was able to give us so much based on the time that we had. And I hope that you don’t just listen to this episode, but that you go back and you do something and you make some sort of change in your environment, in your learning experiences to be even better than you are right now.

So thanks again for Nora for inspiring us and coming on the show.

Beth 54:48
On the next episode of the podcast, I talk with Julie Dirksen. Some of you might know Julie’s name because several years ago she wrote a great book in our field called Design for How People Learn. And she’s written another one, it’s been out for a little bit, so I’m so happy that I finally got a chance to chat with her. This one’s called Talk to the Elephant,: Design Learning for Behavior Change. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about. Julie and I talk about how do we design learning for behaviour change on the next episode. I hope you join us both then.

Beth 55:20
[Show outro] Thanks so much for listening to the show. If you’re ever looking for resources we mentioned during the episode, you can always go to facilitatingonpurpose.ca to find the show notes, including transcripts for every episode.

Beth 55:33
If you want to give me feedback about anything I’m doing here as the host of the podcast, I would love that. Reach out to let me know if there’s something I could be doing to make it more accessible for you. Or hey, maybe you just have a tip that you want to tell me, something that you think I don’t know yet and you can expand my learning as well. I’d love that.

Feel free to get in touch. I’d like to thank Mary Chan too. She’s my audio editor for the podcast. Mary keeps us sounding good and I am so appreciative that I have her support on every show.

If you’d like to support the podcast, I don’t ask for advertising, but what I would love is if you just rated the show on wherever you listen to it, subscribe to it, send it to friends and colleagues, just keep spreading the word. And that is a great support to me.

I would appreciate that very much. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode.

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