Teaching Teachers and Making Makers: What the Maker Movement Can Teach the World about Accessibility and Design

Abstract

Although interactive technologies and the maker movement offer stunning prospects for the next 50 years of educational inclusion and accessibility for learners with visual disabilities, a surprising array of physical, digital, and cultural barriers continue to communicate lessons of exclusion and inequity. Accessibility is a fundamental aspect of digital and physical design which, when present, allows a user with a disability to have an effective and substantively equivalent experience to that of a user without a disability. Here we consider interaction barriers for people with visual disabilities, but the themes readily apply to other disability-specific challenges in universal design and inclusion. Consider any cross section of exciting instructional technologies, and chances are they are dominated by visual metaphors, graphical user interfaces, data visualizations, and interactive video. Systems that incorporate ostensibly non-visual, multi-modal interactives such as haptics and active manipulation do not necessarily expand access for blind and visually-impaired learners, as such tools are likely also to include key interface elements that are visual. The same may be said of mainstream information technologies accessibility is still temperamental and far from complete for such seemingly simple and ubiquitous resources as Google Suite, Facebook, and YouTube, let alone advanced immersive experiences such as Oculus Rift. The iconic tools of the maker movement and experiential learning -- 3D design, modeling, and printing -- while lauded and enthusiastically embraced by sighted designers of accessible instructional materials, remain largely unusable by independent blind makers.