We learned last week that 22% of Canadians have at least one disability, the majority of which are women. Being aware of this as teachers is incredibly important if we want to create spaces and classrooms where every single person feels engaged, cared for and cognitively challenged.

When it comes to digital accessibility, for instance, it’s interesting to note that even the basic principles of perceivability, operability, usability and robustness aren’t present in all of our classes at UVic. Usability in particular, which states that “everyone should be able to use the content easily, without becoming lost or confused” is a challenge in a lot of our courses. Moving on to best practices in digital accessibility, I’ve noted that nearly none of the videos we’ve watched in class thus far have had captions, and we have had no transcripts given to us at all. There is a lot of work to be done on that department and I hope that we, as student teachers, will go into our profession with more awareness of the need for accessibility in every class.