Organisational Effectiveness

The JISC Techdis Accessibility Maturity Model illustrates six stages of organisational approaches to accessibility and e-Maturity, from Luck (“with luck we won’t have any disabled learners”) through Specialism  (“we offer specialised services to support students registered with our disability office”) to the ultimate stage, Partnership (“disabled learners work with teaching staff and are represented on management committees to ensure accessibility concerns are addressed throughout the organisation’s operation”).

The e-Maturity of an organisation has a very close correlation with the accessibility maturity of that organisation. From the JISC Techdis perspective, the fundamental guarantor of good accessibility practice is the extent to which technology is embedded in the culture of an organisation, resulting in accessibility becoming a shared collective goal rather than relying upon the enthusiasm of a specialist individual or a team. This leads to a 'maturity model' of accessibility practice where one of the main determinants of maturity is the extent to which staff in all roles contribute to inclusive practice. Regardless of whether staff are involved in teaching, student services, learner support, management, administration, corporate services, or cleaning, everyone is a stakeholder in a shared institutional culture of inclusion and everyone has a part to play.

Typical characteristics of organisations in a relatively immature accessibility phase include:

• a tendency to encourage disclosure of disability only at application and enrolment,
• a focus on supporting individual learners to surmount particular barriers,
• concentrating accessibility support in small discrete units, and
• providing specialist technology for the sole use of students registered as disabled.

Typical characteristics of organisations with a more mature culture of accessibility and inclusion may be:

• a focus upon reducing institutional barriers (for example by reconsidering traditional assessment methods),
• linking expertise in a variety of areas together to create a critical mass for culture change (for example combining disability or learner support with learning technology units, IT/network support, library and learning resource centres and staff and academic development units),
• moving towards the provision of productivity tools (often free or Open Source) that can be used by everyone thereby reducing the need for some assistive technologies and enabling more disabled users to exist within the mainstream provision, and
• providing multiple opportunities for disclosure so that support and assistance can be readily obtained and directed to where it is most needed, be that within departments or subject areas, or within the combined expertise teams.

The JISC Techdis Maturity Model is a facet of the Online Accessibility Self Evaluation Service (OASES) process which is a auditing and self-assessment tool that can be used to assess and benchmark current accessibility practice. This is role specific guidance for individuals and teams within an institution, across institutions and for an entire institution. It can be undertaken at any time without any prerequisite prior understanding of accessibility and inclusion issues.