Auditing, Assessing and Benchmarking Progress

All organisations are required, under the UK disability legislation DDA/SENDA / Disability Equality Duty, to anticipate what reasonable adjustments may be required and put in place mechanisms by which those adjustments can be delivered when required. The difficulty is that many individuals are unaware of what it is they are doing well, or not so well, in relation to general best practice across the sector.

JISC Techdis has developed several resources that may help institutions and individuals to audit their current practice in a variety of areas in relation to accessibility and inclusion. Further sources of guidance are provided to improve their practice and to anonymously benchmark their practice against that of their peers, resulting in an indicator of priority areas.

• The Online Accessibility Self Evaluation Service (OASES) is an 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.
• Senior Management Briefings distributed to all further education colleges provide guidance for senior managers on a range of key issues. This enables them to judge their accessibility awareness and readiness to make a variety of reasonable adjustments.
• The 12 steps towards embedding inclusive use of technology as a whole institution culture distributed to all higher education institutions provides a programme of activity that should, if implemented properly in context, move an institution significantly forward in terms of its whole-institution approach to accessibility.