Accessibility education in organizations is hard, but we can take some of the pressure off by focusing on teaching literacy instead of expertise (and making it a game).
Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst
This year at a11yTO Conf, there were many wonderful talks about gaming, storytelling, and learning in regard to accessibility. I think there’s a lot of value in looking at how people learn and express themselves through collaborative games, and a few mental hops later, I was thinking about what I can take from my experience running Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and apply to my experience teaching accessibility in organizations.
But first, let me back up a bit and explain why I think running and playing games like D&D have a lot in common with doing accessibility education.
Learning and gaming
At its simplest, D&D is a game where a party of adventurers collaborate to fulfill quests, solve puzzles, and fight enemies in a world that is described and acted out by the dungeon master, or DM.
I think there are three big things that form good experiences in collaborative gaming. Those are:
- Players’ characters all have their own unique strengths, skills, abilities, and paths for growth
- The DM applies rules consistently
- Teams solve problems collaboratively with their own ingenuity
Players and characters are all different
For any type of game where players have the freedom to make choices that impact the story, everyone will have their own play style. This ranges from something as concrete as the player character’s class to something as unique as the character’s personality, play style, and goals.
For example, a player might be a ranger (meaning they are good at using a shortsword and bow, and at exploring the out of doors), they may have low charisma (making them shy or awkward, socially), and they may have a personal goal of finding an ancient family secret hidden deep in their ancestral forest. Similarly, everyone on a project team has a different role to play based on their area of expertise. Everyone does their work differently with different tools, and each person has their own preferred methods for learning and communicating.
In D&D, player characters are good (and bad) at different things, have different motivations, and come from different backgrounds. It’s generally beneficial for the whole adventuring party to have balanced abilities with complementary goals. This means having skills that fill gaps in the party’s overall skill set, and approaching solving problems in creative ways, together. It can be fun to play as a group that all have similar skills and abilities now and again (all bards! all barbarians!), but you’ll get the most longevity out of a group with a variety of classes and skills. Project teams with diverse backgrounds and experiences are the same, where it’s fun to hang out with people that do the same things as you, but you’ll get the most done with people who have different skills.
Games require systems
Any game has rules that help players understand what to do. Games like D&D are different from others in that there can be a lot of interpretations of those rules, since the interface of the game is actually another person: the DM. While all players have access to the same resources (the Player’s Handbook, for example), they also need to trust that the DM will provide consistent interpretation of the rules as they play.
Depending on how people learn best, learning to play D&D from reading the handbook can be very difficult, and usually it’s easier for folks to learn by playing. However, when people first start, it can still be difficult to understand what to do. It can be hard to imagine the scene the DM is describing, and to come up with questions to hone in what they’re supposed to do. This is why game systems have general actions (hide, attack, investigate, etc.) to help as guides, which the DM can use to interpret the players’ questions and requests.
This is similar to how people trust an educator to provide a clear and consistent vision of what they are supposed to be learning. People who are learning (especially from a broad service-design model of education) benefit from resources that let people access the information they need when they are doing work, and that fits their own learning style.
As an educator, it’s extremely important to be clear about what learners will get out of specific resources, or specific activities. They need to know, for example, how difficult material is, how long it will take to go through, and how it fits into their overall learning path for individuals and for teams. It’s also crucial to communicate what’s a hard rule (a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, success criteria for example), versus what’s up for interpretation.
Solving problems and setting expectations
A great deal of the DM’s job is setting everyone’s expectations up front. This means a more comfortable and fulfilling experience for everyone in a game, and the same goes for teaching others about accessibility. However, this doesn’t mean it’s your job to do everything for everyone.
As a DM, you’re there to provide an environment, resources, and guidance, not solve puzzles or clear dungeons for your party. (That’s the whole point of the game, right?) It’s ultimately up to D&D parties and project teams how they will solve problems, using the information you’ve given them, or that they’ve discovered themselves. As an accessibility educator, it can be extremely easy to find yourself providing solutions and hand-holding team members through every step of the way, but it’s not sustainable or productive. In the context of a game, it’s also not fun, for anyone.
Literacy over expertise
For a game as complex as D&D, there are so many rules, so many books, expansions, variations, and options, that no one can remember everything. Basically, everyone needs to look up stuff sometimes, and DMs and players often keep detailed notes to help them remember what has happened and how to play the various characters. As a result, it’s important to know how to look up rules and notes and less important to remember every detail all the time. In D&D, the key to playing the game is knowing how to look up rules and interpret information, not knowing every rule by heart.
What this comes down to is literacy over expertise, which is a valuable consideration for accessibility education too. My first big exposure to literacy as a concept was when I was studying library science. Here’s a formal definition of information literacy from the Association of College and Research Libraries (aka the ACRL):
“Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.”
Another way of talking about information literacy is this: Teaching information literacy is teaching people to discover resources, evaluate their usefulness, understand their context, and to create new work from them, leading to their participation in the community of practice around that topic. This is a way to have learners participate fully and sustainably in any kind of learning process.
Earlier in this article, I mentioned that players new to D&D can find it challenging to interact with the world the DM has created, because they don’t always know how to ask questions in relation to the framework of the game. When people are new to any topic, the questions they ask are usually very broad. Their needs are often very specific to what they are currently trying to accomplish, but they don’t have the vocabulary or context to ask questions that match what they need. Before they can accomplish their goal (whether it’s convincing an evil noble to hand over a magical jewel, or describing accessibility barriers in a feature to a project manager), they need to level up their knowledge so it matches the need.
To help facilitate that leveling up, DMs scatter learning opportunities throughout the environment so people increase their literacy in context, just like an accessibility educator can embed learning into various activities, tools, and resources.
Community, process, and craft
A major tenet of D&D is what’s called the three-pillar experience. The three pillars are social interaction, exploration, and combat (or some sort of competition, or puzzle). These three pillars form the structure of pre-built storylines from publishers, and they can be used for creating your own adventures. The pillars allow for different types of experiences that let different players’ strengths shine, and also make adventures more dimensional, like activities in the real world.
I think these three pillars also map nicely to three aspects of accessibility work, which I’ll call community, process, and craft. To keep things tidy, I’ll also tie these to three levels where accessibility education and learning have to happen: organization, team, and individual.
The community
At the community/organization level, accessibility learning resources look a lot like the Player’s Handbook. They’re general, and designed for entry-level learning. They might be handbooks and checklists, but also guild meetings and workshops. A big part of these general resources is putting everyone on the same page about where the organization is in its literacy journey, and how accessibility requirements will be interpreted. Is it going to be centered around rules and WCAG compliance, optimized to balance rules and best practices, or starting with human factors beyond legal requirements and rules? This sets the whole tone for the endeavor and helps people know how their work will be evaluated.
The team
For every adventuring party there is a quest, and for every team there is a project or program. To complete a quest or ship a project, you need to strategize as a team. Shipping something usually includes creating documentation, specs, decision logs, templates, and other ways to see where you’ve come from and what you need to do next. Accessibility needs, requirements, and to-do items can all be included in these artifacts to build on broader organization-based learning. Through practice, teams will learn what tools, resources, communication methods, and processes work best for them.
The individual
As D&D characters play, they gain new levels in their class and unlock new abilities. The longer they play, the more powerful they become, but the more information they need to keep track of, just to play their role. The same thing happens the more you learn about accessibility, where more knowledge comes with more responsibility and more nuance.
After organizational and team-based learning are solid, individuals can be ready to learn more about how accessibility work fits into their specific discipline. At this point, you shouldn’t have to spend an hour convincing people they should be in the workshop they’re currently attending; they will have opted in to learn more on their own. This is when team members in specific roles, who are really engaged with the material, can become experts (or DMs!) themselves, if they want to. If the work they are doing is built on those organizational and team norms, they’ll be doing accessibility work anyway.
Keeping track of progress
Teaching accessibility is hard because we’re trying to address the needs of many roles, many learning styles and learning needs, and we’re trying to do that with very complex material. Crucially, we’re also trying to do this in the context of peoples’ work. To keep people, teams, and organizations engaged, it’s important to give people a wide range of ways to learn, practice, communicate, and see their progress.
In D&D, individual players keep their own notes and character sheets, including their abilities, skills, equipment, relationships, backgrounds, and goals. They can also keep track of their flaws, failures, and accomplishments. These features are organized in their character sheets, which get updated as the character grows and changes during play.
It’s fun to think in character sheets, so here are a few ways to do that when evaluating individual team members’ accessibility knowledge and literacy, and how it relates to their teams and organizations:
- Class: What is your team role?
- Bonds: How are your connected to your team? Your organization?
- Traits: What are your special accessibility superpowers from your background and class?
- Goals: What are you trying to accomplish?
- Abilities: What are your strengths and weaknesses regarding accessibility and your general craft?
- Literacy level: How literate are you in accessibility? (The closer the trait and goal are aligned, the higher the literacy level.)
Keeping a character sheet up to date isn’t an end to itself. As characters grow and change, so does their participation in the adventure. My favorite part of D&D is that it is a form of collaborative storytelling, just like education can be collaborative and mutually enriching if it’s done right. I love when my players share their sheets and notes with me, because I can see their progress as a character, and often their enjoyment and growth as a person through the game.
Telling a story together
I hope that I’ve given you some ideas to think about your practice differently and relieve some of your burden, fellow educator (or adventurer). You are a hero, among a host of heroes. The next time you are teaching accessibility, think of it as a collaborative game, one where everyone wins if everyone plays.
