Could COVID improve access?: Accessibility, remote working and pandemic

UK Disability History Month runs from 18th November to 20th December each year. Alice Bennett reflects on the digital shift forced by the pandemic in the light of this year's theme "Access: How far have we come? How far have we to go?"

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many social changes but one of the greatest has been the digital shift, as more people than ever study and work remotely. This shift online has not been limited to work but also extended to leisure, with live streamed concerts and stand up performances and increased online content from galleries and theatres, much of it free.

The price of attendance and potential difficulty in travelling to venues is a barrier to attending events and activities for many people, but disproportionately impacts disabled people. The recent availability of so many performances and activities online not only helps to overcome the potential barrier of cost, but also the frequent inaccessibility of venues and transport. It also helps overcome other potential barriers - for example, being able to watch from home opens up live streamed performances to those with chronic pain or fatigue that prevents travel, it enables a good view for those unable to stand gigs, and provides a relaxed and controllable home atmosphere to those who find theatre venues stressful. Recorded National Theatre productions, films released early on platforms such as Amazon and streamed concerts all provide opportunities for a far wider audience to engage with these performances.

During lockdown, getting outside became far more difficult for everyone, although between issues of cost and accessibility of travel, and the accessibility of sites themselves, has meant natural beauty spots can be difficult to access for a great many. Wildlife webcams are not new, but received new attention in lockdown, as a way to facilitate lockdown nature watching - for example the webcams of the UK Wildlife Trusts, which let you stream footage of the natural world (including puffins, shown right, photo of from the UK Wildlife Trusts). Whilst these can benefit anyone in lockdown or otherwise unable to make the trip, the improvement and promotion of these remote means of accessing the natural world are again of particular importance or opening up opportunities for engagement with disabled audiences.

On a more local level, activities such as exercise classes, coffee mornings, music lessons and book clubs are no longer safe to hold in person. Many of these have gone digital, providing what they can online, both in terms of content and maintaining social contact for their users. Again this opens up possibilities for new audiences, for those previously unable to attend.

The shift online has not universally improved accessibility. The move to provide physical services virtually has highlighted the digital divide - the gap between those with reliable high speed internet provision and the technology to use digital tools effectively and those without reliable technology and internet access. Those unfamiliar with digital tools may be similarly excluded. Therefore although the greater online provision has enabled engagement for many more than previously, it has not enabled access for all.

Besides online provision of leisure activities, the pandemic has seen a great many people work remotely, often for the first time. Whilst this has meant the need to adjust to new ways of working, being able to work or study remotely opens opportunities to those with disabilities, removing potential barriers such as inaccessible buildings and difficulty commuting. Whilst this has eased lockdown for many, the sudden proliferation of online resources and working from home wherever possible has not been without comment and some resentment from the disability community. Why is the new accessibility being criticised? Well, the accessibility is not - but rather that it took a pandemic to make it happen.

Many disabled people have had requests to work or study remotely (whether the remote aspect would be full or part time) refused, with individuals having been told that remote working would not be possible for that job or that course. Now, many of those same jobs and courses which could not be managed remotely have been shifted online. As these accommodations are made, there has been understandable anger from those previously denied them.

This topic has come up in the BBC Ouch! Corona pandemic podcast, a spin off from the Ouch! Disability reporting. In the first podcast of the series, broadcast on 29th March 2020, journalist and blogger Natasha Lipman commented:

“It's been very interesting seeing a lot of disabled people online talking about this, saying how people have lost their jobs or had to drop out of university or schools or not be able to get a job in the first place, and then within the space of a week or two remote working, flexible working. Online lectures have suddenly become a thing. So I think it's been something that a lot of people have been finding difficult.

What I've been saying for years is that there are an awful lot of jobs that can be done with more flexibility, and this doesn't just benefit disabled people, it can have huge benefits to a lot of people, but then of course in this situation there are a lot of people who don't have that luxury of being able to say okay, I'm going to keep working but work from home.”

In the second episode of the podcast (broadcast on 1st April 2020), this was also a subject for comment from Ellis Palmer, a producer on BBC NewsHour on the World Service:

“I actually think this crisis could throw up a really, really interesting thing for a lot of disabled people, which is we had to fight a lot of the time to get reasonable adjustments, but now a lot of non-disabled people are finding they need reasonable adjustments, laptops or whatever, to be able to work from home. And now they're realising kind of the wisdom of our fight. Hopefully there will be more of an acceptance of remote working, just spending a day in the office a week. So, I actually think the future of work post COVID-19 could be potentially advantageous for disabled people economically speaking.”

The situation is common across economically developed countries. The disability activist Imani Barbarin describes seeing a company publicizing their working from home provision during the pandemic - a company which has previously told her that working from home would be impossible. Her article outlining her anger at the situation appeared on 31st March 2020 in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

So will COVID change this? At this point, we don't know. It is too soon to predict the long term social impact of this pandemic. Enabling more widespread remote working could improve diversity, particularly opening up possibilities for work and study for those living with chronic illness or disability. With lockdowns creating enforced experiments on the possibilities of remote working, studying and wider engagement, COVID may have proved that more online access is possible than previously thought. It is tragic that it has taken a pandemic to push progress in accessibility, but hopefully, a more flexible and accessible culture or work, study and leisure activities can be a lasting legacy, long after COVID has gone.

If you found this article interesting, there's more like it in our free online Digital Wellbeing course.

Looking after your digital wellbeing in lockdown

Ahead of our latest free online course on Digital Wellbeing which starts on 11th May, one of the course facilitators, Alice Bennett takes a look at the challenge of maintaining our digital wellbeing under lockdown...

If you are a fan of MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – you might know that some of us here in the Library and IT have been involved in creating a few of them, one of which is on digital wellbeing. We update it each time we run it, to make sure it covers current issues but when we were preparing to run it again this year, something big happened: a pandemic.

Does this affect your teaching if your teaching was always going to be online? Well, it certainly does if your course is about digital wellbeing! With life in lockdown, working from home and studying remotely have become the new routine for the majority, social media and video calling are the primary means of staying connected and whether streaming or gaming, the digital dominates entertainment too.

Looking over our previous course materials, there was suddenly a very big, very virus-y hole. We talked about tech in the workplace – workplaces that are now closed. We discussed how not to annoy colleagues with emails but made no mention of videoconferencing. We talked about unhelpful comparisons on social media, but hadn’t mentioned comparing lockdown sourdough loaves. Everything was still current, but also somehow very out of date. This course has a global audience and we try to talk about trends rather than specifics, but this was a global event. We had to acknowledge the elephant that had suddenly waltzed into the room.

But what about overload? The pandemic is dominating our lives, so we can’t ignore it, but we didn’t want it to dominate this course. We couldn’t talk about digital wellbeing without mentioning something which pushed so much more of daily life online and has so heavily impacted wellbeing. On the other hand, continually staring the pandemic and its every digital ramification in the face was not the answer. Studying online is not necessarily escapism, but for most it is not about endlessly probing the worst of life’s problems either.

And we don’t know the whole story yet. We can talk about digital trends and habits, we can look at how lockdown has changed our behaviours, we can consider how we are using digital technology to combat the virus – but long term, we still don’t know what impact this will have on our digital world and our relationship with it. It may change habits, or people may revert to pre pandemic behaviours – we won’t know for some time what legacy we have been left.

So with this latest run of the course we have tried to strike a balance. We discuss the big digital issues and the immediate ones. If, like me, you have participated in more video conferences in the past few weeks than in the entirety of your life before 2020, we have tips on video calls and working from home, as well as discussing the risk of being always on when working remotely. With so many of us spending more time online during lockdown – whether through choice or necessity – understanding the way we interact with digital technology is even more important. There are risks and unresolved problems with our relationships with the digital world, but similarly there are amazing possibilities. So join us to consider the pitfalls and potentials of digital technology and the impact on our wellbeing, at a time when negotiating our wellbeing and an increasingly online life are especially important.

The new run of our Digital Wellbeing course starts on Monday 11th May.

Wellbeing in the digital world

As well as it being Libraries Week 2019 (with its theme of libraries in a digital world), today is also World Mental Health Day. To mark this, Susan Halfpenny takes a look at the topic of Digital Wellbeing and shares some of her approaches to switching off...

Once upon a time, there was a world before our own: a land where the internet didn’t exist. It was a magical place... of playing outdoors, looking up information in books, visiting the library! An age when you didn’t know everybody’s bad opinions on every topic; where meeting people actually involved going to a physical place! That fabled land is a fading memory. Now it’s hard to go a day without using digital technologies. In this new and confusing world, we can barely tell fact from fairytale. Trolls no-longer simply hide under bridges, while big bad wolves keep their big big eyes on us, recording our every action. Has something got lost in this digital forest? Have we traded the prospect of a happy ending for a handful of magic beans?

Sometimes in our modern society it can feel like we are more present in the digital spaces than we are in the physical world. All the interconnectedness of technology with our everyday activities has made a lot of processes easier but it can also result in us feeling ‘always on’. This inability to switch off can have a negative impact on our wellbeing. It is therefore important that we develop the skills that will enable us to use applications effectively, critically evaluate the information we consume, and manage our online/offline balance.

Digital Wellbeing

Digital wellbeing is “the capacity to look after personal health, safety, relationships and work-life balance in digital setting” (Jisc, 2015). For us to effectively manage our digital wellbeing we require the skills to manage digital overload and distraction, protect our personal data, and engage responsibly online. We need to act with concern for the human and natural environment when using digital technologies. To improve digital wellbeing we need to balance developing ICT skills with critical evaluation and interpersonal skills. To enable us to make informed and critical decisions about the impact of digital technologies on our wellbeing we need to reflect and consider if these technologies have an impact on our emotions, relationships, and sense of self. We will all have different ideas about how much time we spend online is right for us and which tools help or hinder our wellbeing. There is no right or wrong. What we need to do when considering our digital wellbeing is identify what works for us as individuals. Once we have this figured out we can look to how our actions can impact others and ensure we are behaving in a socially responsible way.

Switch off or burn out

Managing your online/offline balance is not always an easy task and sometimes we can feel overwhelmed by email, messages, notifications and alerts. These digital distractions can seep into all areas of our lives, making us feel pressured to respond; drawing our attention away from activities we are undertaking in the real world. In the following video, from our Digital Wellbeing course, I explore some of the ways I have struggled with digital distractions which caused stress and anxiety — making me feel I was ‘always on’.

Here are some useful features, tools and tips that I identified when I was trying to address my work-life balance and ‘switch off’:

1. Turn off your alerts: getting alerts at all times of the day can be stressful and distracting. You can use the Do not disturb function on your Apple or Android device to switch off alerts from all apps. If you want to manage this on an app-by-app basis then you can do this in the settings. We provide guidance on how to turn off alerts for different operating systems on our digital wellbeing page.
2. Make a quick note: when you have an idea or remember something you need to do, note it down somewhere to look at later. You could use a non-tech method like a post-it or notepad or a tech solution like Google Keep. The Keep mobile app has voice recognition, so you can speak the idea into your phone and it’ll take a written note that can be picked up later.
3. Send less email: research has found that, on average, people spend a third of their time at work — and half the time they're working at home — reading and responding to emails. All this time dedicated to emails can result in increased workload and stress. Take a look at our effective email guidance for hints and tips for email management.
4. No phones rule: identify time when you won’t look at your phone. You might find it useful to have no phones in the bedroom so you can go to sleep and wake up without the distraction of technology, or no phones at dinnertime to encourage interactions with your family or housemates.
5. 15 minute rule: when you get home, for the first 15 minutes do something that will take your mind off work and make you happy! If straight after the working day doesn’t work for you, pick a different time that does. This is a technique picked up from readings of positive psychology and mindfulness. The Action for Happiness website provides useful tips and activities that you could consider using for your 15 minutes.

As previously mentioned, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to digital wellbeing. One person’s positive can be another person's negative. It’s all about taking the time to reflect and think about what works for your wellbeing.

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If you're interested in finding out more about the topic of digital wellbeing, we're running a free three-week-long online course which starts on 21st October. We'll be exploring the concepts of health, relationships and society in the digital age, and we'd love to see you there!