7Changing the institution
December. The module ran for the whole cohort. The three learners completed it and the practical without a further request.
- Accessible Procurement and Vendor Accountability — read again, now as the proposal: what procurement asks for before signing, who reads the report, and what the contract says about exceptions and remediation.
- Institutional Accessibility Planning as a Change Program — where the inventory goes, and what turns a published plan into changed practice.
- Closing the Knowing–Doing Gap — the distance between what an institution has agreed and what it does, and the leader’s part in closing it: a decision is not a change until the next licence is read before it is signed.
- Making the Case for Resourcing Accessibility Work — the argument after the numbers, and its limits: what a rebuild cost, what it would have cost at procurement, and what the duty requires regardless.
- Disability Data and the Limits of Prevalence Figures — how to use a national figure honestly when making the case for a module everyone must complete.
- Evaluating Whether Design Reduced Barriers — measuring whether the rebuilt module lowered barriers rather than assuming it did.
- Making Accessibility More Than Compliance — the module as a template: access as a dimension of design quality for every mandatory module the faculty builds next.
Three things leave the associate dean’s desk. For the faculty: the rebuilt module becomes, by the associate dean’s direction, the template for every mandatory module it builds, with captions, transcript, keyboard operation, named controls, and no time limit as defaults rather than fixes; the essential-requirements statement written in June and the technician’s brief written in August are filed with the module and reviewed each year. The note is about the design of the module; it is not an evaluation of the people who built the first one.
For procurement: the conformance report and the unit’s test results go to whoever signs the next licence, with a proposal that every report be read against the national procurement standard before signing, that “partially supports” require the exceptions in writing, and that the contract name who remediates and by when (sources 24, 22). The renewal in two years is the first test of the proposal, and the date is in the plan.
For the institution: the inventory is counted, and the count goes to the accessibility plan with the associate dean as its named sponsor. The provincial legislation requires the plan, a committee, and a feedback mechanism (source 7); ownership and sequencing are what the proposal adds. The count rests on a figure used carefully: in the most recent national survey, twenty-seven per cent of Canadians aged fifteen and over reported a disability (source 25); a module every learner must complete cannot assume otherwise of its cohort. Next year the faculty measures two things, not one: whether the modules built since were built to the template, and whether any learner had to ask. A request answered well becomes evidence, and evidence counted across modules becomes the case for the next change.