E.A. Draffan
My main roles have involved collaborative research on a series of projects whilst lecturing and supporting post graduate students on subjects related to digital accessibility and disability related subjects. From 2015 to 2018 I was involved with EU funded projects such as MOOCAP that resulted in a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). These have had over 20,000 registrants and the free materials have been used when working on other projects such as SlideWiki which offers open educational resources as an authoring and presentation platform.
A spin out from an Arabic Symbol Dictionary project funded by the Qatar National Research Fund has resulted in the development of Global Symbols where the Tawasol AAC Symbol set has been linked to several other open symbol sets as part of the UNICEF Innovation Fund project for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app development and an ECARO project Giving every child a voice with AAC technology. Global Symbols is a growing resource that aims to allow international use of localised AAC symbols to be harmonised, so that they can have multiple uses for individuals with speech, language and literacy difficulties. This has progressed thanks to an Alan Turing Pilot project concerning AI and Inclusion using concept linking for improved search features.
Despite being over ten years old the ATbar browser extension for accessibility still requires support! It was developed as a result of the LexDis project involving disabled student participation, Updating and monitoring is also ongoing with the Web2Access service, that has also benefited from the Alan Turing project. This also comes thanks to an ECS group design project providing the prototype for an 'automated web service accessibility checker' that delivers accessibility statement templates based on the WCAG 2.1 checks, image recognition, natural language processing and public service web requirements.
My career began as a Speech and Language Therapist spending eight years as the District Speech and Language Therapist at a group of London Hospitals. The work involved supporting disabled people with a wide range of communication difficulties. Having left the National Health Service, I then worked in schools and colleges, specialising in the support of those with Special Needs whilst encouraging the use of assistive technologies (AT).
A Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship gave me the chance to see how centres of AT were set up in the United States. This resulted in ten years work at the University of Sussex, building and running a regional AT Centre, whilst liaising with others to introduce the concepts of equal access to teaching and learning for those with disabilities. I went on to work with JISC before joining ECS with Professor Mike Wald and the ECS Accessibility Team and now with Dr Gary Wills on the NRemote project. I was a member of the committee that worked on BS 8878 for digital accessibility and I am still connected with the BSI ICT/002 ICT Accessibility committee as well as the WCAG Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force. I am involved member organisations such as AAATE , AHG, and on a British Dyslexia Association technology committee.