The accessibility of the Copper Award is a high priority for the ABTT. This is one of the reasons the award is currently in a pilot phase, to gather feedback on accessibility from real users.
Current accessibility considerations include:
Partner Venue
Teaching of the Copper Award is intended to be delivered ‘in-house’ and ‘hands-on’ by industry partner venues. The ABTT will offer a Bronze Award manual which will outline the curricula that candidates should learn to achieve the award. The delivery of the curricula is intentionally flexible, to enable venues to tailor it to their own needs and adapt it to meet the accessibility needs of their trainees.
Cost
The cost of taking the Copper Award test will be minimised to ensure the widest possible access. For this reason, the test will be administered online via multiple choice answers to questions, so that the results can be automatically calculated. This minimises the potential cost of staff needing to assess answers to open-ended questions and grade test submissions. In exceptional circumstances, the ABTT may offer a paper version of the test where a partner venue is unable to make the online test accessible to a specific candidate.
Test Format
Some candidates may face barriers engaging with an online multiple choice test. Partner venues delivering the Bronze Award training are best placed to understand the access needs of their candidates, and should therefore be the primary source of support by making reasonable adjustments to how the test is conducted. Here are some reasonable adjustments that a venue could offer:
- Additional time for the candidate to process the questions
- A support person who could read the questions and answers aloud to the candidate
- A support person who could operate the computer (e.g. navigating pages and selecting answers), following the candidates instructions