Accessibility and Digital Competencies of Psychology Students – New Perspectives

In the 21st century the digital skills and competencies seem to be a fundamental requirement for many employees. It can be said that willingness to use digital technologies is not very common among therapists or psychologists. Those professionals are perceived as employees with non-digital approaches. However, the global pandemia changed the way doctors, nurses, therapists or psychologists have worked. This is why, it should be underlined that the process of training psychology students should be changed. Generally, they are expected to identify mental problems among their would be patients or clients, while they also ought to break down any technological barriers to improve digital inclusion. As a result, in the context of the academic syllabus, psychology students should have better digital literacy skills enabling them to recognize digital accessibility barriers e.g. found in digital documents. The need for training and education in digital accessibility has increased significantly for some time, which was the reason of modification of the syllabus framework. This paper aims to explore the effectiveness students study how to design accessible digital documents so as to merge their skills and accessibility issues. A set of proposed changes to ensure the syllabi would cover accessibility issues was implemented in October 2022. To gather full-time and part-time students’ feedback on proposed changes, a questionnaire was organized from January 2023 to February 2024. As a result, participants were asked to offer their qualitative comments in relation to the digital training.