 and welcome to this first parallel session of the Alt Winter Conference. I am delighted to be joined today by Turindu from UCEM. That's the University College of Estate Management and she's here today to talk to us about improving accessibility awareness at UCEM with a CPD course. So without further ado I'm going to hand over enjoy the session. Thank you Caroline. Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining this session today and next 20 or so minutes we will be having a conversation about accessibility awareness, specifically about what we have done to improve accessibility awareness at University College of Estate Management with a CPD course and what you can learn from our experience. I'm Turindu Lee Anukunawadana, a learning technology researcher and the chair of online learning research center at University College of Estate Management or UCEM. We at UCEM offer undergraduate, postgraduate and apprenticeship programs. UCEM's core purpose is to provide accessible, relevant and cost-effective education, enabling students to enhance their careers, increase professionalism and contribute to a better built environment, basically to facilitate the journey towards net zero. While our teaching is all about built environment in the physical world, our programs of study are conducted entirely online. This is in response to who our students are and the high degree of flexibility they require to be able to participate in higher education. We have been teaching at a distance for over a century now. We have over 4,200 students at any given time studying with us from around the world. 96 percent of our students study with us part-time. 68 percent of our students are in employment and many of them are in full-time employment while studying. Our student body comprises of 94 percent of mature students and the average age of a student is 30 years. Being an institution, delivering our programs entirely online, digital accessibility is something very important to us. Access and accessibility can mean different things in different contexts. So I thought to start with Oxford Dictionary's definition. So when I use the word accessibility here, I'm referring to the second definition where how easy something is to reach, enter, use by someone with a disability. Specifically I use this term considering digital spaces. That is how easy it is to access our digital content. Webpages, Word documents, emails, site presentations, PDF documents, videos, podcasts and the list can go on and on. Disability is not something that only happens to others. If you are a lucky person not to be affected by a disability in your life, think about yourself in 20, 30, maybe 40 years in the future. We all age and with age there will be some difficulties in seeing, hearing, mobility etc and not to mention the possibility of unexpected events of unexpected events in life. One might have a fall and may end up having to wear a cast severely limiting one's mobility. We also have to remember that there are hidden or invisible disabilities. These can include autism, color vision deficiency, learning disabilities and even mental health conditions. By raising awareness of accessibility, we are making the world a better place for everyone. If you think about the use of RAM, they are an accessibility aid for users in a wheelchair to access a physical space, a building. But if you are pushing a buggy, RAM, stroller or whatever you want to call them, RAMs help you too. Have you seen delivery drivers pushing box trolleys using the RAM packages to a building? What about when you drag that heavy luggage on your way to the train station or the airport? This is an example to show how accessibility of physical spaces have been improved for everyone with the introduction of a RAM, which is an accessibility aid. Now if we think about similar situation in the virtual space, we can take the example of captions for video accessibility. So captions are an accessibility aid for people who have hearing difficulties. But if you are not familiar with the accent of the speaker, captions will help you. If your first language is not the speaker's language, but you still understand a little bit of it, captions will help you. Also, if you are in a quiet space without headphones, you can still watch a video on mute if it has captions. Creating accessible content that is making the video accessible by introducing captions makes it a better experience for everyone. As I have already mentioned, accessibility is the right thing to do. But not just that, we as employees are bound by a legal obligation too. We are required to adhere to the public sector bodies, websites and mobile applications accessibility regulations 2018. Here you can see a rough timeline I have created. The online learning research centre at UCM, we call it OLRC, was established late 2015. And this timeline only deals with the work online learning research centre has done on accessibility. This does not mean that there has not been accessibility work that had happened at UCM or rather CEM at the time, College of Estate Management before this point. But I am only presenting a selected window here. We have raised accessibility awareness at UCM via a poster campaign. This was an adaptation of designing for diverse learners poster shared with Creative Commons license. We then did a screen saver campaign, conducted workshops, webinars and we also do regular blogs. We also do regular updates on institutional bulletin about accessibility. And we have been doing this over the years now. And now we are at a point where we have a self-paced six hours CPD course that was developed in-house using the expertise we have gained by working in working and researching accessibility at UCM. The UCM accessibility awareness course was created with two specific objectives in mind. First and foremost, to raise accessibility awareness among staff members so that they can comply with the latest government regulations. Secondly, to be a reference point for staff members with accessibility queries. It is all well and good to learn about things but we can't always keep everything in memory. Sometimes we forget and we need a place where we can refer back to. So this course is going to be a place of knowledge that you can refer back to. This is similar to having the GDPR training or the health and safety training available for the staff to go back to. This is how the course looks. The course is hosted on our Moodle VLE. Where available, we have reused accessibility awareness content that has been publicly shared by others. For example, this sculpt poster. This course consists of activities just like our course content for our students. We are trying to engage our learners more actively in the course. So when we use a resource, say a video, we pose a set of questions for the learner to think about and find answers to while watching the video. This way, we hope to engage the learners more. There are altogether eight open badges to be earned for different sections in the course. These are the sections in the course and the course is logically ordered into these questions. First, we look at how we view disability because this essentially forms our worldview. This is an introduction to various forms of visible and invisible disabilities and we use the web aim video experience of students with disabilities which shows what challenges students with disabilities face. In this section, we are looking at two models, medical model of disability and the social model of disability. Second section in the course is about assistive technology. In assistive technology section, you can learn about what they are, why they are needed. In this section, there is a quiz which will allow the learner to earn the assistive technologies open badge. We also give a flavor of assistive technologies by asking our learners to try NVDA, Windows Narrator or Voice Over for Apple devices. We also provide a short video of NVDA screen reader, how it reads out a screen. We also ask them to try convert text to speech for Windows. The idea here is to give a basic understanding of what these technologies do. But the main message in this section is that assistive technologies are helpful but only if the content is created with accessibility in mind. Next section of the course is about web accessibility standards. This section is important because we need to know what is the standard required of us and without knowing that we can't really see whether we are there or not. In this section, all relevant legislations are discussed, not in very great detail but discussed and the main message from this section is accessibility is for everyone and by achieving these standards, we are making it better for everyone. This section too allows the learner to earn an open badge. The next section is accessible color and possibly the section I like most. Here we present various activities that the learners can try. For example, a Cobbliss color blindness simulator, a BBC video clip about a young cricketer who found it difficult to bat because he couldn't see the red ball on the green grass pitch. This essentially help get a feel about color vision deficiency and lets the learner view the world from the perspective of a person with color vision deficiency. After this, we present some scenarios where color is used to convey information which you shouldn't do and we ask the learners to think about presenting the same information so that it can be made accessible to everyone, even to people with color vision deficiencies. Once they have formulated their answers, they can compare their answers to model answers that we have provided. In these model answers, we present the same information accessibly using different ways. This is to show the learners that there is more than one way you can present information accessibly. The next activity, they have to get their hands dirty using the color contrast checker. So there is an activity demonstrating how to check color contrast and what level is acceptable at WCAG 2.1 AA standard. For example, if you have a light color background with light color text, we know it's harder to distinguish text from the background. So there are certain standards that we are required to adhere to. For a for normal text, we have to have a 4.5 to 1 ratio. For larger text, it's 3 to 1 contrast ratio. How to find the contrast and how to identify whether different colors can be used together or not is presented in this set of activities. There is a quiz in this section where the learner can earn an open badge. The quiz will check whether the learners are able to identify different color combinations as accessible or not. There are videos and articles to help. The scenarios we present here are close to their UCM roles. So for example, we ask questions about using color in creating presentations or even graphs. This way, we hope the learners will feel that the content we have presented is closer and applicable to their day-to-day work. Next section is headings and document structure. This section deals with headings, paragraphs, etc and how to correctly demarcate them using document styling. And learners can earn a badge by taking the quiz. Accessible images section of the course deals with understanding the purpose of images and how to demarcate whether an image is a purposeful image or not to a screen reader user. In this section too, we show how to write meaningful alternative text and we ask questions and provide model answers where they can compare their answers with. So the scenarios provided are ALT text for a simple image as well as ALT text for a complex image, such as a graph. Image section of the course also has a quiz where the learner can earn an open badge. Audio and video section deals with captions, subtitles and other related accessibility challenges such as flashing video, etc, presented by synchronous media. There is also a badge for this section. The next section is about accessible links. We don't have a badge for that. Making links accessible is very important because we use it everywhere. For example, in documents, emails, presentations, this section is dedicated to help with that. Table section of the course is dedicated for dealing with issues presented by the misuse of tables and how to properly use tables in an accessible way. There is a badge for this section too. Check accessibility section is the next one and it provides the learner with a set of tools to check accessibility of their work. For example, an introduction to Microsoft built-in accessibility checker. Finally, there is a reflection section in a way to force the learners to think about what they have learned and how they will use it in their job role at UCM. As you already heard, there are seven open badges available in the sections as milestone badges. Milestone badges can only be earned by achieving 100% on the section quizzes. So to be fair, we are allowing three attempts. If you have completed all sections and earned all seven badges, then you can apply to get the final badge accessibility awareness. To earn the final badge, you have to do the reflection activity where you have to identify how you are going to apply what you have learned in the course to your job role to make things more accessible. This is an opportunity for the learner to think about what they have learned and how they can make a difference at UCM. Open badges can be a motivator and can be used to mark milestones. These can be used in online profiles such as LinkedIn or portfolios, etc. to show your skills. Open badges recognize and show evidence of what you claim you know or you have done. These are the badges we offer in our course. It is thanks to ASMA, our graphics designer, that we have these beautiful designs for our open badges. So what is next? My original funding bid to a funding agency did not work out to create and offer this course as an open course. So now that we have created the course and getting feedback from our learners, perhaps an improved version could be released openly in the future. Do people outside of accessibility circles want to take courses on accessibility awareness if it is not compulsory? From ALT Learning Technology team of the year award shortlist videos, I learned that University of Lincoln has a compulsory course on accessibility awareness and University of York has a compulsory tutorial. So should accessibility awareness course be made compulsory? So far without the course being compulsory, we have had good response to the course with six staff members earning the final award with lot more in the pipeline. But is it only the people who are always putting themselves forward as champions? Or is there others who are interested to take these courses? Only the time will tell. Thank you. Thank you. That was a wonderful presentation. It was a really nice proactive and practical course and there's lots of activity going on in the chat there, lots of praise for the badges in particular, lots of people liking those. We have a couple of questions but actually a lot of them you answered in the latter part of the session. I'm just going to pop them up on screen in case you do want to add anything to them, but there was a couple of people asking about whether the course was compulsory and if voluntary what was the take up which I think you addressed. Would you like to comment any further on how you found the take up for the course with it being non-compulsory? At the moment so we launched the course last month, 11th of last month and at the same time we were having an off-stead inspection which meant that the whole institution was very busy and then we had QAA returns so there was a lot of other work going on at the same time but still we had six people going through the whole course earning all the badges and mind you it's not easy earning the badges because we want everyone to get 100% to claim a badge. At the moment I'm happy with the uptake but that's the question that I also have. Is it just the people who put themselves forward as champions who are taking this up or whether there's going to be interest from other people as well? Someone has asked whether we should make the course compulsory or not. I would like to make it compulsory but I would prefer people to take it up voluntarily because accessibility is something really important and everyone needs to understand that it is not something that you have to be forced to do but I would rather like them to be willing to do it. Thank you. The next question comes from Neil Davidson who asks how do you find your learners react to these learning experiences? Are they surprised by how difficult peer accessibility can make things? We have been having a lot of workshops beforehand and I think that's a very good question because in one of the workshops before COVID time we asked them to where I banned the shades kind of thing so basically blindfold them and then ask them to navigate just using a screen reader and then they found how difficult it was and everyone said how difficult it was and they found actually that accessibility is something that they really need to think about but in COVID times we can't do that so we have to get people to get the idea by using videos etc so in this course what we have done is trying to replicate that using a video of a screen reader so we ask them to listen to the screen reader and think whether you can do the navigation just by listening to it and also we give them the opportunity to try out different things that they may not have tried like text-to-speech which you can use in Word documents in Microsoft so yes they do come back in their reflection to say that what they found how they found it and it's really heartening to see the transformation if you like of the people who have gone through the course and write their reflections. Great thank you. I'm going to do a couple more questions before we run out of time. Glenn Campy asks how are the badges distributed and shared? At the moment we are using a badge platform called open badge factory so that's the platform that we are using to offer the badges so people can share it the way they want so if they want they can share it in LinkedIn or Twitter etc in their online profiles. We have a blog post about how to share the badges if they wish to so that's also there's a link link to the blog post with their badge so that if they want to share it they can do it. Thank you and we've shared the link to your blog in the chat as well if people want to read that. Another question comes in from Caitlin Lucas who asks approximately how long does each badge take to complete? Not all badges take the same time. Generally it's about 45 minutes for one section but I think the section on colour would take a little bit longer so for the whole course we are thinking we have counted it as six hours but within one hour less than one hour you can earn a badge so the idea was to make it short and simple so that whenever you find a little bit of time a chunk of time you can go in do something and earn the milestone badge to say that I have completed this section so that was my idea of introducing these badges so that people find that you have done something and you have achieved something. Great there are a few more questions that are coming in but I'm going to suggest that perhaps we continue that conversation over on the discord a couple questions around time and the platform used and if we could carry those on over at discord that would be great. It is just up to me to say thank you very much Vrindu for joining us today and for talking about your CPD program it has been a really active session in the comments and thank you to everyone for joining us and we'll hopefully see you at some later sessions. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity thank you. Thank you everyone.