 Just like using this technology, the way we are teaching is changing. This was a typical school and actually I'm pretty sure those desks were exactly what I learned when I was in school back in the 80s. Maybe that's what we should do, we should go back to the way people taught in the 80s for the party. Well it's either that or I have to go as a goth. I just don't have the high heels anymore and I certainly forgot my makeup so maybe not. However things are changing. And the key thing is that with that change comes a devolution of what devices we're using, how we are learning, what the materials are on, where we are. And in this case we've picked some examples of different sort of scenarios, casual group learning, two people sitting across on a table outdoors, not on the beach where I'd be with my tie or something like that. If I had to correct a few hundred essays, can't think of a better place to be really. Or someone using assistive technology. And that's the thing, so it's changed and one commonality here is digital. And very much as presented by myself and others, when you're thinking about digital you're also thinking of the file. Now it's, for those who know accessibility, it's perceivable, operable, understandable, robust. This P-O-U-R is part of the web content accessibility guidelines. This concept. The last one, robust. It's like a good wine. No, it's not like a good wine. Robust means that it is something that can be used on different devices with different versions and so on. Something that it's really everyone able to access in any way that they need to. And that's usually where we just fall flat on our face as educators. Because we don't actually think about the robustness of our material. Now if you think about books, we've got in like Trinity Library books going back hundreds and hundreds of years. You've got The Book of Kells there, which is from my hometown. I wasn't involved in it because it was from like 1800 or sorry, 872 or something like that when it was created. So that's like going on towards 1300 years ago. Now that's robust. People who were using those early Lotus spreadsheets, not so robust. But technology, you have to think about it. But not just for the future for now, because now is the future for some. So that leads into why do alternate formats? Because there isn't one format to rule them all and in e-learning bind them. Although you would think that the PDF counts as this one format everybody does. But you know what? PDF is the last format you should think about using in sharing information. If you go to the UK government website and they talk about accessibility and how to share information with its citizens in the UK. Of course, I'll leave the conservative joke alone for the moment. But they say, HTML, make it a web page. Web page first. PDF is really designed to be passed around so you can print stuff off. So like for our cube, we share a PDF of that because you can give it to a printer and they will print it exactly as it was designed. So all the bleed lines and whatever else. Although I find that my fingers bleed when I've got paper cuts more than in printing. But this is the thing. It's about students, teachers and institutions. It's about creating that robustness, creating a... Well, right now I want to listen to it because I'm in a boring lecture and I just can't listen to him drone on anymore. Or I'm walking along the river and I don't want to be holding a book in front of me in case I do a Gavin and like fall over the edge. Or you want to be able to look at it on your tablet where you've got a really good black and white or white on black screen contrast to be able to look at it in bright light. So it's the situational disability aspect, which becomes important. That might be the person. It's just there's a barrier there that they want to get over. So the alternate formats then within our tool kit, what we do is we look at different files, pages, books and images that they can convert and they've got that little multi-coloured swirl in the middle and they get these options for the different ones, text, audio, e-book and Braille. And so if a student says, hey, I've got a disability, they have to have an accommodation so then teachers often are having to go and do this after the fact. And remediation is effort and effort is waste. In this case, if it's been built really accessible in one format then it can be transferred into others quite easily. So that's one of the key things here. But students not having to declare their disability because they may not know. Unless you want them walking around with an arrow on your head. And by the way, that phrase is actually Mark Lynn from DCU when he presented with Karen at a conference a few years ago. He walked around for the whole conference with a headband and an arrow sticking into his head just to try and get the point across. Point, arrow, stuff, anyway, sorry, jokes. But people came up to him and go, what's the arrow for? And he went and come along to the workshop. Maybe we should have done that for this one. But it is about they shouldn't have to if it's accessible and convertible by default. So when you think about it, okay, you know, there's different text formats. So you're going to have PDF because you can't have an accessible PDF. You probably need a PhD in Adobe Acrobat Pro and of course a license for it because if you have a really accessible Word document, turn it into a PDF. And then the fun begins. It does take effort as it should. All good things take effort, doesn't it? But then you've got audio. And the interesting thing about audio, we were talking about quickly speaking or slowly speaking earlier. And one of the really cool accessible concepts is giving people enough time to listen and comprehend what you're saying, okay? Listen and comprehend or read and comprehend. So consume and comprehend and think about it. And when we do MCQ quizzes and stuff and they've got one hour to do 25 questions, it sort of goes against that because you're forcing people to act under pressure and not everyone necessarily thinks at the same pace or comprehends at the same pace, but also listening at the same pace is equally important. I listen to audio books and I like the pedals of the metal on this one. I like them faster than average. However, someone who's learning in a second language, someone who has a learning difficulty, they might want to choose a slower language and having or slower can also be a language. Is there any? Maybe if you're drunk. However, but a certain slower speed. But offline players don't often offer different speeds or if they do, they're hidden away in the settings that you don't know exists. I found out recently that a player I use does have a speed option. It was just hidden behind five menus to turn it on. So offering the audio in different speeds is a good thing because online ones force them to stream, which isn't great if you're using data. And eBooks is different formats. There's not just one to rule them all there either. Giving them the format. But I hit 45 and I suddenly needed these to read. It wasn't great. Hate glasses. Really hate wearing glasses. Someone told that I have a habit of losing them and forgetting why I've put them down. But then I want to have my fonts bigger on my eBook when I'm putting it on my tablet to make it easier to read so I don't need to wear my glasses. And braille. There's a multitude of braille formats. A multitude. And that is the thing. You want to be able to support all of those. So when you're looking at different text formats, it has to be accessible. And if you're not mindful, if you're not focused on it, you're going to create documents, and especially older ones, which are just unusable to people nowadays. Did you know that Microsoft Edge is a screen reader built into it as Firefox, as was Chrome, as the Safari? They're all starting to have screen readers, or readers built into them. And if the content is only readable, as it was when I was doing a session with a teacher recently, their PDF literally started at the second page and it read the footer. It then read the heading on one of the other pages, and that was it on an eight-page document. The rest of the content wasn't surfaced to the reader. Unless you did OCR, which is optical character recognition, where you get AI in there, it's been around a lot. I know that AI is like everyone's talking about how good it is, and it's helpful sometimes. It can be. And this is one of the areas where it's really useful. But you do want to make sure that those formats are going to be something new, because of the different types of text. Why would people want to use this? Why do they want to use DocX instead of a PDF? Well, DocX means they can use Immersive Reader. Do people know what Immersive Reader is? Afterwards, it suggests if you use Word, or even if you use Microsoft Edge, you can use Immersive Reader. It allows the students or the reader to reformat the content in different ways to suit them, like putting a color swash behind it to change the color contrast. Or to make it narrower. One of the things which I really wish was a huge PR campaign for Moodle of why they made the course area narrow in Moodle 4, that's a readability thing. If you go to Medium, BBC, Guardian, any of the big media platforms that are literally trying to push content at you, the lines don't go very long, because reading from line to line, you want to keep it narrow. But it was a PR campaign that really, from a usability and accessibility point of view, needs to be done for Moodle. But then who will use the different formats because PDFs can be used, and they can be tagged, which means that a heading is set as a heading, or a paragraph is set as a paragraph, and images have all the text like you can do in Word. But there's also that sometimes when you have a Word document, you have lots of tables. Now tables are harder to do in PDFs. In Word, they're not so bad. It's a bit like Excel, and they can be set to be read as a table. The problem is, most of the time it's for layout, not for data. But then you've also got equations and formulas, and that's again one of the things that people might use it. So there are so many different ways of you can play text. So Edge and often browsers now will display a DocX or a PDF in the browser rather than downloading it. I don't like that personally, but it makes it easier for people to read. So when people are converting from a PDF using our system, they can go to Doc, Excel, maybe it's a PDF of spreadsheets. I can't imagine a worse way to share a spreadsheet. Well, sharing a spreadsheet is pretty nasty anyway. Sorry, I'm in Excel. I love it, but no one else seems to. RTF, that really old format, but that's certainly robust, it's still around. Tagged PDFs, plain text, comma separated, HTML. Another nice way, you can just give them an Excel page and they can read the text on it. Why not? They can just save it to their desktop or to their phone. DocX and Excel. And this is that immersive reader thing I was talking about. You know, you're over there on the left-hand side, the option for column width. I love it, the page color, but also line focus. I mean, I remember as a kid seeing people using a ruler to help remove the distraction because this is a digital equivalent and blacks out the page apart from the one line of text or two or three that you're reading through. Also add spacing, which again helps neurodivergent learners because if all the words are too close together, especially if they're all caps, that makes it so hard to read. And of course it will read it aloud. And that's something that's obviously built into into Office. However, then you've also got it built into Word and Microsoft Edge, the browser. And then it can have really cool things because it can also add in whatever it's a verb. And adding in all of these extra bits to help readability and learning language. Which I do love. I think it is just so cool. So here's just an example where it's colored in non-competing colors as it happens. The study of earth, land, forms and so on. It's different nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. So it's showing a label and it's showing color. So it's not using color alone for meaning. Another really good thing in documents. So I'll document there recently where they had so much color it looked like a rainbow. It just couldn't be read. It looked pretty though. And then how about a book in Moodle? So you build content in HTML, you add in your graphics and then you actually have it that it can be downloaded as either a PDF or a book. So you're allowing them to read it online in a native HTML web format but then take it away with them. I think that's really important because if you think about it when old face-to-face classes and whatever you had a handout that you'd get, having the handout online is good. But having it as a web online is better. And then they can print it if they want to. So I think it's really important for those people who likes printing stuff to be able to really read it and annotate it because PDFs aren't great for annotation. And then what about audio? Is that a conference a few weeks ago where I saw someone sitting in one of the roles with their headphones on? And they were listening to a football match. That's one way you can use audio I guess. However, it's not necessarily the only way and certainly not the best way to use audio because when we think about audio people might need to. It's like learning styles don't exist. We all know that they've been debunked. But some people might require to consume via audio because they're dyslexic and their reading speed is very slow so they take it in better in audio or take it in at all via audio. And that's really important. It isn't about preference or style. It's about need. Just like walking along. Now I used to learn chess moves when I was a kid younger, should we say, half a life ago. And I'd walk around a chess openings book in my hand learning all of these positional moves because I thought I'd be a brilliant chess player. Wasn't a brilliant one. I was average but I did walk into a few polls and like lamp posts on the street while I was walking around with a book. Possibly not the best way to consume content on a busy street. But listening to it would also have been better as long as I'm aware and I don't walk out in front of traffic that I don't hear anymore. So any bit of content walking along the street. But if you're in a bus, if you're in a train, this kind of way is going to be a nice way to do it. You're not going to be reading and getting sick. So it is an important thing. It's about sequential text. So if you're asking people to jump around different bits of content, this doesn't work quite as well. Unless it's something like a series of small chapters. When I started off doing selling years ago, I had a podcast series by selling bigger.com or something like that. And it was just these little three minutes just in time training sessions that you do before a sales meeting or something like that. That was really good content. Small snippets, learning nuggets, audio works really, really well. So it's typically shared as an MP3. Why do you use that format? Because it's just easy for people to use. Devices use it all. If any of you are ever being bored and Google my history, I used to work in telecoms. And I was interviewed many years ago talking about video formats. And eventually this would all come down to one. And the video format was, if everyone remembers all the different formats 20 odd years ago, that would stop. Well, it did stop. Now MP3 and MP4s are pretty much the standard out there. But why do you, who will use it? Everyone will use it. So just download, because everything plays it nowadays. This is easy just, all devices are using it. So the benefits is quite simple. That it's fast to download. If you don't do it in full blown stereo, with lots of extra stuff, the size isn't very big either. So that's better, certainly smaller than video. And pretty much every device has at least one bit of software built into it that will play this. That's great. That's robust, isn't it? So when you think about it, you will have that person sitting in a bar, or someone in the middle there, driving a car and listening to it. Someone running. Luckily they're looking forward and not down into a book. And then of course there's some other people sitting on a bus or a train or whatever it might be. And it just changes the scenario, because all of those have barriers for being able to consume the content on a laptop or in your hand as a printed book or whatever it might be. And it's about reducing those barriers. And with an hours then, you have those seven speeds that people can choose, depending on what their need is. Their need. At that time. Because they might want it in different speeds at different times. Just like they might use different formats at different times. And then there's a multitude of languages there. I love that word multitude. I should really give out a free cue for every time I say it. It's all about ebooks. So I love ebooks. I've got a Kindle. We moved in January. I found it again having lasted for four years. Because I now just use my iPad Pro. Kindle, great idea. Fits in the hand. Lovely. Simple. Very effective. Just hated it. But I've got an ebook reader on my iPad. So I'm happy. But it is about having that easy thing to read where you can really control the layout and size and everything. Again, control. People who want different formats, they want control. And there are different formats. Moby, should know either. But anyway. So that was the old format for Kindle. You EPUB, multiple variations there. Why use them? Because they're just easy and they work on pretty much every device. Although, ironically, Windows, you really have to choose a good reader if you want it. I've used so many over the years. I'm not sure what the best one is now. But I have one that's installed some years ago. And I think the one reason I like these formats is they're not dependent on extra software like Word or Google or whatever it might be. It's just a simple reader. And again, most mobile devices have something that will already work with it. The benefits are searchable as well. Especially with a book. The fact you can search just within a book. It allows the whole thing as one entity, not each chapter by chapter. And then there's plenty of tools available for these kind of things. And when we're looking at it, we let them choose the format and that base font size to make it a little bit bigger. Super size your EPUB. For those who didn't laugh, which was all of you, that's a joke about McDonald's. Sorry. Oh man! Jokes just don't go across cultures. My dad jokes are just dad jokes. And of course then you've got a braille device. So if you want to download a format, being able to use that braille device is really important. When you see people using these, it's just an experience you need to understand how they use the assistive technology. Because even if you learn how to use it, you're not using it the way that person, someone who depends on that technology for interaction. And so, people using the format. Well, we're going to have people who are people who are blind, who either choose not to and use audio or perhaps they just prefer a braille reader or perhaps they are deaf or hard of hearing. And the benefits of it is that they can actually engage with the content. Yes, it may take them slightly longer. Just like it takes just the average person sometimes longer than we think to read and comprehend content. Especially if it's complex. I remember one lecturer that I was working with who had 30 questions to answer in a one hour quiz. And I read out out loud the question of the first the first question. Then each of the options. And then talked through my talk process. It was over three minutes. It was the first question. And I knew the subject really well, but I was debating about which was the right answer and so on. As we would be thinking about it, he changed his time limit to two hours after he did some of them himself as well and realized a big lump of text is just so, so useful. But anyway, so time is important. And we enabled the user to choose exactly how they want to configure their braille file because it's their file for their use on their device. We don't dictate it. Which if we only give PDFs and have no conversion options at all, we're telling them that that is how they have to consume the content and figure it out themselves. If we give them an image locked PDF Well one, they're probably going to google how to unlock a PDF which for those who don't know, it's as easy as this. You open it up in Google Chrome and you print from Google Chrome and now you have an unlocked PDF. Third option if you search for how to unlock a PDF on Google.com. So 10 year old will figure it out. So alternate formats, one of the things you think about is storage. Not everybody uses them but sometimes your content's in an accessible format so people just use it that way. And we found that courses which promote this the students embrace it. Absolutely embrace it and audio just goes off the scales in usage. But then you've also got ownership. You have to teach them about copyright and go this is for you, not for you to put on the web. Which is a good thing because they show that part of the digital literacy and the digital skills understand copyright and for personal use versus sharing use. So let's think about it. Why alternate formats? Because you're enabling the user to make decisions themselves about how and when they will use what format. It's that ease of use. It's autonomous. It's also anonymous. Because we don't log with our tool anyway. We don't log who does it but we just log that it was done. And how well in our toolkit there's an option for it but there's other ways of doing it as well. This feeds into UDL. So thank you everybody. If you have any questions please let me know. Hi Gav. Thank you for that. Really interesting. I found the plugin. We're definitely going to investigate it because we have accessibility needs to be resolving. I remember a few years ago talking at an event and you were there and I was talking about H5P a lot and you challenged me on the accessibility of H5P and rightly so and it's great that you're still fighting that cause. My question is really about that. How for those organizations that use tools like Rise, Storyline, H5P how can we promote better accessibility of those? There are various students that want to use screen readers on a Rise lesson and it's very very challenging for them to do that. Oh it's cumbersome would be a nice way of putting. So if you've got SCORM, you know that lovely word SCORM or H5P package I mean the first thing is both of these are basically zip files with stuff inside them in formats that are technically good. I mean H5P if you ask them as an organization do you have an accessibility checker for your H5P content? The answer is but you can ask them on the way out they're just there I think or they're just there. Ask them, all of you go up and get them to do something they build the content. If they can't get it to be accessible I don't know who can well we are looking at it it's one of our projects for end of year that we're going to have someone explore but we might actually have to deploy it and then check it in a deployed state I mean that's good, that's a lot of effort and cost involved technically to do that kind of thing the same with SCORM objects they are not accessible because people choose to use all the cool sexy interactive stuff that's visually nice and a blind lecturer told me Gavin do you know how to detect if someone's going to create inaccessible content before they create the content can anyone guess? Pardon? No interactive you can do really cool interactive stuff they wanted to either look good ok or be on brand but basically if they choose one sense one sense as their metric so that it sounds good it looks good it feels good one sense that means it's not going to be inclusive as a general rule and think about when you hear people about their planning their content well I want the layout to be look really good and use all our brand color whatever it is and it's because they don't understand that the content should be content right and in some ways a similar lecturer told me Gavin, color doesn't survive printing into black and white which most of us print in black and white do you add into your color? we have one, we have two do we have three? no, two so all those lovely colors that you add into your content printed and they're gone so you need to think about the content so for H5P we're looking at it for SCORM there's one line at the beginning of the perceivable part of WCAG it says a text alternative for any non-text content and that is the most important thing for you to take away from this session a text alternative for non-text content a SCORM is a non-text primarily give them a good word document all the content, full transcript of the videos all the kind of analyze DocX or a web page right that is how you make the content accessible how you make the tools accessible well after Articulate they've spent a lot of money not succeeding yet although they're better than some but if you were to ask me now one tool to do all that userty that's X-E-R-T-E that creates accessible content