 Gavin I've just started the recording cool so hello folks and if you want to give your name and what institution you're from as well and that's all it's helpful hello Robert so how are things on our side because down here it definitely is as you say but sunny and showery down here too half clouds half sunshine typical summer so everyone and great so my name is Gavin Henrick and I'm from Frickfield education that's same weather in the north thank you Allison that's good Aberdeen I lived in Aberdeen for seven months until I escaped no no it was it was great it was just over winter so it was very very cold and very very gray but it was it was really beautiful in the summer so we're gonna be talking about accessibility and instructional materials and you know it's it's a little bit of a challenge I guess you know when we're trying to get people online and especially in the last year and people are trying to use the materials they have and sometimes accessibility isn't at the top of their their mind when they're doing things they just want to get something up and I think that that's what this is gonna be about and I'm gonna get you to think a lot and maybe to contribute in chat or whatever so please do otherwise we'll end and we have nine people here so but I will start my presentation now and so and screen share okay that's cool and I shall remove my video instructional materials and assessment I remember a lecturer saying to me you know what's the point of having instructional material when all our assessments are designed to be exclusive not inclusive and where they are literally sorry but I literally am not thinking about and what to do they might show an image and ask people to talk about the content in that image just to therefore if you can't see the image it's not very helpful as an assessment I know that Rob and probably others are really looking at universal design for learning and I think that accessibility is that is a key underpinning of that and when you you think differently it isn't necessarily more work and there was a good quote that you know and it's only more work if you haven't thought about it at the beginning right if you think about it at the beginning it's just doing it in a very specific way so anyway let's let's move along so and if you disagree or agree or want to contribute in while we're going through this please do so I always look at this sort of quote around accessibility as a thing because it is this multi leg system it's usability it's inclusion accessibility and the key thing for me is this bottom phrase it's a web that works for everyone and so content has to work for everyone okay I remember in school I mean I remember the kid who was deaf or hard of hearing and they would have to sit at the very front to have a chance of being able to understand what was going on in the in in the class and it's that kind of thing which you the owners was on that person really to to solve the problem that the of the barriers that were being created by the nature of the classroom but online we have the technologies to both have the students take more ownership of that but also for the institution and teachers to take more ownership of that and I think that it is really key that it is something that we all try and create this web and learning environments that work for everybody and this is no more so in Tim Berners-Lee and all those others who came together to create this contract for the web I was by making the internet affordable and accessible to everyone because affordability is important when COVID hit and we all went through the chaos and challenges of the last year some of the accessible content was inaccessible when the students didn't have Wi-Fi at home or didn't have a laptop at home we didn't have the right type of laptop at home so I didn't have a Windows machine because they had to go through some sort of VPN system and I remember there was someone I had given one of my old laptops to and had Linux on and it was unusable by them because they absolutely required Windows 10 to be able to do it so it wasn't just a device it was very really specific to be able to do anything remotely and so that's an affordability challenge both in internet and of course in Ireland is a geographical challenge you know I certainly wouldn't say that we have the concept of country-wide broadband so affordable is literally that that's it's that first step you know and then everything else sort of comes from that so you have to think about that and how does that impact content how does that impact assessment choices so if they're having to do their access over their mobile phone I know in COVID most telecoms or some telecoms at least change their policy on bandwidth but if they're having to do everything over their mobile phone and they're burning through their data plan that's going to cost money and if they're having to do video sessions the whole time that's going to cost more money and forcing them to have videos on is going to cost more money and so literally each decision that a teacher can have is around these are the choices you literally create barriers for people or don't create barriers for people as the case may be and that sort of all of it put together because it is also when you're starting to do stuff with content it is about following the standards and standards are technical if you don't know them and how you're supposed to follow them it would predictability it shouldn't be that if every course in an LMS looks different is named different and when someone wants to get their slides from week one just before exams from a few of our modules and they're all named in different places in different courses or whatever that's not going to help them that's creating barriers so it is reducing negative impact of disabilities on access but it's again it's about for everyone and sorry if I go on about that but the key thing to me is understanding that it isn't just catering for a minority it's catering for everybody because not everyone wears an hour on their head not everyone declares a disability that they may have it's like the big discussion around video forcing students at home to be showing their video especially if the platform doesn't allow them have a virtual background then you end up with like I have a horrible curtain or in other cases you have their bedroom or wherever it might be so this is your first task folks and I'd like you to open up your online course space whatever you're using moodle blackboard as hard to learn whatever it might be and look at the content that you've got there just so you want you to just make a note of it yourself what types of content have you got where documents have you got PDFs often online courses are like PDF city and not always but sometimes do you have multimedia have you got videos in the air have you got scorn objects in there so make a note of those and if you feel okay about it share some of us into the chat as well but for more I'm just going to give you one or two minutes just to self-order what you're currently doing okay I'm just checking the chat there nobody's put anything in so hopefully you're all busy looking in your courses I'll give you a moment there okay so think keep your content in your head run your notes I want you to think about the content you create and how you go by creating content and it's sort of simple really so the first one is about structure and layout you know often you'll see a lovely word document 30 40 pages and I won't have page numbers it won't have a table of contents it won't have a logical structure that there's no headings showing up when you open it up into word or to see the navigation in Google and all it looks like visually it has headings they're not real headings and it's always one of things I mean when I'm creating materials I always start off with building that structure putting in a title page putting in all the different bits before I start building the content in it but how often do we do this how many of you the materials you have print okay but aren't as navigable for any for everyone with the format that they have and then of course if you switch this into PDF and whatever and one of more issues as well then you need to have bookmarks for all those headings and so on and have saved it correctly but so layout and structure is really important and you just can equally apply when you're building a web page and to me this is the one thing that people should be able to do well okay I mean content accessibility there's a lot of it okay there's a lot of the rules and the guidelines and so on but there are certain things and that's why I'm just focusing on six or seven things here certain things that you should try and always do and this first one getting a good layout and structure using proper headings I think is key and do look at one or two of your documents hopefully while you're looking at it now and see does it seem to have good headings hasn't got page numbers does I have a table of funds and someone gonna be able to easily find something in that word or PDF document that you've given them yeah so saw a presentation there recently where the contrast wasn't great and it wasn't as readable on a shoddy screen definitely for me because I was looking at all my mobile so color and the contrast of text is important but often you're constrained by your brand and has your brand been tested for accessibility of the institution the colors that they prefer to show do they do they work are they okay and who should say that they're not okay is it you do raise your hand and go hey hold on a second that doesn't meet the legal requirements that's always a good one you tell them technical requirements yeah that doesn't meet the legal requirements for content accessibility I know it's the legal thing is people don't like to hear it but you know there are laws there for a reason to ensure that we actually think of this because unless there is sometimes a penalty people don't think about it they don't prioritize it and avoid meaning with color alone I've seen so many so many web pages where they drop red and green in and not even bold behind it just to add color into different parts of a web page or a document and if you print it out it's gone because I mean who prints in color actually if anybody here does print in color say it in chat please but I must admit I haven't printed in color in years and I've got a really good color printing machine like two foot to my left has anyone here printed in color so as soon as you create a printed copy of your documents or a web page whatever and after relying on color it's lost that meaning is lost and and that's just again to everyone but color for people who are colorblind there are similar issues you haven't printed anything in years Rob you tree-hugger you that's also I must admit really big talk was I just have to print I have to print I just find consuming a huge amount of stuff on digital hard or harder than than printing does anybody else not print at all do everything on digital ah since working from home not at all you see well I suppose I've worked from home from for about 11 years so I've got one of these really cool multi-page sort of scanning things and printing things and yes color ink costs a lot it really does so that's why I print stuff out but another one is about links I could think again this is something which I've seen so many times people being given a one day bad advice but certainly not the best advice I mean a link if you hide every all the other text the link should describe the text of the link should describe where it's going to and if you have click here it doesn't describe where it's going to and I don't know if they want to mark up they want to mark up their and their notes have you found a really good markup tool yet that works with PDFs must admit I haven't and I've marked up a lot I mean I used to scribble on so much is it's great if it's a word document you can just add stuff in but if it's a PDF I just haven't done that you pay for like Adobe but I just haven't found something that good yet but if anyone has please share it so the click here thing and there's loads of simple words like that read more whatever it might be you've to read the paragraph around the order sentence before to understand it and that doesn't make it easy because we when we're looking at a page we need to read down sort of the left and across to the right a bit or we'll hop doing hotspots where all of the links are and so we don't want to have to read all the text if we're trying to get to somewhere the same with a URL as a text I mean if you were to have I'm just going to paste it in here yeah Tom that is certainly I'm definitely there with you if you ever if you're a 365 house as an institution there's no reason for not having a PowerPoint and word documents in there instead of PDFs they're much more usable you can make them more accessible it's so much better for students you know because worst-case scenario one of them is going to use OCR and turn it into a word document that might not be as accurate as the one you could have given them so yes make make them work to get something of a lesser quality then you can give them with less work so if you're going to have something or someone reading that long link right and you often see it in emails or whatever and I will say it's great seeing the like the email that comes out for the registration from out is like join session or something with the link hidden behind it and that's having something meaningful have any of you come across really terrible link names or text being used for links Google Doc ones are excellent they're like about half a mile long sometimes see or scenes like that anyone else okay images mm-hmm obviously some of you will know that I do an awful lot of stuff with noodle although I do stuff with other systems as well and there's a tick box there when people are adding images going description not necessary that was up to last May right and I just can't imagine how many teachers probably just ticked that having no idea that they were creating a barrier for people who either the images weren't loading because of bandwidth issue or people who were using a screen reader they weren't deliberately creating that barrier but the interface didn't actually ask them well it does now now it says this image is decorative only so if they take it now to not bother putting in a description or out text then they are making a choice to create a barrier but if it is decorative fine but if it's not having those descriptions important and remember seeing a great presentation by Alastair McNaught who is the same for the same image using four different contexts so the descriptions of it was going to be four different ones and the one I use is imagine a dog standing in a field on a sunny day so in one you could have a context of freedom another one could be sort of a getting it back to nature and how you would describe that or one it could be about isolation and loneliness and I think in COVID many people have been that dog standing in the field with a sunny day outside and I think that those descriptions are really important and if the context of that image is important to the material then it should be done well but you must just not say what's in the image you must include that context of what is important in that and if there's sometimes you can see images with text on them I mean every I mean one thing that triggers me is on Twitter people post a quote being inspirational and the Al's text is image inspirational for some and not for everyone and another thing that bugs me recently is conferences who do these lovely visualizations of summarizing what the conference was well that's that's really good and helpful to some but not to all I did ask two of them there recently I'm going do you have a text alternative for that wasn't even considered wasn't even considered so it's so important to consider images because if images conveying meaning convey it in text as well and complex images might just need really long descriptions might multiple paragraphs not as an Al's text but multiple paragraphs afterwards explaining what it's about again otherwise you're maybe try a different mechanism than using an image to describe it which will probably be text based anyway so they won't come across in their courses or when they're doing things where it's they've seen images which just were not described well were crucial but were not described well if you need examples yourselves do be do be do multi-media oh Rob oh that just makes me a very sad panda a very sad panda I mean I shared our schedule for the conference which is running for today in the next two days the middle moot um as a google sheet because anyway I tried to put it into a web page it wasn't wasn't great um so I left it in a spreadsheet because that's probably the most accessible easy way anyway but multimedia so I did a recently recorded a one-hour presentation for another conference and we also created the the captions for it and then my marketing comes person spent seven hours correcting them now possibly could have taken me less because I've known the content more but captions and subtitles you know these are these are key things and how often do we do this I mean sometimes you might have a script that you're doing and you will release it as well as a video or you use something like youtube to also create it and they're better than nothing well some people think they're better than nothing but it does take a lot of effort and if you're going to rely on video and audio these are things to consider and then table data so like a timetable pretty good as image breaks all of this but yes good to have a caption there good to have proper row and column headers often you'll see them with that if we look at documents and this is screenshot of a power point which has an image in us and you can see over the right it has an accessibility checker built into it okay um this is great a lot of content was probably created on microsoft words of years ago 10 years ago and some of them haven't changed content wise in that time we're opening them up in office right now and again doing it like you with a spell check clicking on check accessibility will then help you fix most of the issues is it everything though but you know what as long as you're moving forward and tomorrow is better than today that's really important okay and again you can see sort of a bit more detail there on the right um with regard to um office um and then in word as well here is an image it found no out text and it prompted up on the right and you can leave it there all the time so when you make a mistake or haven't finished something is it will prompt you now unfortunately with google there isn't something free an equivalent do something you pay for thing called grackle docs that's grackle and it goes a small amount of checks which is again enough to make it better and just for interest how many people here or google or 365 you want to just type in say g-suite or 365 in the chat okay looks like microsoft is winning here in this particular um battle i have both we use g-suite for our developer team collaboration and we use office 365 for all the professional side of what we do so if you think about media i mean and do drop in some other examples it could be video audio versions of lectures oops not of lecturers always typos terrible um podcasts audio conversion of a document you might have an mp3 version of a document could be a virtual classroom recordings could be some instructional videos what other multimedia do you add in to your courses adobe spark pages okay h5p well must have been wouldn't really consider h5p media unless it was because you have to put video and audio in it would you not would you consider it media you do um but if you're going to have audio and video from these then how do you get text alternatives so one obviously if you're giving a presentation you can write your script in the notes and so you have your script already written before beforehand so you can share that with people and if you leave it in the powerpoint it's the notes that they can see it um you can look at also generating text from the media youtube youtube can also generate it and people can submit fixes and i mean multiple languages you can have zoom where it also does um captioning as well and and creates a transcript for you or you can pay services like otter ai um or you could be using powerpoint live where it's automatically um streaming a set of um captions for you and a full transcript as well so what do people use here do people use any of these options or how do you go about creating text versions of multimedia also generate from panopto okay youtube and zoom okay so one of the things you also have one of the integrations like what we do or there's other products out there as well where it will also convert text into different formats if you have pdf you can do that but this is sort of the reverse because you can also do where you can actually create an audio export or an epub those kinds of things these are other formats so like h5p you could create a full epub with details that kind of thing um but what do you consider now what alternative formats do you think would be suitable for let's say you have a chapter from a book so you possibly have it as a pdf from scanning at the moment what better alternative do you think could there be for that recently using our embedded sort of ocr scanning we had a very badly scanned book completely converted to a word document for example an audio version absolutely susan i think there are audio books often available for um some of the materials it really depends what you're using obviously but creating one is a good thing um but often to create that you need to first convert your scan into into text what about help instructions how do you currently do that within your learning management systems are they downloadable pdfs are they web pages how do you currently provide that kind of information moodle books rob okay that's a very accessible way of doing it creating web pages is a really good way for um people to be able to use their browser controls to maximize their accessibility experience the blackboard page susan so similar again what about a book a full book so so some of these i remember seeing pierson books they were like four gigabyte scorum objects obviously um you might have a printed book but then what formats can you get those provided in or how would you go about doing it it's a bit similar to a chapter obviously but wouldn't necessarily be scanned i think that it is a a lot of the books now are becoming like multimedia things but like your h5p course presentation rob some of the books from publishers they're going beyond just the digital version of the paper book and they're trying to embed extra materials and stuff within them um but i do think it's a challenge if whether you're going to have an e-pub where you might have a mobi for kindle or pdfs it's about making sure that they are accessible and usable and when you're thinking about what materials you're going to use and books you're going to require you should be thinking about the formats that are available to them or for them not just that it happens to be the best one and information leaflets i mean i've seen lots of information leaflets sort of printed up and put on walls and colleges about this that and the other end the one interesting thing i've seen recently i've seen a lot of them with a qr code on the bottom which will bring to a web page version of them so that that can help because then they can suddenly access screen reader technology in that and that even if that student can't see it someone might say hey you know what you should do this but that requires other people to be involved but how are you going to handle that kind of thing if you're going to have information and people are walking around that just can't see them how do you make them aware of it i think that's a challenge i think when you bring environments into it when they're in your learning management system it's one thing but if you're trying to give guidance for someone when they walk into a lecture theater um that's going to be a certainly a challenge then what about lectures themselves so how do you go about currently making your lectures more accessible oh see in this we don't have a subtitling system here for blackboard collaborate i think as rob mentioned earlier in zoom you can do auto subtitles i think penanto as well also generate but how others how other ways do you go about trying to make your lectures more accessible there's everything a recording it's the first part and ideally ideally give the recording in advance flip the classroom so people will be able to listen or read the material in advance before coming into the lecture and the lecture is then more uh interactive piece but or even just give them as a recording and the lecture is then more working doing something um how many here do actual full lecture recording for what they do or for all the lectures okay let's talk about the a-word so assessment typically two types of assessment a sort of a an assignment where they're creating something and uploading something in an online quiz let's take the first one what are the accessibility challenges that people are going to face with regard to um uploading an assignment i remember a lecturer telling me recently or last year where the student had printed out something scanned it and then uploaded the pdf the lecturer was blind so that wasn't going to be very useful because ocr wouldn't work very well so the solution for that was to ensure that the students were aware that they have to upload the word document version not a scan of a printout now how others how else you go about making assessments more accessible often you might want to choose to give certain different time frames for people giving not an extension but that a person has a certain disability then that you will give them an extra amount of time because maybe somebody has to type for them so when i had hurt my arm doing judo that i'd have had to have someone writing for me if i had an assessment in the following few weeks so as students choice and format rub yeah that's universal design for learning because if they can choose how they're going to do it then it'll be something that they have control over that format and that method whether it's uploading a word document whether it's recording audio or a video presentation i think that's one of the things where real accessibility is about looking at exactly how you're you're creating your content your choices what restrictions and barriers you're creating each time you use one and trying to avoid any if you can and sometimes it might need to rethink what your assessment is the same with quizzes i mean often you'll see images used in quizzes and describing them sufficiently that doesn't give the answer might be problematic so you might need to come up with a different question if you want to do a quiz to address the same learning outcome or the same competency depending on how you're doing it i think assessment is where it's because accessibility becomes really important because just the traditional mcqs are not necessarily going to deliver for everybody in the same way and so it is about having students think about format some might not cope well under the high stakes pressure of a timed exam but given a different format and a different time scale they would be able to demonstrate sufficiently to pass and meet those learning objectives and competencies i think that one thing kovat will certainly have thrown up in the air is thinking about this and thinking more it's it's even in leaving cert the fight between a written exam and a grade um a derived grade from their work over a few years you know it's a people seem to have a a religious i suppose just gripping on to this written exam as being the only way or the best way so thank you all for your your interaction so i think we're going to end up finishing a bit early i've been hoping for a bit more and obviously you've interacted really well but there's only a few people here um i mean i think this is a goal and it's you could say create a web that works for everyone creates a learning environment that works for everyone teachers and students i think that's really key as well because when you're talking about learning materials and assessment you need to be sure that what's being created is suitable for the teacher as well so if the teacher is going to be marking in an environment that might be quite noisy you don't have their headphones with them then audio submissions aren't going to be as great unless they're also converted into text for example so there's you're going to have challenges in the whole way around all of these things and the purpose of this session was to really just get us thinking a little bit about some of the options some of the constraints some of the barriers rather than necessarily say do it this way it was just about getting you thinking so they haven't got any sort of thoughts they'd like to share on audio if you want don't be shy come on contribute in if you want i'm assuming that they can just turn the audio on can they yes they can yep just at the bottom of the screen does anyone have any questions or anything that they'd like to ask before we wrap up okay well if not thank you very much for your time and i hope you found the reflections that were useful for you thanks Rob although i'm sure you could have done this Rob yourself Gavin if you're happy for me to end the recording now yep that's fine