 Oh, that's hilarious, brilliant. Thanks Chloe. Thank you for the welcome as well. Just check in, I can see the slides. Everyone else see the slides here? Okay.актерios. It's amazing, thank you for joining me on this very great Friday for this session on accessibility and inclusion. Quick agenda is we're going to talk about the welcome and we're going to talk about necessary for some useful for all and then I'm going to give of where to start at the end so hopefully some things you can take away as well today, and running this in Slidoad I'd really love you to join me at Slidoad. So you can either scan the QR code with another device or you can open another tab and pop in the Web address Slidoad. And the code you need to input 8688517. 8688517 and I just want to know what's your favorite flavor of crisps? Dyna dwi'n watryd mewn cylinig. Felly, bobifarad One participant typing, so we'll just wait for that person to finish, and then we will skip on two participants of typing. It's getting exciting. Oh, thanks Emma for posting that in chat as well. Three participants typing, great. What I love as well is that I get a little count up here, so 10 people have contributed, and that's pretty much where 12 people have contributed, and that's pretty much where we've ended up. It's just that code on the corner there, 8688517, but we'll stick with it as we go through. Oh, it automatically skipped the slides because I pressed there. I really love doing things like this, and from an accessibility and an inclusion point of view, is that people are being included in this as well, and we'll talk a bit about the welcome as well. So if we've not met before, my name is Sammy. I also go by the name SJ, and I answer to both names, and my pronouns are she and her. My job is that I'm a teaching and learning specialist here at TextHealth, and there's a picture of my face on this slide with some great text as well. And my email address is there, which is s.white at TextHealth.com, and if you are social, I am always on socials at what the trig map is who I am on socials. Now, this is all part of the welcome and being an accessible and inclusive welcome. Here at TextHealth, we are an accessibility company. We do assistive technology, and we have a very simple purpose, which is we want to help everyone understand and be understood. It's actually written on the back of my jumper. And our vision is we see a world where difference, disability, our language are no longer barriers. And I think that's something that really echoes strongly with educators. I just want to talk about this image. So this is a multi-coloured background, and it has a whited out box with black text on. Text reads, diversity is a fact, equity is a choice, inclusion is an action, and belonging is an outcome. And I think when I think about accessibility, I think we have diverse groups of people that we serve and communities that we serve. We choose to engage and bring people along, and we take action to make sure that they feel that they belong. And I feel that this could be like my daily mantra that I say to myself to manifest the behaviours that I will display as an educator going forward every day. And I really value these statements. So the welcome then is a bit different because we're in Blackboard, but I'm just going to show you an example of what I would do in Google Meet. So even though we've probably all now been on a million Google Meet, Chloe did a really good one here in Blackboard as well. Taking a moment to point out the features of the platform helps people feel welcomed, included, and that they belong. To know where the chat space is to ask any questions, to pass an email address around is actually really powerful, because if we think about someone who perhaps has a neurodiversity challenge, they may have been spending ages masking all day, and they may be just feeling a little bit tired and exhausted, so they might want to walk away. So let's give them an email address if they want to walk away, they can do. I've shared an agenda with you as well, and that's about managing expectations as well. People might want to pop away for a moment because they need their limit of processing information right now. And so when they watch the recording back, at what time do I need to skip to? But actually from an accessibility point of view, if we can break down information into smaller chunks by giving an agenda, by chaptering videos, what we're giving then is an accessibility option for people who need that cognitive load lightning, and we don't know what people's needs are, so it's about how do we do that? How do we turn on closed captions in our platform? How do we make that person appear bigger because they're speaking and want to be able to lip read? We may know our students really, really well, but it's not possible to know everything all the time, and things do change. So I always spend a few minutes doing the welcome, and the welcome also included the Slido that we did as well, which was the what's your favourite flavour of crisps. Because once people feel settled in the space and have contributed and have their voices heard, they'll feel more included on the journey that they then can carry on. And what we need to do is create conditions for people to be able to, sorry, it's like that BBC thing where the children appear in the corner and then they disappear. What we need to be able to do is for people to feel confident and capable that they can contribute. And if they have additional challenges, additional learning challenges, we need to make sure that we have given them an opportunity to be heard and express themselves. So by a simple question at the beginning about your favourite flavour of crisps, it's actually quite strategic because we're going to drive engagement and motivation because everybody feels that they can engage with that question. It's not a tricky question. It's not a did you do your homework? Did you watch the video that we set for the pre-learning task? Have you caught up on the reading? There's no expectation on you as a participant to answer on your favourite flavour of crisps. It's a low stakes question. It's the ultimate low stakes question. And if you kick off with a low stakes question, then everyone can engage. Whether we have people with additional learning challenges or not, everyone can engage. And when we think about accessibility, it's always about designing spaces and designing activities where everyone can engage. So by being accessible from the start with a low stakes question, it really helps. Also, how can participants contact you during the session? Your own accessibility challenge might be that you don't want questions until the end. And that is absolutely fine too. It's about managing expectations. Accessibility features of the platform is a must. Where raises the closed captions? How do I turn them on? How do I make that a tile bigger? Where can questions be asked? Do they go in the chat or do they go in the question and answer box? What are the timings of the session? Apologies, the slide or thing is hiding that there. But what are the timings of the sessions, like I say, about chaptering and breaking down that information? And so by giving people an opportunity to be welcomed and included from the start without looking at specific learning needs or challenges. So we said we'd spend 10 minutes talking about the welcome, which is just about where we're at, and then necessary for some useful for all we're going to dive into now. You are absolutely welcome to ask questions in the chat as we go through. Leave feedback, add emojis, all those sorts of things. And like Chloe said, if you are going to tweet out, I don't mind my face being included as well. If you're capturing that as well, I'm okay with that. So our tool here at Text Help is Read&Write. You might have heard of Read&Write and not Text Help. We also have a math tool called Equatio that I work on. But I wanted to show you a couple of features where they are necessary for some and useful for all. So let's have a little look at some assistive technology that is necessary for some and useful for all. Now actually this slide is a Text Help slide. It's not my slide. And it's not accessible because it's got coloured text to emphasise points. And that is a massive no-no. And I include this to bring this point up. It has since been changed and we've had a conversation about it at work. But if we're going to emphasise key words in text, it needs to be in bold and not in different colours. Because some people can't see different colours, so bold works. Also if people are using a screen reader, it will pick up the emphasis of the bold and not necessarily the emphasis of the change of colour. Because what we're trying to achieve here at Text Help and I think everywhere we're trying to achieve is the normality of glasses. When I was a child wearing glasses was not okay, but it was necessary that I wore glasses. It's now actually pretty cool to wear glasses and nobody really minds if people wear glasses. It was such a thing when I was growing up wearing glasses. Like are you allowed to go swimming because you wear glasses? And I think what we need to do is recognise the journey we've been on with the glasses. And what we will need to be able to do is to get to a point where assistive technology like this is the normal way of working. Not just a normal way of working to pass an exam, but this is the normal way that everybody works. Oh, cool, you've got assistive technology. Right, great, cool. I don't need to ask any questions. I don't need to know any more than that. I wouldn't go to a glasses where I'm going, are you wearing glasses? What is it you've got? Long-sighted, short-sighted, how bad is it? You know, we don't play top trumps of prescription levels of glasses. So why on earth would we ask any questions about anyone that uses assistive technology? And so it's about normalising the experience. We want to see a place where people aren't treated differently because they have a learning difference. And I think that's a real powerful statement. People are not being treated differently because of their learning difference. And that is on us to make a more inclusive environment. So that's necessary for some useful for all. This is an image of a screenshot of PDF being read and the highlighters of the assistive technology picking up keywords. It is necessary for some people to be able to highlight keywords in that text. It is necessary for them to keep track of where they're up to. It is necessary to break down information for their dyslexia challenges. It is necessary for neurodiversity challenges. It is necessary for some people to be able to do that. It's also really useful. I've done an amp session before, not an amp for IFE. It was Festival Fridays. I remember for Chloe on highlighting texts. And actually it's really useful if you are reading a large piece of research and you want to highlight it and make notes. Personally, I highlight by colour. So blue would be key teaching and learning principles. Pink would be maths teaching principles, which is my subject. Yellow would be evidence of impact. And green would be questions that I still have about it. Or whatever it is and categorise it how I want. And I go through and I highlight as I read the text. I don't need to highlight. It's not necessary for me to highlight, but it's useful for me. And then with one click of the button, it pulls all those highlights out into separate documents. And all my blues are here and all my pinks are here and all my yellows are here. So I have all my quotes and my text allocated by theme. Well, that makes my learning so much easier. I didn't need this assistive technology, but it's actually really useful. So exploring assistive technology and normalising the experience of that necessary for some and useful for all. But once we've highlighted it, what we can also do is with one click of a button pull out what's called a vocabulary list. So those words that I highlighted here were trailer, emotion, good and bad and feel. And the next page slide is an image of a Google Doc, which has a table with the word bad and feel, the definition and then a picture dictionary. So actually it's necessary for some people to be able to see a picture, to connect the words. Perhaps that's easier for them to read and understand when a picture's involved. But actually it's really useful if we've got students with English as an additional language. It's really useful that we can, as a teacher, highlight key words, click a button and then it makes a picture dictionary. That's really useful as a pre-teaching tool. You'll also notice it's got a notes thing at the end. Well, actually that's really useful as well, isn't it? Because they could then possibly put what it is in their language or what that word means to them or use it in a sentence. So the assistive technology then has gone from being an adaptation and a modification to help students to actually being a teaching and learning tool that benefits all our students. And so when I say it's on us to normalise this, it's on us to use this technology to explore different ways of representing material. And obviously there are other options out there and I'm just showing the ones that I had access to on my device. This in no way is a sales pitch on this. It's not actually plain, but it is a funny gift, this one, and it's a man magically trying to open the doors and automatic doors opening. And because of what I really think well with the glasses analogy as well is the automatic doors analogy. They are necessary that doors automatically open for some people, absolutely necessary. And interestingly, they were invented for people with push chairs more than people who were wheelchair users. But they're now super useful, especially in COVID times that we're not touching doors. They're super useful if your hands are full with shopping bags. So it's necessary for some useful for all and it is within our power to normalise all of this. One of my favourite examples is the electric toothbrush. And the electric toothbrush was designed to support those with fine motor skill challenges. People who physically struggle to brush their teeth. It's now actually more efficient at cleaning teeth than a manual toothbrush. So this is where the adaptation has become even more powerful than what it was, the need it was addressing in the beginning. And now a dentist will say to you, can you get an electric toothbrush rather than a manual one please? So we've normalised it so we can do it. And it is on us to find ways to do this as well. A couple of things that I think about when I think about teaching and learning and accessibility. I think about podcasts a lot. I think about physical reading materials a lot as well and paper based resources. I think about videos and I think about ebooks and reading materials as well. And I'm going to get you to go back into the slider at the minute and just have a little think about what might ring out to you as any accessibility features in a podcast, a video or an ebook that might be of benefit to students. And then I'll share my thoughts and we'll compare and contrast. So just having your mind a podcast, a video and an ebook and reading materials, why might that make things more accessible for some students? I'm going to take the physical reading materials myself as an example. So the physical reading materials, I actually think have accessibility in them and I think we write them off sometimes as well. But actually the reader can highlight directly on the document and some people need that physical activity of highlighting and it's important to recognise that even when people have a diagnosis and a recommendation of an adaptation that they might need that modifying again for their personal need. The reader can cut sections out to break information down. Not that you would cut a library book up but you could cut a newspaper or a printed article up to have a mood board to visualise ideas or where is this research going and how we would do that. But also the reader can share with a human support easily if it's a paper based resource and one of the most common adaptations that we assign to students sometimes is a human support. So I just wanted to say it doesn't have to be digital always but we have to normalise the way that we think about things and build a more inclusive way of learning. So I'd just love you to spend a couple of minutes while I grab a little swig of this and read Matthew's anecdote in the chat. Podcasts, videos, perhaps on YouTube specifically if that's easy for you to think of it in that frame and ebooks. What are the benefits of those for an accessibility point of view? So it's the same slider that you were in before with the same code. What features of a podcast video or ebook are necessary for some but useful for all? Think about it in that frame. Absolutely, Matthew, the zooming in and out of screens that's a great one. It is necessary for some and useful for all. So captions, transcripts, subtitles all these things. Replay speed, absolutely. Navigation and bookmarks, 100 ways. I love this one. The different ways people learn like to absorb information. Yet chapters, pause and replay, able to pause. Recognising the difference in people learning. I'm not going to say it back, but recognising that people learning different ways and this is necessary for some and useful for all. Adjusting the volume massively, sir. I have a hearing impairment, so I rely on captions massively. That is my life and adjusting volume as well. So if something doesn't have captions, I probably wouldn't watch it because the volume would just not work. Choosing pitch, change the font sizes, huge benefit. Subtitles, bookmarks, learning on the move. You've read my mind, that's one of my big ones that comes up when I share my thinking. Response change, listening on a bus. Massively so. Massively so. And recognising that sometimes it's an accessibility need but actually it's an inclusion need as well and including those who learn in different ways as well and in different locations. Learning outside the classroom as well. So I can see two people still typing. We'll just hang on, there we go. Access time to suit, that asynchronous and that flipped environment. Podcasts, learning doing something else, not confined to sitting at desk. Podcasts can be paused, absolutely 100%. Keep revising, that retrieval practice as well. So a couple of things that I had and these all came up as well. Thank you so much for contributing to that. Podcasts can actually replace a video element, something that would have traditionally been a video. Actually could we just download the audio transcript and send that to the student as well. I think that is useful if we have students with a challenge around visual impairment and important to recognise that we might be able to present things in a different way in a podcast than just giving them the video without the visual. We might change the way we present it when we're not doing it in a video or in a lecture style environment. We might change what we say, so important as well. Ability to pause and return to help with neurodiversity challenges in particular. Replace text elements for dyslexia challenges if you have a massive piece of research that students need to read. I mean, I think it's a great idea that you might want to record a podcast summarising some of that text. Sure, everyone should go read it and it's necessary for some that they will use a text-to-speech software but that should be really useful for everyone to hear what you think as the expert teacher in the room when you summarise and read those papers as well. We mentioned this one as well in the polling from Slider, freezer pounds for note taking. Thinking about that cognitive load, actually we're able to do two things at once in that multitasking. It's a lot harder to look up and down from a video on make notes. It's actually much easier just to have your headphones in and focus on that. Video specifically YouTube captions. Again, it might not be possible when face-to-face. I don't use sign language so if I'm in a live environment face-to-face a signer doesn't help for me so I very much rely on things being recorded that I can watch back with captions. I like to laugh at them getting things wrong as well. Ability to pause and return were discussed. That's Alexa answering as well. Chatted sections to break down information and that came up in there as well. Chaptering is massive in YouTube and it automatically does it. So if you do have a really long lecture that you're trying to get students to watch absolutely chatGPC is going to write me a summary of this video 100% and it will really help with that. YouTube will automatically chapter things but one of the things we sometimes forget about with YouTube is share from a specific time you know students watching a video that they've been required to watch and actually the magic happens for them at 2 minutes 23. We'll let them share from 2 minutes 23 and copy that link and paste it wherever they keep their revision notes so that next time they come to revise that concept they go straight to 2 minutes 23. It's necessary for some students who might lose focus or have an additional learning challenge but actually it's really useful for everyone. And again video free's of hands for note taking as well. Ebooks you can digitally highlight to help with neurodiversity challenges pause and return. Sport dyslexia by extracting quotes. One of my biggest things since I've come into this accessibility arena where I now am from my FE classroom is about copying down examples and extracting quotes and the strenuous load that happens when we ask students to do that. If we use digital materials or we use toolbars that allow texts to be extracted we remove that strenuous load and heavy lifting that students have to do in accessing those materials. And digital materials can also be shared with periods for collaboration and discussion as well. So we said we'd do 15 minutes on that and I went slightly over at 16. Apologies. But where to start so you're going sorry this is great but actually where do I start? Where do I get this information from? So a few websites that are really important to me. The first one is Common Sense Education. And I'm just going to skip into this tab here so we can open it. So Common Sense Education and we will have a look at this. Common Sense Education you can put a website in, you can put an app in and you can see what people think about it from an accessibility point of view. Is it useful for students? Is it useful for teaching and learning? And what do people think about it? So TikTok gets this rating the community rate is this but it has a privacy warning. So when we're thinking about an inclusive environment is that going to cause a challenge for some of our students because it has a privacy warning? You'll also find on Common Sense Education digital citizenship lessons which talk about how we can make digital tools more engaging and in the UK ones they go up to Year 12 and Year 13 so appropriate for some of FE in their secondary school but actually all of the lessons have family resources so if we're working with adult learners, if I just click on a Year 7 lesson about finding balance in a digital world all of them have family resources and family activities so if we are working with adult learners they're really appropriate as well. Another website that's really great is Learn to Enable so if you're thinking where do I start with accessibility and I want the real basics how do I share it with colleagues? I'm on board but how do I get others on board? If you go to Learn to Enable and you can get access to their posters and it's just got the real basics of accessibility just as a real nice highlight of what would be useful and all the things that we've talked about captions and transcripts as well and alt text included in there so Learn to Enable is really good you've obviously got Google and Microsoft themselves who offer accessibility advice as well and then one final website as well is includeedu.online so includeedu.online and I'll share these slides as soon as we're finished with Chloe as well Includeedu is a teacher generated bank of resources that have had an impact for students in teachers classrooms with learning challenges so you would have a little look for a student thinking about an additional learning need perhaps they've got a cognition challenge and perhaps it's around comprehension you can find solutions for Google, Microsoft or Apple and you can see apps that are recommended and suggested by teachers and the accessibility features built in that will help students with that challenge as well so those are just a few of the websites I would suggest and I'm conscious of time so I'm going to stop talking then hand back to Chloe Wow thank you so so much Sammy goodness me that was a whistle stop tour for a half an hour and I feel like I'm so glad that it was recorded because I'm going to have to go through and take a minute and take stock but I really appreciated how you modelled these things as you were working through them of course so thank you very very much everybody and like Sammy said we'll send resources out afterwards and we'll also send the recording out too so we've just hit half past two so I know folks may have meetings that they've got to whisk themselves away into but I can see lots of thank yous coming on in chat as well but I'm going to stop the recording