 Hey everyone and thanks for coming along. It's nice to see a decent sized audience here. This is really good. So there's a lot of other passionate people about accessibility. So my name is Christian and this is my wonderful colleague Danny here and we both head up the customer education engagement team at eCreators. Now basically what we're looking at doing today is just taking you through for the next 15 minutes, just a bit of a talk about accessibility and just to start making you think a little bit more about it. You know accessibility and the considerations around it isn't necessarily a really hard topic and it doesn't necessarily mean you need to spend hundreds of hours trying to make a site accessible but it's just really good to keep that in the back of your mind and to really think about that as well. So I'm just going to move on to my first slide here and it's just looking at this person is have you ever wondered how it may feel? You know have you ever sat back and sort of gone how might it feel to actually have a disability? You know this person sitting here not being able to see anything. Imagine what the internet would be like to us you know and scrolling through on our mobile phones if we were not able to see anything. And it leads me on to this little graphic here which is a similar sort of thing about you know a person asking a question saying hi could you please guide me to the checkout? And the person saying yeah it's over there and pointing to it. Well that doesn't really help does it? And that's the same sort of experience I suppose that we can get in a slightly different way from the internet though. You know if I do have an impairment of some sort like that what does it actually mean and how does that actually get portrayed to the end user there? So just a bit of a quote to have a look at there's two quotes I just wanted to cover off so just like what is accessibility and how does it play out in our world? So it means the ability of everyone regardless of their condition to have access to something so it might be the internet, it might be a transport system could be anything like that. So how does it all fit in? The other one that I really like is that it's important that the web is accessible to everyone in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. An accessible web can help people with disabilities participate more actively in society. And there's some pretty big things there. You know we are an inclusive world nowadays you can see how so many things that we do are changing that way and how can we all do that within our sites as well? And one of the things I just wanted to sort of as another sort of sample that I wanted to give you and this is something that started playing out a lot in my mind when we started looking at accessibility quite a while ago was that you know, what if I took a scenario you know those first scenarios were what if I had a disability? But what if I took a scenario like maybe closing all the doors into this room and making sure that I'd turn the internet off into this room? We are now actually disabled so to speak from the people who are outside this room. So disability accessibility so it isn't just about being a physical disability or not being able to see or not being able to hear but it can also be based off quite a lot of other factors as well. And that might be a sample there is that you know now whatever we're doing everybody else is completing the quiz and suddenly we've been cut off. So that might be considered as a bit of a disability for an accessibility reason. So that then leads me to okay so we actually have three types basically. So we have the permanent disability, a temporary disability. So as you can see up there it might just be something that's you know making it hard for us for a short period of time all that conditional or situational disability that we talk about. And from you know our point of view that's probably the largest one is people's connections, internet connections all those sort of things that play out for us that is actually considered a disability. You know I live in a remote area of Victoria not that remote but in the country anyway and so my internet connection might be a little bit different to everybody else that's in the city. You know at our workplace we've got super fast internet and that's considered still an accessibility reason that I really need to think about. So leading on from that is then the wirecaggy or what we call that accessibility is sort of basically framework that's come up. So that's the web content accessibility guidelines and these basically set out a structure and there's three tiers which I'll just quickly talk to in a minute to basically set out accessibility levels and how can we actually make things and content more accessible to our users there. So this slide just sort of talks through that. So they basically work towards a double A standard basically is what a lot of them work to and there's those three levels which I'll talk about in a minute as well. So a lot of you will probably hear about a lot of things to do when you look at accessibility I'll talk about that wirecag standards there. So that breaks down the levels here so basically it's in the three levels. So A is the lowest level, double A is the middle and most common level that most people are able to achieve within their environments and then triple A is the highest level. Now when we sort of talk about the levels you might sort of say okay well what is this a measure of and it's basically a big checklist to deem where you sit. So there's quite a lot of checklists and they are available online as well but for example I'll just read out one here. So an example of one of these checkpoints might be is to provide the text equivalent for every non-text element so that it might be like an alternate description for a photo or a video. It might be for graphical images, images or maps, animations, graphical buttons, sounds, those sort of things. So that might be one of the options that someone would actually tick it off against and if you met that okay well there's one part of it that you've now met. Level A is the lowest level and it's the easiest to achieve success of. Now you can achieve success at level A without having to change much of your design so it can just be like alternate descriptions and those sort of things. Triple A obviously is the hardest to achieve and as they say the W3C claims that most organizations won't actually be able to achieve triple A based off the fact that you end up having to compromise your design to actually be able to achieve that. So you end up finding that we've had a few people before who have actually had to have like a secondary site actually built and then that's actually being designed to meet that triple A because the designers had to change so much that their interactions and some of their graphics and that sort of stuff, they just can't simply have anymore. So that's sort of what we're talking about with those. So why consider accessibility? I've really got two points to do with that. One is just to give equal access to everybody like what I've already been talking about and the other one is that in a lot of cases there are laws around it as well and the laws basically work around the discrimination. So we talk about things like inaccessible web content discriminates against people with disabilities and things about also like additionally refusing to make a reasonable adjustment to a website so that its content is accessible can also be described as discrimination. So there's some things that do loosely sort of lie around the law with that as well. All right so when you're assessing accessibility it's a really good time to do it quite early on. So this might be when you're building a brand new site or when you're actually taking an existing site and redesigning it. It's a great time to do it at an early point and consider what level you want to achieve at the start rather than trying to make it up as you're going along because it is a bit harder to try and build it into something that's already being done and one of the samples that I was saying what we always practice with all our clients to is to do it through the storyboarding process. So when we sit down with the client and decide we're gonna develop a new site we'll talk to them okay what are your requirements around accessibility, what standard do we have to meet and then therefore we'll make those changes as we're going along and make sure that our design matches what's actually happening there. So really, really good to think about right from the start there and as it does say in that second point down there is that sometimes a knowledgeable human and their evaluation is required just to determine how your accessibility works. There's a couple of tools out there and Danny and I will both show you one or two of those things to just help you along and give you a bit of an idea but at the end of the day too it is good to have someone just checking over your slides at the end. So I'm gonna hand over to Danny now to show you a little bit about the accessibility and also what options you have in Moodle. So I'm gonna start off by giving you some examples of good and bad accessibility within Moodle. So I'm starting off with this screen where you can see the top image is very inaccessible. It's got very light background with white text which means that no one can really read it. So what good is it if you've got really great information and then no one can read what's on the screen. The same is with the next image where you've got a patterned background which distracts from the text in the top image and then beneath that you've got really dark text so that you've got that contrast. On this screen it looks like someone has just gone wild with the color palette where they've chosen every single color on the color palette which means you really, the end user doesn't have any structure to the page. They can't determine what's important versus what's not important. It may look pretty to some people but it's just not usable for the end user. In contrast to this one where there's a few colors that have been chosen, people can see the screen, the navigation of the page, they can see what's important versus what's not important. So they're just a few examples of good and bad accessibility in Moodle and now what can you do in Moodle to make your site more accessible? So we start off with being mindful of different internet connections. So you may have super fast internet connections which means your videos and your photos load really, really quickly but think about the people who are using dongles who are in remote areas or have really slow internet connections that may not be able to load those videos or those large images. We then come to what is the experience on different devices? So nowadays people are consuming content on their smartphones, on their tablets so they're not always at a computer which means is the experience going to be the same on a tablet or on a smartphone or another device as they would have on a computer. I think I've gone one too fast. Being mindful not to nullify what you've done to cater for accessibility. So you've gone to all this trouble to build something that's accessible, don't put something in the way that's going to stop people from using it. So it's like in this scenario where they've built a ramp for a wheelchair or people that have a disability and then go on and put pot plants in front. Consider your text choice or your font choice and your font styling. So you can have great information and then choose to use a size eight text with a really illegible font. So that's important too. Not using images that have text inside them because the read speakers can't use them. They can't access that text that's within that image so someone who's using an accessibility tool won't be able to read what's in that box. We then have alternative text for images. So Moodle will always ask you to put alternative text or a description in for your images. It's all too easy when you can't be bothered and you just wanna tick that description not necessary box but that means that someone who is using assistive technology won't actually be able to know what's in that image. We then come to having transcripts or closed caption for your video. So someone who's not able to hear the video, whether they have a hearing impairment or whether they just don't have access to sound won't actually know what's going on in the video without that transcript or those closed captions. The Addo editor in Moodle also comes with an accessibility checker which means once you've put in your content you can click the little person icon within the editor and it will notify you of any accessibility issues that you may have in that content. So in this case we've got really poor contrast between the background and the text so it's alerting you that you should go and change it. We then come to the HTML tag. So if you're using HTML to actually use the correct elements so that screen readers that can read web content are able to actually identify what the element is and they're also focusable and clickable. And lastly we have the ability to be able to navigate the page with a keyboard only so if someone can't use a mouse or doesn't have access to a mouse they're able to focus on all of the elements on the page and be able to identify them and click on them. So skipping over any of those would mean that someone loses access to an important piece of content that you might have. I'm gonna hand over to Christian who's gonna talk a little bit about Reed Speaker. Thanks Danny. Hopefully you've found a few little interesting points in that there's quite a few things that I quite like and take out that even just like in the AdO editor. A lot of us are using that editor as our primary one in Moodle and quite a lot of people will bring us and go what's the little man in there? What do I do with that? And it's things like I say and from what Danny showed you there's a lot of tools there that are already there for you. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't need to go out and buy thousands of dollars of software to make your content more accessible. But as you can see, if you're doing it as you're going along, it's a lot easier because you sort of are already putting it all into play as well. One other little thing I just wanted to touch on as you might have seen, Reed Speaker do have a stall outside here and they are really be into accessibility as well. They have a product which is called a web reader by Reed Speaker and that basically works towards double A compliance, YCAG double A compliance as I said there. And it's basically a really great assistance tool. So it's got the accessibility and the translation tools and it's basically a HTML object. You can actually put it into any of your text fields and get it to come up on any page. So in a lot of ways it'll read the text for you as well as a few other things that will actually pop up in the toolbar as well. So eCrad is a partner with Rich out there with Reed Speaker. So we certainly highly endorse that. And if you do want to know about it, a bit more about it, please feel free to go out and have a chat with Rich as well. It's a really nice product and it does touch on a lot of those things around the accessibility reasons there as well. So look, just to wrap up guys, what is accessibility? Why consider accessibility and what can you do is what we've been having a look at today. And I hope it's just given you some thoughts. You know, it's provoked a few things in there that you might think to yourself, all right, how can I go and tailor this? What can I do to make my site a little bit more accessible? Now we've got a couple of minutes for one or two questions if anybody has any. Otherwise, we're very happy to talk to you outside of this venue as well. Any questions at all? Yeah, I've got one up the back up there, yeah. We need like running music or something, like, you know. For that presentation, you mentioned about accessibility of choice of fonts. Do you have particular recommendations for fonts that are especially accessible? You jump in as well, but in a lot of cases, you know, they look at, you know, when you talk about, you know, in the cases they've talked about like printing fonts and that sort of stuff and you know, Times New Rome and those sort of things used to be the best for printing, whereas Arial and those, they used to make comments about them being the best for screen. I'd sort of stay away from particularly scriptive and cursive fonts, particularly on the web, and to stick more to those, and I'm not saying Arial's the only one, but those more type of fonts that aren't as cursive and scriptive. Is that, yeah, is that sort of, yeah, is that your feeling? Yeah, so that's roughly what I go off here. And one more over this side. Just a question on different text editors in Moodle, Ato and TinyMCE. I think TinyMCE has a range of different heading levels from H1 through to H6. So is there, thinking about heading structure, any thoughts about which one's better to use in that space? Well, they, a lot of the stuff, and again, please jump in, a lot of the stuff with the Ato editor was actually built more with accessibility in mind and that was why we sort of find that the Ato editor is a little bit limited of what some people will say is limited in their options because of that, because it has simplified things to be more consistent for screen readers and those sort of things. As some of you probably know in the Moodle Plugins directory, there are a lot of additional plugins for Ato editor so that you can bring colors and everything back into it again. But look, yeah, like Danny showed with those HTML tags and that sort of stuff, as long as we're still covering off with a lot of those heading tags, the screen readers can still read them okay. They can still understand them. So don't be afraid that you can't use them at all. But as you can see, the Ato editor does simplify things with that accessibility in mind. Cool. All right, well, I really appreciate your time, guys. It was lovely speaking with you and feel free to come and have a chat with us over at the Ecorator stand if you need any more info. Ta.