Tag Archives: accessibility

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Phygital is not a word, ever…. – Weeknote #221 – 26th May 2023

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Quite a busy week all in, including some time in London.

I liked this post by Lawrie on accessibility and inclusion: If you set a minimum standard…

The thing that we keep confusing is that accessibility is not the same thing as inclusion. In reality, we have not moved beyond the traditional concept of accessibility, something that is measurable, something we can benchmark, such as web accessibility “regulations” to a broader notion of inclusion. Accessibility has been a crucial stepping stone in creating environments that accommodate individuals with disabilities, but its language and approach can sometimes inadvertently complicate the goal of achieving true inclusion.

Talking about with a colleague about physical spaces, we discussed how ramps can make a building accessible, but doesn’t mean that the building is inclusive.

Wheelchair ramp
Image by Andrzej Rembowski from Pixabay

I was supporting colleagues interviewing for a position within their team. I haven’t done interviewing for a while now, so was an interesting experience.

There was quite a bit happening in the intelligent campus space this week. On Wednesday I was running the Intelligent Campus Community Event in London. Over 15 delegates attended the event, and there was lots of positive feedback.

Just wanted to say thanks for running that event yesterday – I thought it was very useful, also I was glad to make some new friends with similar interests!  You did a great job on running it!

On the same day, the Building the future intelligent library guide published on the web –  bringing together existing systems with innovative applications to improve learning, support the research lifecycle, enhance physical environments, and maximise resources.

To support the guide an Intelligent Library blog post published on the Jisc blog –  Libraries are the beating heart of every university and full of staff who are often proponents of digital-first thinking; so, they could take a leading role in exploring these exciting new avenues – deciding which technologies to adopt, how and why.

Library
Image by RHMemoria from Pixabay

On the same day as the Intelligent Campus Community Event I was also delivering  a presentation for the Advancing Blended Learning in Higher Education Event. I did a pre-recorded video for the event which was running at the same time as the community event.

I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being part of the event yesterday. Thanks for preparing such an engaging video. It was a really great addition to the event. 

Spent some time trying to resolve internal and external problems registering for ILTA EdTech Conference in Dublin next week, having had a paper accepted. The end result was, no resolution and no time, so had to withdraw my paper from the conference. The main problem for me was the short window from having my paper accepted and the date of the actual conference itself.

Have been writing up notes from the personalisation workshops I have been running over the last two weeks. Analysing content from workshops and formulating plan and next steps.

Started writing up notes from the intelligent campus community event as well.

Caught this tweet from Lawrie and responded with a GIF.

People have enough trouble having a shared understanding of terms such as hybrid we really don’t need to create new words such as phygital.

CrossCountry train at Cheltenham Spa Railway Station
CrossCountry train at Cheltenham Spa Railway Station

I have blogged about train wifi quite a bit in the past, I wrote this blog post in 2010.

I did wonder why CrossCountry Trains didn’t put in wifi as you find on the East Coast Main Line services and Virgin Trains Pendolino. Well it appears that providing wifi was part of their Franchise agreement with the Department of Transport. CrossCountry Trains was suppose to have wifi in place by November 11th 2009. They failed to meet this deadline!

I also asked about the lack of train wifi on First Great Western (now GWR).

My question though is much more, why isn’t there wifi on First Great Western services from the West Country to London and why wasn’t it in their franchise agreement? I travel with First Great Western much more than I do CrossCountry and would really like it if they had wifi.

Eventually both companies put wifi on their trains. However, the BBC published an article this week that said train wi-fi at risk as part of cost-cutting move.

Rail users could lose access to wi-fi on trains in England as part of cost cuts after the government said it was a low priority for passengers. The Department for Transport says cost pressures mean it will review whether the current wi-fi service “delivers the best possible value for money”.

Most times I travel by train these days I am more likely to use my own 4G or 5G connection as I still find train wifi unreliable. However I still think it should be on trains for those that don’t have their mobile connectivity.

A question for you to ponder this week.

What do you think is the difference between adaptive learning and responsive learning?

My top tweet this week was this one.

lilac23

Accessibility – what does it mean for libraries and education?

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I am attending the LILAC 2023 conference in Cambridge. I was last at LILAC delivering a keynote on digital capability when it was in Dublin in 2016.

The keynote on the second day was Accessibility – what does it mean for libraries and education?

Interestingly the session was pre-recorded in advance and the session on the day was a fully fledged Q&A session.

When you hear the word accessibility what initially comes to mind? What about accessibility in relation to libraries and education? How about how neurodivergent users in particular are impacted by accessibility, and their accessibility needs?
 
Accessibility is a broad area that in relation to education and libraries can cover access to and use of spaces, service design, access to and use of resources, digital accessibility and technologies, document design, and accessible approaches to teaching. 
 
Neurodivergent is a term that can be defined to mean people whose neurotype differs from those considered to be neurotypical, with all neurotypes sitting under the umbrella term of neurodiversity (Verywell Mind). Neurodivergent is an umbrella term itself that can be used when referring to, but not limited to, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, Tourette’s, OCD and more. 
 
This keynote speech will touch on some of the key accessibility issues impacting educational settings and libraries, with a particular focus on accessibility in the context of neurodivergency. It aims to encourage attendees to more consciously assess and explore your own personal accessibility practices and those of your workplace, in order to improve accessibility practices.

 I did a sketchnote of the Q&A session.

Sketchnote

I was a little depressed to see that accessibility is still an issue, despite years of discussion about this topic and how universities can make what they do more accessible. In many ways technology has made some of this much easier.

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End of term – Weeknote #198 – 16th December 2022

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This was my last working week of the year.

So though I had snow and cold weather in Berlin two weeks ago, it was even colder than that this week in the UK. In the South West we didn’t hit really cold temperatures, though I did experience -6°C one morning this week.

The week started with a Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting. Originally planned to take place in London, due to a range of unforeseen circumstances we moved the meeting online. It was really useful and interesting to hear about the challenges various universities across the UK are facing.

Some key headlines from the group were (and there are no real surprises here)

  • Personalisation
  • Learning Spaces
  • Assessment and feedback
  • Wellbeing analytics
  • Learning analytics
  • Curriculum analytics
  • Influencing government and regulators on blended learning
  • Importance of support for campus (intelligent campus)
  • Reviewing the curriculum
  • Culture change
  • Digital learning environment review

One thing they did want to see more of, which crossed all those areas was research based evidence to support any advice, guidance, products across those areas.

I asked ChatGTP, an artifical intelligence tool,  what is personalisation of learning was and this was the response. I think tools like this have their place and their uses, but as with any tool understanding what its potential is, is important in knowing how you can use it, and how others might use it.

Disappointed and rather saddened to see the way Twitter is going. Despite that, and though I didn’t plan to, I quite enjoyed the #LTHEChat this week. It was run by an old friend of mine Lilian Soon, and was on accessibility.

One topic which did generate discussion was that of document styles.

I really struggle with getting people to use styles and templates effectively. Most don’t see the point and actually prefer to bold and underline headings throughout their documents and presentations. This is fine for them, but as soon as you need to collaborate on a document, you find that you need to work hard to retain styles and consistent formatting through a document. It’s a similar thing with templates. In theory if you use styles and you change the formatting of the style, then all the instances of the style will be updated. Where people use formatting tools on the actual text, this then doesn’t happen.

Why are styles important, well they are critical for screen readers in navigating documents, but also if a student (or a member of staff) wants to change a document, then styles makes it really easy.

So why don’t people use styles and templates, I don’t know. Maybe it is too hard. I don’t think this is just a training issue.

Also it is not just styles, some people don’t do section breaks instead do lots of hard returns.

Typewriter
Image by Patrik Houštecký from Pixabay

In many of my presentations in the past I have talked about laptop bans, and then ask can I bring a typewriter?

It always gets a few laughs.

So you should not be surprised I laughed at this.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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e-Learning Stuff Podcast #089: The Xerte Community Day

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Ron

Recorded live at the Xerte Community Day at the University of Nottingham. We discuss what is Xerte and the impact it has on teaching and learning. Find out more about Xerte at nottingham.ac.uk/xerte

With James Clay and David Sugden, Dave Foord, Lilian Soon and Julie Harding with special guest Ron Mitchell.

This is the 89th e-Learning Stuff Podcast, The Xerte Community Day.

Download the podcast in mp3 format: The Xerte Community Day.

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes

app of the week, ipad, iphone, ipod touch

Dragon Dictation – iPhone App of the Week

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Dragon Dictation – iPhone App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at the various iPhone and iPad Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive. Though called iPhone App of the Week, most of these apps will work on the iPod touch or the iPad, some will be iPad only apps.

This week’s App is Dragon Dictation

Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon® NaturallySpeaking® that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages. In fact, it’s up to five (5) times faster than typing on the keyboard.

With Dragon Dictation you can also update your Facebook status, send notes and reminders to yourself, or Tweet to the world….all using your voice. So when you’re on-the-go, stop typing and start speaking – from short text messages to longer email messages, and anything in between.

Dragon Dictation currently supports both U.S. and U.K. English. Dragon Dictation will start supporting German language later this month, and will add support for French, Italian and Spanish languages later this year.

Free

I’ve had this App for a while now, but it has only been recently made available in the UK iTunes Store.

The version I was using only (really) responded to US English, this recently released version now supports UK English, so I no longer need to use a “fake” American accent!

What I like about this App is that is very quickly and easily transcribes what you are saying. It does require an internet connection as the transcription happens in the “cloud”.

This is very much how many people see the future of computing and the internet.

Your own device is quite simple, but is always connected. All the hard work and computing is down in the cloud, on other more powerful computers elsewhere.

This has advantages in terms of speed, but of course the main disadvantage is you will need to be connected to use this. Fine if you have free wifi or a decent 3G connection, obviously less so if you live in rural areas or all the wifi you can find costs money! In those kind of user scenarios you will need to probably buy a package for a laptop that does the transcription on the laptop.

So what of the actual transcription, well lets transcribe that previous paragraph. All you do is click the red button and say what you want transcribed.

This has advantages in terms of speed and of course the main disadvantage is you will need to be connected to use this fine if you have free Wi-Fi or do some freaky connection obviously less so if you remember when areas or all the Wi-Fi you can find cost money in this kind of user scenarios literally buy a package from laptop does this transcription on the laptop

If you speak slower, you do actually get a better result.

This has advantages in terms of speed, but of course the main disadvantage is that you will need to be connected to use this. Fine if you have free Wi-Fi or a decent 3G connection, obviously less so if you live in rural areas or all the Wi-Fi you can find costs money! In those kind of user scenarios you will need to probably buy a package for a laptop that does the transcription on that the laptop.

I also “spoke” the punctuation. As you can see there are only one or two errors. I also did in this quite a quiet room, so less background noise, try doing this in a noisy classroom and I suspect the results would not be as good.

At this stage you can go in and edit any errors or add text you forgot to say!

There is also an iPad version, and as this is an Universal App you only need to download one App to have both versions, one for the iPad and one for the iPhone.

If you want to use this on an iPod touch, you will need an external microphone.

Getting the text off is quite easy, either send as an SMS, e-mail it or copy it so you can then paste into another application or website. You can also link the App to social networks so you can use it to post Twitter and Facebook updates if you wish to.

This is a very good App and works really well.

Get Dragon Dictation in the iTunes Store.

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e-Learning Stuff Podcast #052: Universal Design for Learning

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What is universal design for learning? Designing your learning so that it is accessible for everyone. In a nutshell, good teaching.

We also talk (at the end during the credits) about my Skype problems…

James Clay, Lisa Valentine, Lilian Soon and Ron Mitchell.

This is the fifty second e-Learning Stuff Podcast, Universal Design for Learning

Download the podcast in mp3 format: Universal Design for Learning

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes

Shownotes

Photo source.

jisc

Accessibility

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Even a simple Word document is more accessible than a printed/written handout. With an electronic document, the learner can very quickly change the typeface, the colours (background and font) , the size of the text, it can also used with a screen reader

Using learning technologies can improve accessibility to learning content for a wider group of learners. Understanding how to present resources to ensure that they are accessible is important for all staff.

Well worth looking at the JISC TechDis website.

The JISC TechDis Service aims to be the leading educational advisory service, working across the UK, in the fields of accessibility and inclusion.

Our mission is to support the education sector in achieving greater accessibility and inclusion by stimulating innovation and providing expert advice and guidance on disability and technology.

There are some nice case studies on the JISC RSC YH Excellence in Inclusivity site.

Welcome to the JISC RSC YH Excellence in inclusivity portal which has been developed to help promote best practice and share knowledge to support enhanced inclusivity. This portal provides a simple route to accessing a range of case studies which show how inclusivity has been enhanced through the use of appropriate technology.