Digital Accessibility and Neurodiversity

Dafydd presenting to lecture theatreLast week we hosted the third of our Digital Accessibility events, this time with Dafydd Henke-Reed, Senior Accessibility Consultant with AbilityNet. Dafydd has been diagnosed with Autism and Dyslexia and spoke about his personal experiences of Neurodiversity.

Dafydd was engaging and open about his experiences growing up, going to University and the technology he uses day to day. From the very start he highlighted that Autism is a spectrum and that we were hearing what Neurodiversity means to him.

From Cognitive Brick Walls to being horrified when friendly lecturers asked him to move forward from the back row of a lecture theatre, we heard about the barriers and obstacles he had faced.

What stood out for me

 

“Dyslexia could be solved with tools; Autism was about learning how to thrive in a seemingly hostile culture.”

Dafydd had refused support related to Autism at University. Tactics such as large yellow “appropriate allowance when marking” stickers felt like a brand. This is pertinent; many students may not disclose their “disabilities” due to previous experience or because they find allowances intrusive or counterproductive. In fact, with conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder may not consider it a disability in the first case, it’s just the way they are. If we are to be truly inclusive, then we need to design our learning experience to remove barriers and everyone benefits.

“Come over for group study and we’ll get beers and Pizza in? Hell no!”

Dafydd spoke about how he found groups and teamwork challenging. He’ll use digital tools like Slack or instant messaging to communicate rather than walking to a colleague’s desk. He also praised electronic tickets (“I won’t lose them”)

He showed us the Speech to Text (STT) and Text to Speech (TTS) systems he uses every day along with the spelling correction functionality.

“Not good enough”

Dafydd will obsess about making things perfect. From essays with over 20 drafts to repeatedly painting his bathroom wall until a relative intervened to say it was fine, he needed regular feedback to help get past the compulsion to improve something.

Do’s and Don’ts

 

The excellent UK Gov “Do’s and Don’ts” guides were given a name check again, this time for Dyslexia and Autism. If you haven’t seen them, check out these lovely visual guide posters. I think they should be printed out in every office!

Government Designing for disability guides

We have one more session with AbilityNet left on the 5th February looking at Physical Impairment, still a handful of tickets left.

Digital Accessibility and Sight Impairment

Adi Latif from AbilityNet presenting on Sight Impairment.Last week we hosted the first of four Digital Accessibility sessions with AbilityNet, the UK charity supporting those with impairments or disability to use digital technology.

The first session focused on Sight Impairment and was presented by Adi Latif, an accessibility consultant with AbilityNet. Adi lost his sight in his teens as a result of a degenerative eye condition. Adi gave us a potted history of his experiences going into Higher Education and how technology had evolved and helped his journey since. From clunky archaic looking speaking watches to the Uber app, he painted a picture of the difficulties he’d had historically accessing the digital world and how he now uses tools to navigate both real life and online spaces.

It was humbling seeing him demonstrate how he uses assistive technology like screen readers or mobile phone apps to make sense of the world. The fact he was continuously slowing down the audio playback for these tools so we could understand the feedback really struck me. My experience of using screen reading tools to check over digital content I’ve created has been painful at best, with content read back at real time speeds. Adi appeared to be reading back at double time, if not faster.

Adi demonstrated some of the regular pitfalls sight impaired users come across accessing documents and covered some best practice to improve accessibility. He also covered just how awful an experience using a PDF file can be, essentially saying “Actually, if I hear a hyperlink say it’s a PDF I probably won’t open it”. After years of advising people to include a PDF it was slightly horrifying to learn that they are so inaccessible, and an alternative version should be included.

That makes sense when you consider that PDF is a format created for print, so is primarily concerned with creating an exact copy of the source material. I’ll certainly amend my practice on this front.

Adi discussed various ways to improve accessibility, from the Microsoft Accessibility Checker tool to Blackboard Ally.

This was a great first session with AbilityNet, we have three more to go focusing on:

We’ll be releasing some ‘Top Tips’ videos for each strand after the event. We’ll also try to make recordings of the sessions available.

If you would like to talk to the Digital Education Office team about Digital Accessibility, Blackboard Ally or just have related questions do feel free to contact us via:

Email: digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)117 42 83055 / internal: 83055

Digital Accessibility Events for 2019/20

The Digital Education Office are hosting a series of events focusing on Digital Accessibility. AbilityNet are running four sessions on individual accessibility needs. Speakers will share their lived experience of various conditions and impairments and discuss how these influence the way they access and consume digital content.

They will share their professional experience as Accessibility and Assistive Technology Professionals in supporting Disabled Learners in the context of accessing digital platforms and content.

The sessions will engage participants by developing their understanding of potential pitfalls when creating digital content and will include easy to consume guidance on creating accessible content for all audiences. Additional support videos and guidance will be provided after the events.

With new legislation requiring the University to ensure that all content published on websites, intranets or mobile apps is accessible, these talks offer a chance to learn how to improve the materials and content you create to support students learning.

 

You can find out more and book tickets for the individual sessions via the following links:

Digital Accessibility and Sight Impairment 30th October 2pm – 4pm

Digital Accessibility and Mental Health 13th November 2pm – 4pm

Digital Accessibility and Physical Impairment 4th December 2pm – 4pm

Digital Accessibility and Neurodiversity 15th December 2pm – 4pm

 

 

Deep linking for External users

A couple of years ago I created a simple tool to generate Deep Links into specific content areas of Blackboard courses or organisations. This works well for the majority of our Blackboard users who authenticate via Single Sign On.

Unfortunately this tool falls down when links are accessed by users with an ‘External’ account, typically students and staff outside of the university who need access to a course but do not have University accounts. Some work I’m currently supporting requires an easy way to signpost both UoB and External users from a website into related areas of a Blackboard course, so I’ve updated the tool to create an External User variant:

External Users Blackboard Deep Link Tool.

It’s quite niche, but I thought I’d share it in case it’s of use to University staff.

Video Case Study: Distance Library Skills Workshop and Induction with Collaborate

In this short video case study, Angela Joyce (Subject Librarian) and Dr Janet Orchard (School of Education) discuss their attempts to deliver Library Skills workshops to students at a partner institution in Hong Kong. Sometimes when trying new technologies things can go wrong, but with a bit of planning it’s OK to fail. Learning from the experience can help to make subsequent attempts a success.

Read more: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/digital-education/ideas/all/case-study-distance-library-skills-workshop-and-induction-with-collaborate/

Games and Simulation enhanced Learning (GSeL) Conference

GSeL Logo - 8bit style graphics.Last Thursday I caught the 8.44am cross country to Plymouth to attend the first Games and Simulation enhanced Learning (GSeL) Conference. GSeL is a newly formed interdisciplinary research theme group, part of Plymouth University’s Pedagogic Research Institute and Observatory (PedRIO).

VR Hackathon

Plymouth University 2nd November 2017

The main event was on Friday the 3rd, but a session billed for the previous day – ‘Hackathon: VR for Non-programmers’ sounded promising. So, I ventured down a day early to channel my inner geek. I’ve got a basic (but rusty) understanding of coding so hoped that the ‘non-programmers’ tagline was true. Turns out the session was well designed for those with little to no experience. Michael Straeubig expertly guided around 15 attendees with differing skills through the process of creating a simple VR equivalent of ‘Hello World’ over the course of 2 hours.

The Hackathon was a hands on workshop running through downloading a-frame framework template project files from Michael’s github, installing open source software atom.io for editing/coding.

Sounds complicated? Yeah, sort of – but Michael’s laid-back-whilst-enthusiastic delivery helped fill in the gaps and moved at a steady pace we could all keep up with. He guided us through creating our first scene, adding in various 3-dimensional objects, altering their size and colour. Setting up a local server on our laptops via atom.io, we were able to move beyond viewing the 3D space we’d programmed and view it on a pair of budget VR goggles (Google Cardboard) on our smartphones.

It was a great primer for dipping toes/feet/legs into creating simple VR spaces from scratch using free tools. The a-frame project files supplied had additional examples of how to extend and develop. I don’t mind admitting I spent a large part of the rest of the day tinkering. A Michael drily observed during the session, we’d become ‘cool coders’.

Games and Simulation enhanced Learning (GSeL) Conference

Plymouth University 3rd November 2017

A day of talks and workshops based around the use of Games and Simulations, both real-life and digital. Some personal highlights for me included:

Professor Nicola Whitton’s keynote ‘Play matters: exploring the pedagogic value of games and simulation’ which tapped eloquently into themes like Failing without Consequence and motivation/engagement through playing games.

Matthew Barr (University of Glasgow) ‘Playing games at University: the role of video games in higher education and beyond’ – a great talk about his work with ‘gaming groups’ and the benefits cooperative video game playing brought students. “If I ruled the world, every student would play Portal 2”.

James Moss (Imperial College) ‘Gamification: leveraging elements of game design in medical education’ – some brilliant examples of using scenario based games in medical education. ‘Stabed to Stable’ involved scenario/persona based learning, a horizontal whiteboard, post-it notes and pens, with students clustered around trying to map out processes (checks/actions) they needed to go through, whilst James periodically helped guide or threw related spanners into the works. An overhead time-lapse video showed a dynamic session in action. A second game involved teams becoming the ‘medical officer’ helping a team of characters climb Everest. This simulation included mountain noise recordings (incrementally getting louder), random wildcards presenting challenges, lighting changes and James squirting participants in the face with water.

Michael Parsons (University of South Wales) ‘Keeping it Real: Integrating Practitioners in a Public Relations Crisis Simulation’ – shared his experience running a real-time simulation for PR students. Students attempted to handle a recreation of the infamous Carnival Triumph ‘Poop Cruise’ in the University’s Hydra Minerva Suite. The simulation used news report recordings, archived social media posts and live interaction with actors via telephones over several ‘acts’ to simulate a PR teams attempts to handle a particularly disastrous voyage. It all went well till the passengers were close enough to land to get mobile phone reception (and access to social networks).

The conference presented a feast of examples of using games and simulations in teaching and learning. From creating crosswords to utilising digital badges to recognise achievements to data visualisation in Virtual Reality, the place was abuzz with ideas. The focus on the potential of play and gaming to engage students meant the event had something for everyone, whether die-hard techy or strictly analogue.

Tool for creating ‘Deep Links’ to a Blackboard Course/Organisation

Blackboard Deep Link Generator

A frequent question we’re asked at this time of year is ‘How can I link directly to a Blackboard Course?’

It’s something that can be done, but simply sending out a courses URL will only work if the recipient is logged in/authenticated. Often the use case for sending out direct links means that it’s really unlikely the user will be logged in, so they need to be prompted. Sending out an email that says ‘log into Blackboard and then come back and click this link’ is obviously a nonsense.

This is where ‘deep linking’ comes into play. By amending the URL and adding a bit of extra text at the beginning you can create a link that forces the user to sign in/authenticate and then redirect them to the desired course, bypassing the Blackboard Home page. Unfortunately processing a Bb URL in this way can feel like you’re dabbling in the dark arts.

We were asked about this yesterday, so I’ve re-purposed one of the tools I used to use to do it all for you. Click the link above to launch.

Note: This will only work for University of Bristol URLs, so external visitors will need to view source and amend themselves – you should only need to change the ‘prefix’ variable to your own institutions login pages. 

Designing and Evaluating Accessible Learning Experiences 

I attended an Accessibility in Education workshop in London last Wednesday (24th May).  Lisa Taylor-Sayles and Dr Eric Jensen presented two strands – design and evaluation.

Lisa’s presentations covered designing for accessibility and inclusivity. Her focus was on Universal Design for Learning (UDL).  Designing learning experiences fit for everyone, regardless of their needs.

She began with a potted history, WW2 veterans returning with disabling injuries. This led to changes in approach to town planning, infrastructure, and assistive technology. Later the principles of Universal Design developed into the Three Principles for UDL.

Read more about the Seven Principles for Universal Design here.

Read more about the Three Principles for Universal Design for Learning

Lisa gave practical advice on small changes that build to improve learning experiences. Simple steps such as using a tool to check colours benefit everyone. Rather than assuming you’ll retrofit for accessibility if needed, you increase inclusivity.

This approach dovetailed well with Eric’s strand which focussed on effective evaluation. He covered Formative evaluation, surveys and qualitative methods such as Empowerment Evaluation. Eric gave real life examples of where he’s used these approaches in his work (and what works and doesn’t).

Sessions and workshops alternated between the two strands, keeping it fresh. For me this also helped cement the need for evaluation needs to be core to any learning design. Would definitely recommend the event if it’s repeated.

https://www.methodsforchange.org/designing-evaluating-accessible-learning-experiences/

Digital Literacy – An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief

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A new Horizon Project Report from NMC focuses on how classroom instruction/education can create digitally literate students (and by default staff).

NMC Releases Horizon Project Strategic Brief on Digital Literacy

“While institutions have become more adept at integrating emerging technologies, our survey data revealed that there is still a lot of work to be done around improving digital literacy for students and faculty,”