Lunch and Learn about Accessibility

Transcript 

Introduction

Ryan Hazen: All right, Well, first of all, I’d like to start by introducing myself, and the institution that I work for Moodle US. We are services oriented company that operates under Moodle headquarters so Gavin if you show that next slide, some housekeeping first of all our time limit is a maximum of 45 minutes. Make sure you introduce yourself in the chat, feel free to submit  questions during the presentation through the q and a, and both recording and transcript links have been shared Gavin just put it there in the chat again. And once the recording is done, we will share that with you directly. 

So talk a little bit about Moodle US – we are merger of three respected US based Moodle partners, My Learning Consultants, Moonami Learning Solutions and E learning Experts. We are a Moodle owned entity, and we’re focused on providing services to enable our customers to build the best online learning experiences in the world.

So, whereas Moodle Australia and Moodle Spain have been focused on maintaining the products. Where Moodle US is really focused on providing services to support folks that are using those products all over the world.I’ll tell you a little bit about our services, as we skip them. Oh, there we go.

First of all, we’re very bespoke consulting organisation. We very much work with our clients so identify their unique needs and then we scale our level of support to suit the specific requirements of our of our clients we offer hosting. We offer learning design and we offer custom development. So, if you need support in Moodle.

For these items. We are here specifically to provide that support so very much a flexible and scalable partner in your online learning development and deployment, so I’ll tell you a little bit about myself and then I’ll introduce my compatriots here I’m a learning designer for Moodle US I worked in education corporate government and nonprofit sectors.

My name is Ryan Hazen. I’m the chief engineer of the mountain moot, if anybody’s ever come to the mountain moot and also I’m the vice president of the Northwest managers of educational technology. I presented on active engagement faculty development and online course design and multiple different contacts over the, over the years, and I, formerly was a higher education instructional technologist, I was a public school teacher and for those in the US that are service minded I was an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer I’m always very proud of that national service angle in my history so I am joined today by Gavin Henrick and Laia Canet from Brickfield Education Labs, like to turn it over to, I think, Gavin first introduced himself. So Gavin take it away.

Gavin I’m not hearing you there are you muted.

Gavin Henrick: Oh, there we go, sorry it’s while I was drinking the water so my name is Gavin Henrick. I’m the CEO and co founder of Brickfield Education Labs. I use he/him pronouns. I’m a big white man in my late 40s of English and Irish the sense of long brown hair in a ponytail and a greying beard. I’m sitting here at my desk in my home office in Dublin in Ireland.

Laia Canet: Hi, my name is Laia Canet, I’m from Barcelona, Spain, and I am a consultant, I’ve been working with Moodle Since 2005 quite a long time. And I’ve been working as a teacher and in different roles related to Moodle. I’ve been working with Moodle partners to in here in Spain. And I am I hold also an MEC.

Gavin Henrick: Thank you very much Laia. So, Just very quickly to explain Brickfield Labs,

We are from Brickfield Labs, it is a two and a half year old company, myself and Karen Holland co founder, set it up after we left Moodle two years ago.And we focus on accessibility and our philosophy around accessibility is very specific it’s about trying to fix and future proof it’s about  finding the issues that are in the Moodle courses and in the Moodle content like inside the Moodle quiz questions. And then helping the teachers fixed us, and both fix them, but also to help the remediation of that as well, of the documents and creating alternate formats and under future proofing were long term most of our effort will be about making Moodle more accessible more usable by teachers on by students.We had a quote from one of the conferences, we were at earlier in the year or one that we held run where a student said their ideal is where the system just works the way they want it, so they don’t get reminded that they have a disability.And that really is where we’re hoping to help Moodle course design and Moodle course content go to where it’s providing all the formats for everybody that’s needed so they can just use it the way they are.

So Ryan and I guess back to you with.

What is Accessibility, WCAG, Moodle and Some Tips and Tricks… 

Ryan Hazen: Well, first of all, before we get into this chart here I’m curious. Gavin if you could sort of orient us. Let’s define accessibility. From the outset, how would you define accessibility?

Gavin Henrick: Gosh. Well, the technical way in a practical way and for me the practical way is that accessibility is about making the web work for everyone.Maybe it’s not simple, but not creating barriers. If you choose to do a webinar and choose not to have even the autotranscript, then you’re making a choice to create a barrier for some and it was an interesting study where 73% of students and learners were using subtitles or auto captions during or while watching videos and, and it wasn’t all because of a disability, sometimes it was because they didn’t have English as a first language if it was English they were watching. Sometimes they were in a noisy place or didn’t have headphones. Do as many many reasons for it.

And sorry if I speak quickly and the transcription doesn’t catch my words I do try to focus on that. 

And so yeah so it’s about not creating barriers,  and it’s about making it usable for everyone.I think that’s key.

Ryan Hazen: So let’s talk about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, what are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, usually shorten to  WCAG, so tell us, tell us a little bit about those.

Gavin Henrick: Well these are a community created set of guidelines around. The best way to create content for making it usable by everybody. So, does it are broken into different areas and they’ve got different specific technical rules.Some of what you need technical ability to understand some of which you don’t. Having good heading structures, you don’t. Following the correct Heading, Heading One, two and three. Not using colour alone for meaning, these are these are simple things, but it is about a set of guidelines that are being created to make content usable by everybody. So if you have an image, and it’s not decorative correctly explaining it in text, or if it’s really complex in a full description.

So yeah, it’s just, it’s a bit technical, but primarily it’s about usage it’s about making everything usable.And I think that’s the key you know people get hung up on it being this technical checklist I must follow all of this, you know, if you start off with the idea I want everyone to be early users.

That’s the place to start. But accessibility is a journey and that’s the other parts of what is accessibility institutions and individuals are on a journey to improve accessibility and what they do, whether it’s sending emails, creating content and Moodle. You know, as long as tomorrow’s better than today you’re going in the right direction.

Ryan Hazen:  So, yeah, that’s a good approach. I think that, and WCAG guidelines reflect that they are constantly evolving there’s new, new guidelines and new standards for us to, to keep in mind that is definitely a growing changing thing.

So let’s take a look at that chart. I did a little research in advance so this, and one of the things that I was interested in was using this Google Trends tool to see how interested people are in these different kinds of topics so on the screen right now is a graph that shows interest over time in the search topics Accessibility, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Neurodiversity. the accessibility line is very high, all the way through the 

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines has remained fairly steady at a low level and then neuro diversity.

Take takes off is barely registers but then it takes off, starting in 2020. Sometime around March, so. Gavin, do you want to give us impressions of this what’s, what’s going on here. How do you explain this.

Gavin Henrick: Well, I think there’s a few things. One, people have understood accessibility is important for a while, and they don’t. The technical people might be looking at web content, guidelines. But people in general are looking for accessibility. So one of the first things is we need to make those guidelines more accessible, more digestible by people.

So when they  do start doing that they understand that more.With regard to neuro diversity, I think there’s been a greater increase in awareness of the importance of neuro diversity and supporting it because of covid. I mean I think that’s probably where everyone suddenly went online and having to design content, where before they might have only done a little bit online, supporting the face to face now they’re all online and they’re, they’re just struggling to understand

And in institutions and staff wanting to support. Everybody, and it is again, bring it back to its making the web work for everyone.

Ryan Hazen: Yeah, let’s take a look at this next chart here. I think it really hones in on something that you pointed out on this chart we have neuro diversity and distance education. It’s a line graph and it tracks interest since January 5 2020, and we have two major spikes in the term Distance Education one is in March 2020, and the other is in August. 2020 So, but plotted against that we see that, while Distance Education had major spikes and interest at those particular times, Neuro diversity as a topic of interest for folks searching the web has grown steadily over time and actually is showing more interest right now. Then distance education so Gavin, what do you what do you make of this.

Gavin Henrick: Well, unfortunately I think we’re going to get another spike rather soon. That’s the first thing I’ll make from it. This isn’t going away. So, but clearly.

The first jump online, everyone started looking up and understanding distance education or trying to, and then going back to college. It happened again. But it was a steady increase in an understanding again around neuro diversity, and it is important you know when you what’s better for people who are trying to understand where they are and how they how they will learn and the best way to have content for them themselves and that’s where UDL comes in and supporting the universal design for learning.

But I think this just, it can be a steady increase over time though it’s not going to go down, because as people become more aware of themselves, and as actors become more aware, they’re going to try and learn more.

But yeah, this education people think they sort of got it, and tails off but I think we’re going to see spikes again because yeah. Unfortunately I don’t think this pandemic is gone in any way at all.

Ryan Hazen: Yeah, I don’t think so either. And I think that, you know, seeing renewed consistent interest in both accessibility neuro diversity and the web content guidelines is hugely important for us right now and I think important to understand why Brickfield is providing the services that you’re providing at the time that you’re providing them 

Gavin Henrick: so I could do is jump in there so does the question I’m just gonna answer now anyway. Someone says how is neurodiversity being defined in the charts. So can you explain how you created the charts, please. 

Ryan Hazen: So I use a tool  called Google Trends. And they have certain topics that include not just the search term neuro diversity but terms that are related to it. And I would define neuro diversity, generally, as the acknowledgement that folks have different ways of interacting and acquiring information and interacting with one another.

So, whereas in it’s not specifically restricted to disabilities, I think it’s really important to, to make that acknowledgement that neuro diversity exists. Sure, and folks that have that are on the autism spectrum for folks that have dyslexia, but also for folks that don’t have any diagnosed disability at all just have a that are better at in taking information in one way or another.

There’s a much better different definition out there for neuro diversity but I that’s, that’s the quick, the quick explanation that I have for what you know what Google is going to call neuro diversity. That’s an excellent, excellent question. Thanks for bringing that up.

I could do these Google Trends charts all day that’s fascinating tool I encourage everybody to go play with it.

But those, are the only two I’m going to make you make you look at right now so Gavin if you’re if you’re ready I think we can move on this. 

So, just so clearly we have a lot of interest in these topics, educators, and folks of all walks of life frankly are becoming more aware of accessibility on the web. And there they are concerned, we have a lot of people here in this webinar, to learn about it. And I speak to educators every day and one of their big questions is, how do I make sure that I’m making accessible content.

So, let’s sort of zoom in here and focus on web content accessibility in Moodle. Broadly speaking, Gavin, as the expert in the room or one of the experts in the room. What are some things that web content accessibility novices teaching and Moodle need to consider.

Gavin Henrick: Okay, well, let’s say before content they need to consider the actual course that to go into building and I think I’ll get Laia to answer this. So what’s your view Laia? What are the first steps that teachers need to make to have their courses, accessible?

Laia Canet: It’s an interesting question because teachers need to understand that everything, every this decision 

they take make right over here, may create a difficulty for other people. So, we have to remember that there are many types of disabilities – some of them are invisible to us. We don’t know if there is someone with specific problem or that needs something specific for to have to learn them better.

So I think having accessibility in mind is really important in two stages. The first of all is when the when we are designer, when we are designing a course. We take lots of decisions as teachers that imply the ways that students will work, will doactivities. So creating a good course design is really important. For example, the universal design for learning framework is really interesting. Provides teachers with different tools, resources and ideas to, to create lists and their courses,If you don’t know about the universal design of learning the UDL framework, I would recommend you to have a look at it. 

And the second step or the big challenge I think it’s to create accessible content. Once we design accessible and inclusive activities for everyone. We should ensure that we create also accessible content. It’s really important that the content is well structured.

And we have some specific issues, some specific aspects like some for example, at images with description, all the videos with, with captions as you mentioned before, the use of all are there are lots of things that are important. And I will also recommend first point, that would be that accessibility is like we need we have to create accessibility literacy to. I mean,  that our students will be the future content creators. So it’s important that they also learn how to create accessible content how to use properly, the different tools, and in an accessible way. So accessible way. So I think it’s not only a matter for teachers but also for student. 

Ryan Hazen:  Laia that is a great point. One of the things that I have been working with recently. Since the pandemic, especially our teachers who never took an online course  are now teaching online and it’s important, it’s very difficult for a teacher to model good practices when they haven’t had those models to them. So it’s important to acknowledge that our teachers today are doing something that they never saw their teachers do before. And they, that’s, that’s why you know we have such interest in this and.

So let’s try and make it really easy for folks here to visualize what it is they need to do for accessibility so specific, do you have and Laia Do you have any specific tips regarding course content, in particular, like what are concrete things I can do. 

Laia Canet: Yeah, sure. For example, one, maybe it’s not the first, the first thing about the structure, your all your content structure your course structure. It has to be consistent. We can’t be using different ways of accessing them for information or contents. It’s important to use the same structure. Why, because students will get used to it, it would be easier for them. There are people with some problems with short term memory. So, having the same structure makes easier to be familiar with contents and with the whole course works. Also another interesting and really easy thing to do is using headings, getting the structure, we can use the headings to differentiate, what are the titles and what is the content. And also we can have, we can use different types of headings so we can create a structure. hierarchical structure, it’s really easy to do that it’s not so difficult so we can do it, just from today.

Other things about text when we use when we, when we create content in and out for the web or in Moodle with a text editor, or even with documents. It’s important. Simple things like colour contest for example, it has to be relevant.nIf we have a white background, and we use a colour for the, for the text, very green or something like that. It would be difficult to read. Okay, what else. another simple thing.

Lists when we play at least when we create lists. Don’t use an asterisk or, or a dash whatever, use the specific tools, why?It’s easy to answer because if someone is using a screen reader, it would be easier to identify that it is at least. If not, it could be confused as content as text. Okay so, with using the tools properly. We can create more accessible content, we can help to not to create more but he has to our students other things for example with links. We are not helping people, people using screen readers, because one of the ways to to move from one place to the other is using the link least if all the links are click here, Screen reader  users will have click here click here click here they don’t know where the click here link goes. You’re so it’s really important to describe the contents, where this link is going to. And I know the another, another interesting issue is about open links in the window. I think Gavin has an opinion about that.

Gavin Henrick: Oh yeah. So, for years, people were going yet. If you’re going to have a link going to somewhere else apart from opening a new window for the six really good reasons why you should never ever do this, except in very specific circumstances like launching an app I mean, one of them is, people are using device that is acting as a terminal. They’ve one tab, one window, put them into a new window they literally just lose themselves that’s lost one of the most used features of a browser is the Back button. If they can click back you’ve literally created a barrier by doing so, for everybody and that’s everybody.

And then you have people who are using mobile devices if you’re like me and you love your mobile phone, going between tabs on a mobile phone is like just horrible. You know, you go from one window. It’s not necessarily the previous tab in the list and you end up on hundreds of them navigating between them as I don’t know like juggling rice, you know, it just falls through your fingers.

And that doesn’t start to get to them when you’re talking about Okay, so what about people who will get confused where they are, but people with short term memory, or people who are using a screen reader, they, they can click back so we’ll deal with thatlater and how we deal with it and our platform but yeah, It’s a bugbear of mine people just say, oh, but we like doing that. Yeah, that’s fine, but not fine for everybody else.

Sorry.

Ryan Hazen: Well one of the things you know you mentioned headers and one of the things that changed

the way that I look at the web was actually watching someone using a screen reader to navigate a website, it made sense that I realized I didn’t even know this about myself, I don’t read every word on the page. So why should someone with a screen reader have to hear every word on the page. I look for the headers. And then I choose the header that has the information I want to read and then I read the piece of information

below that header I don’t read everything there. I just scan the headers very quickly, and I look for the look for the piece of information I need, and if you don’t have a header structure that makes sense.

People with screen readers are not able to do that. Same thing with the links. I’d like to know where links are going, and you know I could read the text around them, but it’s much better  if the link itself describes what it is you’re going to get if you follow that link.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s watching someone use the screen right here if you have the opportunity and someone’s willing to share that experience with you, absolutely do it, it will change the way that you look at the web. So Moodle is an open source project. It’s the most popular LMS in the world. And it releases new versions every six months. Are there differences between how different versions of Moodle address accessibility issues.

Gavin Henrick: Yeah, so, as people may or may not know Moodle 310 got certified with, and then 2.1 guidelines which was great. They did a huge amount of work and really improved the thing with 20 separate 

pages our interfaces was already good but it was much better now, which is awesome. And I believe they’re going to be redoing our certification yearly.

Also they did the same with the mobile app, and I think it is important to realize that, you know, you have to check. Is there a reason to upgrade and although a lot of people are on 3.9 and I generally recommend people to say on the long term support that they don’t want the stress of upgrading I’m every year, every six months. 310 did have a lot of good accessibility improvements.

So yeah, I think it’s a challenge you need to check if you need to upgrade or not and understand that because one of the other things is when things change in the interface, you’re not going to be liable to confuse people again and Moodle is going through quite a lot of interface change at the moment. and some of the four zero stuff looks great. It’s going to be a big difference for people. It might be something I mean I love, I love where they’re going, 

it’s going to be certainly something that I want to see that journey, because you don’t want things chopping and changing and too many releases there was some changes on chorus page and 3.11. That’s enhanced and 4.0 and probably in for one so really excited to see where they’re going, but you have to be consistent consistency.

There’s a bit of research done on one of the UK universities about that. And it was about consistency in course design, although some  people might say after all the same it’s boring actually after all the same, then it’s easier for students.

Ryan Hazen: Well I’m having conversations daily about change management in advance of 4.0 with institutions that I work with because when you change the interface. It changes for everyone. And so, you know, making sure that you don’t interrupt workflows that are in place like what you say about and making choices makes a lot of sense to me, just you know my personal work so that’s a that’s a really good,really, really good point.

So what is Moodle do to help teachers deliver accessible content.

Gavin Henrick: Well, if you remember way back the introduced athletic, remove a lot of those features, which was a good start, hasn’t really been updated and I think tinyMCE is slightly ahead of that we made some changes in three nine to make it better for adding images and that kind of thing. and.

And what we do in our own product is we take that little step further. But yeah, it’s the editor was a big part of it.

But one of the things is the consistency of the course formats is one of the big ones. But apart from that, in 3.11, we contributed  our starter version of our product in Brickfield into Moodle 3.11 that gives organizations and insight into some of the potential problems that they might have with accessible content. So that’s it’s wonderful working with Moodle even though we left  Moodle having been there for three and a half years. 

We’re going to keep contributing with the Moodle community is just a privilege, it’s absolute privilege it’s something that we get heavily motivated every day, and there’s about 800 organizations using our products now, and that’s just amazing.It’s great and all over the world, organizations of different types. Great. And so yeah so that having it in Moodle is is wonderful. And people try it, and they come and chat to us about what our extra product does are the dark paid product.

So yeah i think it’s about having a good editor, and it’s also having a checker to help support. It’s really important you know, accessibility is a journey. Every teacher course creators on a journey from where they are now to better accessibility, as an institutions on that journey, and you need to support them on the journey. Don’t beat them up about it. You know, they need to improve and you educate them about the why. I think that’s really important. But realize we’re all on that journey and improving what we do.It’s like using the zoom captions and using the PowerPoint live, there’s specific reasons for this.

Ryan Hazen: And that’s, that’s I’m glad you brought that up that’s one of the services that we offer at Moodle US through our consulting and services is working we can work directly with faculty to develop their skills, not only in an accessible content deliverybut also in new and interesting pedagogical models and increasing student engagement online. This one of the things that I’m personally really excited about as a learning designer.And I just wanted to say that when I saw that the Brickfield Starter was going to be included in Moodle core and 3.11 I was very excited.  Thank you so much for making that contribution it’s really important to the community. And not just for the folks that that use screen reader but everybody.

It’s that one of the things about accessible content design is that improves the accessibility of the content for everyone, regardless of ability status, I’ve really noticed that practicing accessible, of course design Over time. 

Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit Demonstration

Gavin Henrick: For those who are listening  we’re looking at a Moodle course in zoom. In Boost its a Moodle 3.9 site, we’re looking at a course page laid out in the topic format and on the right hand side we have our accessibility review block. It’s a bit like to Starter one but it’s more functionality in it. We group the errors, 

which the system finds into six topics of image, layout, link , media, table and text. And then we tell them how many errors, there are in this case for example to 16 with links. Now some people will certainly have said to me and training sessions going Gavin, how can I have 16 hours what links, it’s not rocket science. I’m going no it’s not rocket science. But, you know, there can be issues so one of the things we support within our tool is a bit more performance support. So we provide tips we provide in application direction and the why. One of the things like don’t use all caps and links are  Provide a text warning. If the actual links going to open a window, using plain concise consistent language so this the pop up window, providing those links and these are all language strings, so they can get converted. And just cancel out of that. So that’s when you click on one of the guide buttons.  The teacher can download transcript to print out if they want summarizing the various issues that they might have. 

We also have a heat map which you’re just changing how this works actually at the moment where it provides a colour and icon and text, explaining if a label or a different instance of resources have passed or not.

In this case, there’s a page called testing, which has four arrows on it, which is 3% of all of the checks that were done. So I’m just toggling that off. So I think it’s, it’s about providing that first review of where they are. 

And if they go you know what I’d like to try and solve some of these issues, so they can click into our dashboard.

And this our dashboard which shows all of the different errors that the system has found. And how many of them so if we go down to some of those link ones earlier link text should be descriptive and provide context about its destination so this is the fourth one. And if they want to go okay I don’t understand what descriptive is. So we provide a context we provide a summary and the impact. So if a link is not descriptive enough users of screen readers cannot determine the destination contents and importance. And so these are the kinds of things that they need to understand that they’re not going to do a training session if some people are aware of the concept of sheep dip training where you got you dip your sheep at the beginning of the year and then it’s healthy and it won’t get bugs for the rest of the year, people do that with training, where they train them at the beginning of the year and hope they remember it by the end of May, when they need to use it. So, this the same thing. Having that material available to them at the point of use is fundamentally important to supporting staff, and not just beating them up.

So then we go in and we go okay so they can get a list of all of the issues, but for a number of these we’ve got eight at the moment I think nine actually move our roadmap of 16,000 total, but these are tools to help fix it.

So someone asked about it linked earlier. Here we go. So this now showing a report that was a tool called bulk fixing and seven errors in this course. And we have four columns, where is the name of the resource, where it is.

And then the existence of HTML code so the link text. Someone put it in the actual URL to the web page as the text, as well as the actual URL where it’s going to go with you as the link, and this bad because a screen reader will have to realise, https https colon forward slash forward slash www dot RTE dot IE for something short, you might say thats not problematic. If you go or so anyway we will come back to the variation, so here that link text, we suggest they change it to the actual name of the website,  which in this caseis RTE Irelands national Television and radio broadcaster, because that’s the name of the website, so we off and get that and recommend to them, they get the same recommendation when they’re adding a link in our version of the editor plugin.

And then here, there’s a link to a Google Doc. Now if you were reading on this Google doc and I’m going to read it out a bit of it. It’s like https colon forward slash forward slash dot google dot com slash documents slash D slash one s y w x six seven and it keeps going. This not good. So you should never use the link, pretty much, sometimes you can, if they’re short, and the words. But you, and you shouldn’t be using Click Here are some phrases similar to that.  So in this case that Google Doc is the guide to writing forum posts, and it’s a Google Docs file so we go and get that name. If it’s publicly available. It’s about supporting teachers they’re learning by doing.

As well as understanding the impact. And we have a number of these we have another one for adding in an image outtakes these are all the images that don’t have ALT text in them and of course, we have a thing for column report and name this it a book is in the course Romedoes an image here, and of archaeological site in Rome. And then there’s an option for them to input a text area of the description, and they can do it in both and that’s the key thing here.You don’t have to go and find everyone they can do it in bulk, and triage to get through these.

It’s about supporting the teacher, it’s not just saying hey you got those issues or fix them. Hey, we’re going to help you on that journey. 

We’re going to jumpstart you on that journey. And Just And just in case they do something and they make a mistake. Moodle doesn’t have it on do we do.So I’ve just clicked on both fixed log, where does a log of these entries and  it kept for a period of time, and they can click on restore to undo.

One of the changes that they’ve made.I think that’s really important to understand that when you’re, it is about supporting those teachers to remove that fear to hold our hands on that journey to get to where they want to go.

Now in on the other side of this we’ve got various reports I’ll just jump into that.

And so for example here I’m looking at the activity breakdown for the course, and it lists all of the different activities or content areas along the bottom, and one of them for example page two of the pages is passed, and nine of them have failed being one or more errors found in the content. You’re the ones which have failed we see here forum so we have incorporated some of the third party plugins and are searching. We have a forum here one failed with two passed and a book one passed and one failed so this about providing those insights and we’ve got a number of other ones I’m only giving a very quick demo at the moment.

If you’ve got questions we’ll tackle all of them in a moment. And one of those things just want to show you is when we talked about open a new window. Well, so I’ve just gone into a page and I’m clicking on a link that has open in a new window, and it’s cold. And here we actually intercepts that request, and we give the students the choice. Do you want to open in  the same window. The new window, or cancel, it’s empowering the students.

I think that’s really important. 

There’s a lot more stuff that we can go into but I’ll just show you one more aspect, and that has to do with our file conversion so if your teachers have uploaded PDFs, a student wants to listen to them. Well, they can go in here and they can click on the icon which is a little our logo colours, spinning. It doesn’t spend it used to. But we remove that. So in the pop up I can choose the convergent type in this case I’m choosing audio. And I’m choosing a different speed. So I can choose slower, and then I can request that it sends off to get a notification when it’s ready and they can download it. Or if it’s already done, then we can just click Request, and it will be downloaded and play to them. Until we convert any of the file resources. So I’m just going to stop that we’ve got loads of questions there. We don’t want to run too late. 

Ryan Hazen: So, I while you’re looking at those questions I just want to point out how much I like the orientation to accessibility as a journey and that Brickfield is really a partner with the faculty rather than you know the accessibility police and the United States in particular, there’s often a lot of anxiety around providing accessible content and it feels like something that we’re doing. 

In some cases, to me, regulations, rather than having the end user in mind, which I think Brickfield does a really goodjob of helping us see that you know this about the student, this about their experience and their agency and empowering them to access content, the way that they most effectively adjusted and are able to ingest it so yeah that working with teachers and that’s the same consultative approach that we take a little us as an ongoing longitudinal relationship rather than just  training at the  beginning of the year and just hope everybody hope everybody gets it it’s an ongoing process so I really appreciate that orientation.

Q&A and Discussion 

Gavin Henrick: Hey, yeah okay yeah that’s it. So I have a question here from Meredith – I’m an instructional designer We try to educate faculty to be proactive with accessibility but we see many legacy courses that need a lot of work. How do you recommend running accessibility checks on Moodle resources and activities for a full course, they use Ally for documents,  but that’s kind of limited so yeah would you respond to that.

Well the first thing is, unless people really know how to make accessible documents which most people haven’t been through those training courses and learn how to do the Adobe checking the documents are going to be bad somewhere between. Not good. 

So, our system doesn’t check the documents we check all the HTML. It’s the assessment, all of those aspects it’s built in Moodle.For that reason, so that’s why we chose to focus on that area first, but then we have the document conversion So you saw seven options for audio, you’ve got multiple options for Braille the same with Daisy. mobi and an ePub for ebooks that kind of thing so it’s.

That’s the thing but it’s about supporting our tool analyses all of the courses you can just click a button as an admin and sit back and watch it go one university 640 million QA tests,  it took a few days  But hey, it was fun.

Ryan Hazen: Does the bulk fixed tool reach into the Moodle resources like page. 

Gavin Henrick: Absolutely. That’s exactly what it does. Goes into page page,book, label the multichoice quiz questions, each of the options. Absolutely, that is what we really want to focus on making the stuff built in Moodle work really well. And why did they put Google Doc in the link name, because that is the web page title on a Google Doc, it has Google Doc at the end for branding.

And let’s see any other ones, jump out what file extensions, they got converted to? Lots will share information on that in the follow on emails, but a massive amount of things.

So, the Accessibility Checker is another one there. The Starter version is in 3.11, but all that extra stuff I showed you there is beyond starter basically.

Ryan Hazen: From Sue, our teachers create videos for students do you recommend any products that create subtitles for videos. They’re looking for free products.

Gavin Henrick: No. So there’s no free products that does something well in this for a cost per minute to do could do audio conversions to text. One of the things we’ll be adding in is a link into AWS, IBM, Azure and Google they all have services that you can use for that.But the key thing is if you don’t have anything. Get your students to use Chrome as a browser chrome will automatically set up, or do captions on screen for any video playing in the Chrome browser.So look into that. That’s the cheap way as of it. But yeah, you need to pay for good services.

Yeah, YouTube is it’s free at the point of use for the institution heart, but it’s not pretty when it’s an advertising embedded system.

Laia Canet: And I believe that I would like to add, if you are use automatic captions created systems.

Please check it because they are not completely well done. And sometimes it will be difficult to, to understand the meaning of the, of the content, or maybe appears, some strange things there. so check it.

Ryan Hazen: Yeah, I’ve seen some very interesting misinterpretations. Much like auto correct you know when you’re sending a mobile message captioning services have that same vulnerability, it can be it can be very interesting.

Gavin Henrick: There’s only just one other thing I’ll say, and as part of our service we offer for Moodle courses on accessibility.  If you want to teach accessibility, introduction web accessibility, media accessibility and document accessibility. That’s the four modules that we broke it down into. 

We’re going to have to cut it they’re all the other questions we will answer on our blog afterwards thank you so much. Thank you everybody for coming along. It’s been awesome.

Thank you, Laia and Ryan I think it’s been great session.

Ryan Hazen: Yeah, thank you. It’s always a pleasure. Getting around with you guys this this has been real fun I look forward to doing it again shortly.