Accessibility in 90 Minutes at MootJP22

This year’s Moodlemoot Japan took place online from the 17th to the 19th of February 2022.

About Moodlemoot Japan 2022

Moodlemoot Japan is the annual conference of the Moodle Association of Japan. It has been held every year since 2008. Usually held in person in Nagasaki International University, this year Moodlemoot Japan was hosted online over the three days, using Moodle and BigBlueButton.

"Here at Nagasaki International University, the main theme of our university is hospitality… It epitomizes the hospitality of each and every member of our university and we wish to extend that hospitality to each and every participant even if those wishes are only felt in a virtual environment.”

Dr Yukio Ando, President of Nagasaki International University.

The sessions ran over multiple streams and saw presentations from Keynote speakers Prof. Hiroaki Ogata, Martin Dougiamas, Prof. Hideto Harashima and Dr Jingjing Lin.

Registered attendees of the moot can access the recordings for each of the sessions mentioned on the Moodlemoot Japan platform.

Workshop: Accessibility in 90 Minutes

On Thursday, Gavin Henrick hosted: Accessibility in 90 minutes – what you need to know and what to do (build a better Moodle Course).

During this 90 minute session, Gavin took participants through the following: understanding of the basics of Accessibility, Accessibility for web content, tips for creating accessible Moodle content and then finally a demonstration of the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit.

Understanding Accessibility

Gavin began with the quote from Sarah Horton’s book ‘A Web for Everyone’:

“…disability is a conflict between someone’s functional capability and the world we have constructed”.

He then explained permanent, temporary and situational scenarios in which someone’s ability is compromised. Using examples of W3C Stories of web users, participants learned how different users require different needs while navigating the web. The stories highlight the effect of accessibility barriers and the broader benefits of accessible websites and courses.

Accessibility for Web Content

Gavin shared the Atto editor in Moodle.

Within the editor, teachers can access the following features:

Text editor (like MS Word)
Accessibility checker
Screen reader checker
Prompts when adding media
Prompts when adding tables
Feature rich equation editor (Using Mathjax.org)

The editor has built-in functions that aid accessibility standards – Gavin shared these with the participants. Opening up their Moodle courses, the workshop was handed over to the attendees who were given some tasks!

The participants analysed multiple aspects of their courses, while Gavin shared tips for each of the following: Images, Layout, Links, Multimedia, Tables, Text and Equations.

Blog Posts

We have blog posts containing the tips for each of the above. Why not open up your own Moodle course and analyse them!

Lastly, Gavin gave a demonstration of the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit.

MootJP22 - Thanks for having us!

Thank you to the organisers of Moodlemoot Japan for hosting a brilliant conference.

During the 3 days, we also presented “Using a post it board for student collaboration in Moodle”. This was a 20 minute short presentation where Gavin Henrick, Co-Founder of Brickfield Education Labs and Mark Glynn, Head of the Teaching Enhancement Unit in Dublin City University presented Moodle Board, a collaborative plugin for Moodle. Read about the Moodle Board presentation at Moodlemoot Japan 2022 in our recent blog post.

If you are a registered attendee, you can access recordings of our workshop and other presentation on the MootJP22 event platform.

We had lots of fun presenting at the Moodlemoot Japan 2022. Moodlemoot’s are a great way to come together and share tips and tricks to improve the world’s most popular LMS. In March, we will be attending the Benelux Moodlemoot 2022. Will we see you there?