University of Padua
Background
The University of Padua has always been sensitive to issues related to inclusion and for this reason the attention to the use of accessible technologies has always been high: students with disabilities and learning difficulties, therefore, are provided with tools and services designed to remove obstacles and achieve their goals by developing or improving their learning strategies. In this perspective, at the Digital Learning and Multimedia Office (DLM) – IT Services Area (ASIT), we have experimented with many solutions to support accessibility, focusing particularly on products that integrate with our Moodle teaching platforms.
We have become aware of the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit by participating in events organised by the international Moodle community and we have monitored its evolution. When we saw that in 2021 the Toolkit became a Moodle LMS certified integration, we decided to adopt the Enterprise version.
Challenges
DLM Office is always in search of innovative solutions to support university teaching and education. Our main objective in adopting accessibility solutions is to increase awareness in our academic community regarding the issues of accessibility and inclusion; as a technical and teaching support office, our goal is also to increase the percentage of accessible files created natively or uploaded into Moodle.
In 2021 we chose Brickfield’s Accessibility Toolkit because we weren’t fully satisfied with products we had previously tested. The fact that the Toolkit was developed to be specifically integrated into Moodle made us lean towards this solution
Solution
Some of the advantages provided by The Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit are the fact of having accessibility reports directly within our Moodle platforms:
- Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine.
- Economics & Political Sciences.
- Law.
- Medicine.
- Psychology.
- Human & Social Sciences.
- Science.
- Digital Learning & Multimedia.
- Staff Training.
- Offices & Services.
The reports are made so that both platform administrators and course teachers can verify the quality of the courses and materials published in them.
Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit also provides our academic and technical/administrative staff with tools for automating and expediting the resolution of the most known accessibility errors, such as the absence of alternative text for images, non-descriptive web links, etc. In this way, it’s very easy to find issues in the Moodle content and to fix them. The contextual guides, moreover, help even the less experienced users to understand how to improve the quality of their content and to increase their competence in dealing with accessibility issues.
Outcomes
From the analysis of the data at our disposal, we have observed that one of the most used features is the ability to convert educational materials into an alternative format (audio reading of the documents, ePub, electronic Braille, Word, HTML and PDF).
Alternative formats allow our students more flexible access to course materials. It should be noted that these formats are not exclusively reserved for students with disabilities, in fact they can be advantageous for anyone, for example for those who find it tiring to read lengthy texts or who prefer listening, perhaps while on the go.
As regards the use of the Toolkit by our teaching staff, we have verified that this product is still new for them. This is because accessibility in general is considered a very technical topic, except for those who have had to manage students with specific requirements and consequently needed to adapt their teaching materials. Furthermore, the time available to delve into these issues is often limited.
Going Forward
The University of Padua has always paid close attention to the issues of accessibility. In this regard, a 2022 initiative was the establishment of a Technical Roundtable for Accessibility: the project involves various University offices and experts and has the aim of addressing the various issues related to accessibility in the academic context (from the setting up of the classrooms, to the creation of contents intended for teaching, students’ assessment, and staff training). The Digital learning and Multimedia Office is part of this working group and actively participates in it.
The final goal of the Technical Roundtable, as well as improving the accessibility of premises, tools and resources, is also to spread awareness on accessibility issues. Given that one of the objectives of the Technical Roundtable is to make accessibility a topic within everyone’s reach, and since Brickfield Education Labs provides a wide range of training options (delivered as synchronous Zoom virtual classrooms and/or as asynchronous, self-paced Moodle courses), our Office is committed to promoting these initiatives by involving both professors and technical/administrative staff. For example, through our DLM newsletter or our Digital Week, a training event organised twice a year on the topics of teaching technologies.
After the recent update of all our Moodle platforms, we will also monitor the data provided by the Brickfield Accessibility toolkit to periodically draw up a report on their accessibility: in this way we will be able to identify priority lines of action and intervention to improve the accessibility of teaching materials.
