1) The document discusses using assistive technology to promote learner autonomy and accessibility in online teaching and learning materials.
2) It addresses common accessibility issues with e-learning applications and websites as well as difficulties for students using assistive technologies.
3) Suggestions are provided for making online content more accessible, including using style sheets, adding page numbers, and creating materials in HTML originally instead of converting them to web format.
23. Mrs E.A. Draffan Electronics and Computer Science. University of Southampton Mobile 07976 289103 E-mail: [email_address] http://access.ecs.soton.ac.uk With grateful thanks to all those students who took part in the LexDis project. www.lexdis.org Agile Technology users not just Assistive Technology users.
Editor's Notes
Students personalising their e-learning.
Research carried out by Dr. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University. 2300 web pages Survey: On average, how many web pages do you read each day? Average 21.51 (We then multiplied this by 105 - roughly the number of days in a semester - and rounded to 2300.) and 1281 facebook profiles Survey: On average, how many Facebook profiles do you view each day? Average 12.2 (multiplied by 105 = 1281) “ And over 500 pages of email” Survey: On average, how many pages of e-mails will you write in a single day? Average: 4.96 (*105 days/semester = over 500)
Wordle picture E.A. Draffan LexDis 01/07/11
Cartoon by Mark Parisi – off the mark.com “Don’t you think you’re becoming a little too reliant on your computer?” New research suggests that young university hopefuls expect unrestricted access to the Internet For further information please visit http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/news/fullstory.php?id=99 For the full report please visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/studentexpectations
Nick quote: "I realised (with respect to Parliamentary Affairs) that I was a right idiot in just reading off the PDF and then remembering the quote, and typing it into Word, because actually you could click an HTML version which makes the whole idea of making secure PDFs ridiculous." .... E.A. Draffan LexDis 01/07/11
Assistive Technology triangle – from Access Technologies at the top representing the assistive technologies such as screen readers and magnification or specialist text to speech, next personalisation and accessibility where desktop changes are made and built in accessibility tools are used to Productivity which is where built in spell checkers and auto correct may help to the final layer including free, portable and online tools which for some maybe the most important. This is not a hierarchy of tools but rather a complete toolkit approach.
… when I got all my software in autumn last year, and they said: “You need to have your training on this” – as you quite rightly have said – I did feel like I was doing 2 courses and that was, frankly, too much. I had to stay with my old bad habits because I just didn’t feel I had the time to take out to learn something new to help me. It was a vicious circle, really. E.A. Draffan LexDis 01/07/11
LexDis 01/07/11 E.A. Draffan
LexDis 01/07/11 E.A. Draffan
LexDis 01/07/11 E.A. Draffan
LexDis 01/07/11 E.A. Draffan
Agile Technology users not just Assistive Technology users. With grateful thanks to all those students taking part in the LexDis project.