Brainstorm in Progress: Universal Design

Showing posts with label Universal Design. Show all posts

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Inclusive Learning Design Handbook

I am reviewing the "Floe" website today. I am particularly interested in their "Inclusive Learning Handbook." What is Floe? According to their website:

"Learners learn best when the experience is personalized to individual needs. OER is an ideal learning environment to meet the diverse needs of learners, including learners with disabilities. The Floe (Flexible Learning for Open Education) Project supports the OER community in providing a sustainable, integrated approach to accessible learning, addressing the needs of learners who currently face barriers."

I like this approach because it includes a lot of principles of Universal Design but also addresses other access issues - including cost. Their handbook creates a very innovative context for the creation of OER. It includes not just the content itself but tagging that content with metadata, a profile for learners that the students create for themselves, and the use of open formats. Here are the suggestions for the "Technique" section of the handbook:

Label resources to indicate what learning needs the resource addresses
Allow the creation of variations and enhancements
Support learning profiles
Support flexible styling
Support keyboard control of functions and navigation
Provide audio or text descriptions of non-text information presented in videos, graphics or images
Provide text captions of information presented in audio format
Separate text that can be read in the interface from underlying code
Use open formats wherever possible

"Open formats are typically published freely and don't require software developers or users to pay licensing royalties to use them in a variety of applications. As a result, open formats make it easier for content to be used and exchanged freely within different operating systems, applications, and software tools."

This is one of the few platforms that pays attention to the learner - there are tools to help learners assess how they prefer to learn.

Ironically, I find the default font in the handbook almost impossible to read - but fortunately their platform includes an easy preferences button that will allow me to adjust the font, color, and contrast of the text AND it is openly licensed and not behind a pay-wall so I can use what ever font I want to read it.

Floe allows you to customize how you view pages.

This is a very important project: it includes content, instructions, and tools for making sustainable, accessible content that will render all of the questions about $ustainability in OERs irrelevant.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Jing: ADA Compliance and New Media

Image via WikipediaJing's pro version now includes the ability to add captions. I want to congratulate them on that. No, I want to send them an award or something. I owe them all a College of the Redwoods keyring at the next conference I go to. We use Jing a lot in my department. Jing is a great screen capture tool that captures images and videos of what you are doing on the screen and allows you to voice over at the same time. This is incredibly useful in training materials. The screen capture function lets you insert comments and highlights. If that wasn't enough, it includes a free "Screen Cast" account to store all your images and Flash videos that provides a link and an embed code for all your files. All this for $15 bucks a year. The missing piece was captions. It is against the law to use these videos for student instruction of any kind without captions. There are too many web 2.0 widgets out there that are not compliant. Every day, my Google Reader and email is filled with the latest tool that is supposed to solve all my problems and they are built by programmers who have no understanding of ADA 508 or the legal issues involved around accessibility. I go on Twitter and instructional designers are touting some wonder widget that has no place in education because it is not accessible. Are we still fighting this fight? You can't buy non-compliant software with federal funds and yes, check your state guidelines too. Often, greed is the only thing standing in the way. If a company uses a picture of a table (with no alt tags) instead of a table of data, screen readers cannot see it and the software should not be purchased. Those of you who read this blog know that I choose software carefully and lean heavily towards open source but this is a very useful tool that has now increased its accessibility and they are rewarded with my business. Bravo!

I talked to a salesman recently who said that his company was going to sell non-compliant software because it was not financially viable for them to make it so. We can make it so by knowing the law. How financially viable is it to lose a sale because you don't care about accessibility? The more I learn about accessibility, the more I am discovering that it is laziness and greed keep some companies back. There is 2 billion dollars of DOL money out there for education and your going to NOT make you work accessible??

Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Semantic Web and Universal Design

Image via WikipediaI have been looking at PopcornJS this morning. PopcornJS allows programmers to build in triggerable events in the code delivering a video in a webpage. What problems does that solve? One of the things we are wrestling with at the college is accessibility. According to ADA 508, all videos have to be captioned. We have grants for captioning videos. I have always thought that we should be doing more. If we follow the principles of Universal Design, we are not only making media accessible, but we are crafting learning modules and objects for their maximum interactivity and, what I feel is the next step, connectivity. Videos and other learning content represent another opportunity to link students to subject matter experts and other students. We can integrate learning modules with knowledge networks. One avenue of exploration is HTML5 and the semantic web. We can do more than just caption videos - we can take the metadata, the code in that accompanies the video and package it with a transcript of the video to trigger events and things like live links to Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps & Translate, Wikipedia, etc. PopcornJS is the code that will allow us to do this. There is an interesting page and demo on PopcornJS.

This is what the internet should be doing. There are too many tools like this available for us to accept content from publishers that is not accessible. Publishers will often supply textbooks and supplementary content that does not meet ADA guidelines. Educators and instructional designers should be taking the lead in the colleges using techniques like PopcornJS and not waiting for the commercial publishers to catch up. They have no interest in meeting ADA guidelines because they are not the ones that have to deal with the consequences. In my quest to make the internet a happier, shinier place, I am not calling for a boycott of those companies but suggesting a solution. Colleges could pool their resources (programmers, beta-testers, and content creators) to help move this project along much in the same way the Sakai project is supported. The commercial uses for something like PopcornJS are obvious - someone looks up and watches a surfing video in YouTube. The video opens in a page with a map of the area where the video was filmed, a link to the TripAdvisor page on the area, the Twitter feed about the surf from the locals, and of course, more targeted marketing. But imagine taking that page as a teacher or instructional designer and building in other learning modules, maps, translations and connections.

Colleges should be setting the standards for media and the semantic web to, at minimum, ensure accessibility. We should go farther and develop guidelines for content around interactivity and connectivity. The semantic web and projects like PopcornJS represent another opportunity to open up education. What do we call these? Semantic knowledge guidelines?