Description
The government have asked public sector bodies to make their websites more accessible. In preparation for this, I have worked with the Digital Education team in their efforts to make Moodle more accessibility friendly. This has many benefits, particularly for learners, as it ensures students with difficulties such as dyslexia and colour blindness don’t have difficulty when studying.
I have incorporated giving advice for the WCAG 2.1 guidelines in the different forms of communication while doing my business as usual work, attended Accessibility Drop in Sessions where I gave advice to staff on accessibility questions and have also incorporated screen reader tests for the user acceptance testing for our annual moodle upgrade at City. For any screencasts I have created, I make sure these are captioned.
Reflection
Having had the chance to work with the accessibility regulations gave me an insight into the difficulties staff will face in making their Moodle pages and lecture materials accessible. While it may seem easy to do, changing settings like colour contrast and updating the source materials took up valuable time for me, and I can only imagine it will take staff more time in doing this, as they aren’t very familiar with the regulations. I now feel more empathetic towards staff when they express difficulty in updating source material, often doing it once for them, and highlighting the change. Even though my learners are typically adults, who learn by experience rather than guidance, changing the material once gives a visual aid of what to aim for. This is particularly useful, as the legislation can at times be tricky to understand. Evidence of this can be found the Accessibility Anchor Tags Ticket.
For any screencasts I have created, I use an automatic speech recognition software (Kaltura Reach) to generate the times, but then go through the captions manually to check for any mistakes and to split the captions better. This makes the videos more usable for people with hearing difficulties, and if any specialist vocabulary is used, it also allows me to make sure the correct spellling is applied. To lecturers and academics, I recommend doing captions this way, as the software normally generates 80-95% of the words correctly and also generates the times. I also split the captions, as badly split captions can hamper the viewers ability to read subtitles along with the frames.
Helping out in the accessibility drop-in was a beneficial experience for me as it highlighted gaps in my knowledge. As this was a drop-in, advice was given face-to-face, rather than over the ticketing system. This meant when a question was asked, gaps in my knowledge were highlighted in my answers. During the session, I leaned on my colleague for the answers. As I didn’t know the answers, I quickly jotted them down on a piece of paper while he was giving the advice for future reference and for me to work on. For future drop-in sessions, I now do better preparation, and I have the guidelines and other FAQs ready allowing me to give accurate answers.
For the annual moodle upgrade, the team have now built testing new changes with a screen reader and also checking if any of this is able to be accessed by tabbing. Doing this taught me the importance of designing accessible content for the end user, as well as gave me an experience of the issues users face who may be using screen readers. The screen reader I chose to use was read&write as I had issues with NVDA on my work laptop, and read&write is one of the supported disabilty tools/screenreaders at City. Using a screenreader highlighted potential accesibility and usability issues during the testing, which are then reported back to the dev who will try to fix the issue. I also find looking at the Digital Accessiblity Regulations Mailing List really useful to spot any potential issues with Moodle and other supported technologies, as well as to view good practice guidelines which I could incorporate into my own practice.
Evidence
Accesibility Anchor Tags ticket
Introduction to Poll Everywhere Teams screencast
Messaging UAT Evidence
Accessibility Drop-in Meeting confirmation