I found this SIG meeting a bit of a mixed bag. The tour of the “Student Development and Enablement Centre” was extremely interesting. It gave some practical insights into putting such a centre together – especially in terms of financial viability and the siting of the centre - outside of the library/learning centre, and within (and staffed by) the School of Applied Sciences. These staff are both conversant with the technology available in the suite, and are all qualified in the area of Applied Sciences so can not only advise students how to use the various tools available, they can also advise if the student is attempting to use the right tool for the work in hand. This is a relatively new development and will only really be ‘marketed’ fully for the first time next term. It is only a small space, but it has a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable team supporting it, so it will be interesting to see how this progresses.I also found the presentation from the PebblePad team enjoyable and it was great to see a live demo of an accessibility avatar (a first for me!). However, and it might only be me, I did not find the remaining presentations as useful. This was particularly a shame for the Peepo presentation as Jonathan was certainly very inspired and driven, and I genuinely think he had some very useful thoughts in there somewhere, but I found his train of thought very difficult to follow and I’m fairly sure I didn’t quite take away what he was probably hoping/intending for me to take away.
Working with JAWS and PebblePad - Shane Sutherland and Emelye Evans, University of Wolverhampton
Interesting presentation that provided a demonstration of the work that they have been doing in making their product (PebblePad) accessible. Began by going through their original journey in trying to make PebblePad (built in flash 7.0) work with the JAWS screen reader. Although Flash 7.0 does include some accessibility options (i.e. ability to: make text bigger, making lines more spaced and to change text type) they still had lots of problems with getting the screen reader to work with PebblePad as Flash didn’t tend to keep up with the updates to JAWS. This was found to be a particular issue where forms were concerned, as they (forms) are used extensively by PebblePad.
These issues led to the investigation in using an Avatar providing text to speech as part of the accessibility solution for PebblePad. Originally looked into purchasing an avatar to use, but this turned out to be prohibitively expensive so instead decided to develop their own (called Mia). Working alongside the RNCB (as TechDis will not provide advice to commercial companies) they have been using a blind tester who has now tested several iterations of the Mia Avatar, resulting in a number of changes. They are hoping for a wider rollout of testing to more users (via the RNCB) for the next version.
Emelye then gave an impressive demonstration of Mia, showing how it (she) worked and giving a good insight into the benefits (and some of the drawbacks) of the Avatar currently in devlopment. I found the voice speed a little fast to keep up with sometimes, but Mia was on the setting preferred by their blind tester, so I think that their choice pulls rank over mine! And in any case, the speed and pitch of the Avatar voice is in full control of the user and is not fixed.
Generally the (more-experienced-than-me-in-these-issues) audience were impressed by what they had achieved, and a number of them had a good understanding of the amount of code/work required to get the avatar to do what appeared to be relatively simple things. However, they did point out a couple of key issues, such as importing text into PebblePad for a user with screen reader needs would be difficult, as Mia only works with PebblePad and requires software such as JAWS to be switched off (otherwise JAWS had a nasty habit of ‘taking over’). For a user to import from Word they would need to be using some other form of software to grab it. In addition, the issue of catering for other types of accessibility issues (not just sight) was highlighted and various other research/contacts were suggested. Emelye and Shane very much seemed to take the comments received on board and I think it will be interesting to see how this solution develops.
A link to the presentation will be released shortly by the PebblePad team, and I will link to it here when it is available.
EU4All project – Andy Heath and Chris Douce, OU
The first part of this presentation gave an overview of accessibility issues and accessibility projects/developments currently underway in the OU. However, as Andy started the presentation with a much more general ‘why-accessibility-is-important’ message (which seemed a bit odd to me given that the audience (as far as I am aware) was full of people who are already converted to this point of view given the nature of the SIG) he was not able to fully cover the update and the end was extremely rushed. For those interested, a copy of the full set of slides will be made available shortly, and I will link to them in this post.
The second part of the presentation was provided by Chris Douce and focused on their involvement with the EU4All project – my notes from which can be found below – however, I do note that having had a look at the EU4All site, it is clear that the OU are part of a much bigger project – this was not made clear during the presentation, so I am not sure how much of what is listed below is directly the responsibility of the OU team involved and how much will be undertaken by the other partners listed on the EU4All site.
Presentation notes:
The project aims to develop a flexible open standards based architecture of services to support lifelong learning within higher education institutions for all people, including those with special needs.
OU has more than 10k students with disabilities currently enrolled on courses.
Key points of project:
o Embedding accessibility into learning environments
o Investigating personalisation of user experience
o Investigating user needs provision processes
o Development and exploration of international standards
o Creation of open service oriented architecture (soa) / eFramework
They are only in the early stages of the project at the moment – but it is good to see that the implementation of eFramework seems integral to the project (possible hook-up for Susan K?)
As part of the project they will be looking to create the following guidelines:
o Pedagogical guidelines
o Psychological guidelines
Other reports produced by the project will look at
o Issues of accessibility in ePortfolios
o Best practices in online assessment
Aims to
o Create an open, standard-based architecture of services
o Contribute to e-learning body of knowledge’
o Contribute to international learning technology standards
o Contribute to policy development in Europe
www.open.ac.uk/iet and http://www.eu4all-project.eu/
Putting the User at the Heart of the W3C Process - Jonathan Chetwynd, Peepo www.peepo.co.uk
According to the agenda notes, Jonathan’s presentation aimed to discuss the issues around ensuring that W3C specifications reflects the needs of users, as well as the aspirations or developers and the corporations that they work for with particular reference to CDF (Common Data Format), RDF (Resource Description Framework), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). However, I think all I was able to get from the presentation was that he felt strongly about the use of images and icons as a (good) way of bridging a number of accessibility issues and that some online providers do this better than others – apart from that I am not sure what points he was making. He did recommend the following site http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ - especially the Google talk on human interaction (so I have duly made a note of it and included a link to it here!)
Presentations available at: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Accessibility_SIG_Meeting_24th_July_2007
Location: Wolverhampton University, Millenium City Building
Wireless: Not available
Power: Not available
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