Friday 4 November 2016

JISC Accessibility and Inclusion event hosted by the Learning and Professional Development Centre (LPDC)


Moving beyond text, presented by Alistair McNaught, Subject specialist Accessibility and Inclusion 

An event earlier this year organised by the LPDC and led by JISC focused on accessibility and inclusion.  The event offered simple strategies to make your practice more inclusive with a focus on digital tools.

Participants from the day were asked to share 3 things that they found useful, these could be tips, things learned during the day or interesting points that more staff should know about.

Emma Holdham from the LPDC noted,
  • Greater awareness raising required across the University of the support available and where/how to access it
  • How to make learning materials truly accessible
  • Speak text function within word
Phil Devine from IT noted, 
Mapping of disability with regards to audio visual contexts, in that, (i) text (ii) image (iii) audio (vi) Video and (v) interactivity can be mapped and visualise to help direct learning and teaching. This was brought into sharp contrast with an example of what disabled students often get that is, Lecture, Creation of Notes, Course Readings. In sharp contrast JISC offered multi-media contexts for delivery of learning and teaching in partnership with curative technologies in order for students to configure their own learning. This in contrast, is in real terms, representative of solid digital pedagogic practice, therefore not only flatting the learning landscape for disabled students (with all benefits that brings) but potentially providing a road-map for a generic digital pedagogic framework for all.

This video shows interesting snippets from the event focused on accessibility and inclusivity with a focus on digital  ran by JISC.  The video was created by Aniqa Ashraf a Technology Enhanced Learning ambassador for the LPDC and an undergraduate student




Tips included 

- Locating the text to speech option in Microsoft Word instructions can be found here

- Using text to speech in a PDF document instructions can be found here (NB this will only work with PDFs that are created from text not scanned images of text)