Finnberry does Ed-Tech

Perceivable The first section of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, deals with how information is presented so that all users can perceive it. Just because you or I perceive information visually, that doesn't mean that all users are able to do so. And just because you or I perceive information by listening, that doesn't that all users are able to do so.  Let's start then with the very first guideline: Alternative text 1.1 Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language. Text can be read, either by the user or by a screen reader, but non-text needs a bit of thought. What is non-text content? It is exactly what it says, anything that isn't text. That could even include a photo or screenshot of text. Anything that a screen reader can't read is a non-text item. It could be a picture, a diagram, icon, charts, graphs... anything that you woul...

 In my last post, I talked about the death of Flash, which pretty much dictated my workload this year. However another consistent theme has been accessibility. Accessibility is obviously a topic that is very close to my heart. I live every day with the challenges of inaccessible places and I don't just understand the frustrations, like an outsider watching in... They are very much my own frustrations. Although my frustrations are largely physical, they enable me to understand how it affects a disabled person when they cannot access something because it has been designed badly. Who is affected? There are many reasons why somebody might struggle to access online content. The most obvious is if they are blind or visually impaired, but think about all the different things you do online. You have to see it, hear it, understand it, read it, remember it, operate it, interact with it... and these can all be difficult, or even impossible for some people. In the same way as I use a wheelchai...

Why has 2020 been a significant year?  Is that a silly question?!! Everyone will remember 2020. It will be talked about for the next few years, taught in schools in years to come. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will ask us about it, in the same way that we asked our grandparents about life in WW2.  That is not why I will remember 2020 though. For me, 2020 was Flash-pocalypse year. We knew it was coming... or maybe more accurately, we knew it was going, but about this time last year, it hit me that it was actually going to happen. Not only that, but one of our main clients had literally hundreds of essential software training packages on our LMS that only run in Flash. How do you know if it needs Flash? The most obvious way to tell that a product needs Flash to run, is to open it. Most browsers now disable Flash by default and you have to enable it to make it work. Most... no, all of our new eLearning just opens and you don't have to do anything. These software train...