Finnberry does Ed-Tech

The guidance states:  Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text. What does that all mean? It basically means you need to stop and think about what information you get by seeing and consider how someone with a screen reader will get that same information. The structure of a document or web page is easy to get, if you can see. When we look at a page, headings are often on their own line, bold, bigger than the rest of the text. Lists are usually indented and have a number or a bullet point in front of each item. Paragraphs have a larger space between them than normal lines. Hyperlinks are usually underlined and/or in a different colour. These are all things that you see .  What about people who can't see? How would they know what is a heading, a list item, a paragraph, a hyperlink, etc? The only way is if your document or web page is structured correctly an...

Universal design is one of the phrases that stuck with me when I did a Masters module on accessibility in online learning. It struck a chord because I see in the physical day-to-day world, the problems that occur when something is designed or built and then access for wheelchairs is considered as an afterthought. That is when we (disabled people) become a frustration or an inconvenience. It is much easier to design and build something (a house, a shop, a piece of eLearning, even a Word document) that is accessible for all, if you think about access at the beginning. It would be transformational if everything that was ever designed was designed with all needs in mind. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that a piece of eLearning isn't AT (assistive technology) compliant and as a mitigation for this, the content is put into a Word document. In many cases, nobody thinks that the Word document isn't compliant either. And yet, it's really not difficult to make...