Finnberry does Ed-Tech

One of the most common errors that comes up in a PDF accessibility check is missing title. The video that follows assumes that no title has been given.  To check the title, you can click on File ... Properties and see if anything is in the Title field. If there is but it is still flagging as an error, you have two options: 1. If the title is correct, close the popup, right click on the title error and click Fix . 2. If the title is wrong, delete it and then follow the instructions in the video. How to add a title This video includes a preview of what JAWS (screen reader) reads before and after we have fixed the title. Before, it reads the file name. In my case, when I saved the document, I gave the file a sensible name... but just imagine if JAWS was reading the default download filename with those %20 bits in. Horrible! Just a quick word about the quality of the screen recording. I'm experimenting with a few different screen recording tools. I've recorded this one using Vimeo ...

We've been looking at WCAG 2.1 and how to ensure that your content meets these important guidelines. We haven't finished yet but I'd like to branch off on a little tangent and take a more detailed look at PDFs and accessibility. This is quite complicated compared to using Microsoft Office and it requires some specialist software. Most people are familiar with Adobe Acrobat - the PDF reader. For accessibility work, you really need the Pro version of Acrobat. It comes as part of Adobe Creative Cloud or you can buy a single product licence.  Accessibility Tools Accessibility tools are not turned on by default, so you'll need to go into your tools tab, scroll down and add Accessibility to your tools pane. This will give you an accessibility checker, which will analyse your PDF and identify any errors and warnings.  Errors usually include things like missing language, title, alt text and tags. Warnings are usually things that need manual checking, such as colour contrast. Vi...

I was going to talk about discussion forums today, as they are my other chosen technology for this all important EMA. However, when I started studying this morning, I realised that there is something very simple that my studying could not survive without. Fellow students on Facebook groups often ask whether we prefer to read course materials on paper or on the screen and how we take notes. So that's where I'm going with this one. Let's start at the very beginning... (cue for a song). When I search for resources online, I'm really hoping to find PDFs. Fortunately, most articles are available in PDF (Portable Document Format) and can be downloaded and saved as such. So I save it to my One Drive, using an easy to find file name: the author's surname, the year of publication and the first few words of the title. This not only makes it easy to locate, but it gives me a head start when writing my reference list too. I prefer to read on-screen, with SS over...