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...

Just over a year ago, I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud. It's a suite of applications for photo editing, graphic design/creating, video editing and loads more. It was quite expensive, even with a substantial discount but I really wanted to develop some new skills that would sit alongside my Articulate skills. Each week, the Articulate community posts a challenge. Usually, it's something to do with Storyline and eLearning but this week's was to create a cloned interview.  Cloned Interview "What on earth is a cloned interview?" you may ask. Well, I had no idea either. I watched a couple of examples and soon it became obvious. It's a video where you have two of the same person and they interact with each other.  It kind of reminded me of The Lady in the Van. Alan Bennett has two personas in the film and they talk to each other. It's quite an interesting technique but I figured the subject has to fit that kind of thing. Positive Self-Talk I've had vario...

I've lost count of how many weeks it's been but I have now been working from home since 18th March. Now I am quite used to working from home, as I previously did two days in the office and the rest remotely. My husband, Neil did an occasional day working from home but largely was a daily commuter. There are some genuine concerns about letting staff work from home as a regular thing. One of these issues is whether it is really possible to keep team spirit and a sense of connectedness (is that even a real word?) I think this depends to a significant degree on the management of the team and the willingness of all members to engage online. This is where I am so lucky to be part of a team that gets on well, enjoys being connected and generally is willing to do whatever it takes to keep that team spirit high. We've been using Teams (part of the Microsoft 365 suite) to book and participate in online meetings. This afternoon, we had our weekly huddle. This is a 15 minute meet...

Challenge summary To get the whole story, you'd be best reading my Part-time on Wheels blog. In this post, I want to share about some of the techie things I learned or did for the first time, whilst making our video . I used a rather old Sony HD camcorder and various bits of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Hopefully, this will be useful to somebody. Adobe Illustrator I was watching one of the Spring Harvest videos over Easter and they had a cool frame around the film clip. I liked the effect and wanted to give that a try. So I used Illustrator to create a frame. The cool thing with Adobe, is that you don't even have to export it. You can just drag the Illustrator file onto the Premiere Pro timeline and they play very nicely together. This was handy, as I decided to change the frame several times before finally settling on this one: Adobe Media Encoder My old but trusty Sony camcorder produces all the video files in MTS format, which isn't accepted by Premiere ...

Professor Sugata Mitra Many years ago, I had the privilege of listening to this amazing guy give the keynote speech at a conference. He spoke about our education system and showed some powerful photographic images to explain why our schools are the way they are. It made more sense to me than anything I had ever heard before. Here's the gist of it... Our Victorian education system The education system was created, to ensure that children were given the skills they would need to be able to live and work as adults and to contribute to society. What did the workplace of the late 1800s look like? Well, there were different jobs but the everyday person might work in one of the following places: An office - everyone would have their own desk, usually in rows and columns, facing the front. It was very important to be able to write neatly and legibly. You would do a piece of work, and then hand it in to the supervisor at the front of the office.  It's easy to see how a cla...