Creating accessible educational materials through e-learning Lars Ballieu Christensen Advisor, Ph.D., M.Sc. Tanja Stevns Director, Special Education Teacher

Our agenda Independence and self-sufficiency Inclusion in education and vocation Long-term Inclusive Open Knowledge

Agenda Accessibility and the need for accessible material The challenge of getting the word out The challenge of creating accessible e-learning Demo

What is digital accessibility? A set of universally accepted design principles with the aim to ensure that digital contents can be accessed by as many people as possible, from as many technological platforms as possible, and in as many different situations as possible Christensen & Stevns, HCII 2015

Designing for Alternate Media Digital Accessibility Use tech correctly, tag structure, provide alternatives, set language, … Universal Design Active language, short sentences, illustrations, holistic, … Specific Design Dyslexic, Low Vision, Blind,…

What is an accessible document? Authored in accordance with appropriate accessibility guidelines Authoring tools have been used as intended Features of the authoring tools have not been abused Prerequisite for access with assistive technology Prerequisite for automated transformation into some alternate formats

Automated transformations Many processes can be automated Conversion of inaccessible and tricky documents and presentations Limited semantics support Single-language documents Some processes require accessible source documents Navigation Indexing, bookshelves, libraries Media overlays Sophisticated contents (math, multilingual)

The challenge Many different types of users Many different geographies People with disabilities Faculty, staff, relatives Mainstream users Many different geographies How do we raise awareness and competence levels?

The obvious solution

Creating accessible e-learning Kick-off Requirement specification Vendor selection Manuscript Expected deadline Current deadline Jan 2017 Jul 2017 Jan 2018

Core requirements Professional instructional designers Divided into independent modules Interactive, not ”talking PowerPoint” WCAG 2.0 AA compliant Compatible with LMSs (SCORM) Versioned for Europe and the US Ownership of source files

Accessibility challenges Articulate Storyline Vendor suggestion Claims full WCAG AA compliance Initial accessibility test In practice Limitations in terms of quiz types Massive post-production required Updates to api.min.js, esp. ARIA No support for mobile devices

Accessible e-learning course Course Intro SensusAccess Intro Simple Advanced Special MP3 Creating accessible material Braille Improving accessibility DAISY Simple e-books Advanced e-books

Conclusions An accessible e-learning course E-learning course will be a great resource for our users Be cautious of vendor claims of accessibility support claims/VPATs Insist on accessibility Test, test, test Have realistic deadlines

Example

Questions; comments ?!

What’s inside Accessible docs .doc, .docx .ppt, .pptx .htm, .html .xml Text-to-Speech Text-to-Braille E-book conversion OCR DAISY Pipeline SaveAsDAISY MS Office Spam Accessible docs .doc, .docx .ppt, .pptx .htm, .html .xml .txt, .asc .rtf .pdf (all types) .epub, .mobi .tif, .gif, .bmp, .jpeg .jpg, .j2k, .jp2, .jpx .pcx, .dcx, .PNG .djv Mail/Web access Mail/Web delivery MP3 encoding DAISY Braille Tagged PDF MP3 Daisy Math E-books English Spanish French Portuguese German Greek Braille artwork Italian Dutch Danish Norwegian Swedish Icelandic Finnish Russian Bulgarian Romanian Hungarian Lithuanian Slovenian Polish Inuit Arabic Czech Cantonese Mandarin Taiwanese Japanese Korean Welsh Slovak

Not ideal but better than Document complexity Simple Complex Timeframe No urgency SensusAccess Not SensusAccess or only as tool Urgent Not ideal but better than no conversion Estimate: Some 50-60% of all document can be handled by SensusAccess Source: Jayme Johnson, High Tech Center Training Unit, California Community Colleges

SensusAccess e-learning

Accessibility Rules Use authoring tools as intended Do not abuse tools In practice Metadata are defined (title, author) Structural elements are tagged Content and content alternatives are authored correct (alt text, tables, MathType) The master language is set and language changes are marked

Reference info www.sensusaccess.com www.sensuslibrary.com Readium (free), Adobe Digital Editions (free) E-book reader for Windows, Mac Supports media overlay Menestrello (free) E-book reader for iOS/Android Support media overlay VI Reader (free) E-book reader for low vision, dyslexia iOS, Android

SensusAccess and Braille Three settings: Braille code Contraction level Output format Principles of output formats in general Native character set of rendering device Unicode PEF How to read formatting and PEF format2929p, pef4025pd

Also an email service … Audio Braille E-books Conversion american@ britspeech@ deutsch@ parlefrancais@ daisy@ daisymath@ Braille banagrade1@ banagrade2@ sixdot@ kurzschrift@ E-books epub@ epub3@ mobi@ Conversion convert@sensusaccess.com Available on most platforms Efficient for integration

Note! File names! Web interface: No limitations Email interface: Use short names and no national characters

Training Courses and Workshops SensusAccess overview (complementary) SensusAccess intro workshop Creating accessible documents Creating e-books with SensusAccess Creating structured audio books with SensusAccess Producing Braille with SensusAccess Producing math material with SensusAccess

Reference info www.sensusaccess.com www.sensuslibrary.com Readium (free) E-book reader for Windows, Mac Supports media overlay Menestrello (free) E-book reader for iOS/Android Support media overlay VI Reader (free) E-book reader for low vision, dyslexia iOS, Android

Contact information Lars Ballieu Christensen Mail: lars@sensus.dk Phone: +45 40 32 68 23 Tanja Stevns Mail: tanja@sensus.dk Phone: +45 23 24 06 72 www.sensusaccess.com

Questions; comments ?!