OER Schools Network Meeting Suzanne P Lavelle OER Network Co-Ordinator January 2016

Creating accessible resources Audience – Pupils – Teachers – Parents Aim of the resource – Provide information – Training – Get people to refer back to you – Raise the profile of your school (is so, provide a means of providing feedback)

Resources – disabilities to consider Visual – Colour blindness – Reduced vision Auditory Movement and Manual Dexterity Visual Processing/Cognitive Disorders – Dyslexia – Dyscalculia

Visual impairment Visual – Colour blindness – Reduced vision Solutions: Use a larger font size bolder colours Avoid pale shades that are similar in tone Avoid red/green contrasting colours Ensure all images and tables are labelled (in ‘alt’ text) and captioned (for screen readers) Consider producing an audio version (MP3)

Auditory issues Auditory – Reduced hearing – Tinnitus Solutions: Produce a text version of your resources Produce subtitles for a film Create transcripts of any audio sections (available via a link in the resource)

Impaired movement and manual dexterity Manual dexterity – Navigation problems – Using hardware (eg. mouse, touchpad, keyboard) Solutions: If your resource is a website, make any links obvious and clear Try to ensure that your document can be navigated easily using the arrow keys. Avoid the need for excessive scrolling, use of tabs and need for right/left click of mouse

Visual Processing/Cognitive Disorders Processing issues – Dyslexia – Information over-load When dyslexic users read text, they can experience visual distortion effects. These effects vary in degree from person to person, but they can make reading text much harder. Dyslexia Improvements - what does dyslexia look like Some pupils are not able to process large amounts of data in one go, for example if they have suffered from some type of brain injury.

Visual Processing/Cognitive Disorders Solutions: Avoid justified text and double spaces after full stops – these create large, uneven spaces between letters and words and result in a “river effect”. Avoid high contrast colours – i.e. black text on a white background (can lead to “swirling of the words”). Use greys and browns instead. Don’t have long paragraphs of unbroken text in your document – use shorter paragraphs (1 per idea). Avoid fonts with serifs and italicised text – they obscure letter shapes for dyslexics and make reading difficult. Use bold to highlight instead of italics. Alternative fonts, such as OpenDyslexic.OpenDyslexic

Visual Processing/Cognitive Disorders "Typographic river" by Jeff Dahl - Own work. Licensed under GFDL via Commons - File:Typographic_river.svg The “River” Effect

This is a screenshot of a web page of a Wikimedia Foundation project. Text of Wikimedia projects (except for Wikinews[1] and parts of Wikidata[2]) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license Note how this black text on a white background produces more glare and is harder on the eyes!

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Willard5 at English Wikipedia. This applies worldwide. Blurring and doubling of text Visual Processing/Cognitive Disorders

Solutions: Break up large areas of text with images and captions to help cognitive processing. Avoid multiple windows with cluttered displays which can create distractions Sequential operations can also be difficult for those with processing issues Provide easy ways to backtrack or start again in navigation of websites (sitemaps)

This presentation is shared under CC-BY 4.0CC-BY 4.0 Creating Accessible Resources (2016) by Suzanne P Lavelle/Children’s Hospital school, shared under CC-BY 4.0Suzanne P Lavelle/Children’s Hospital schoolCC-BY 4.0