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

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

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

4. 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

5. 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,…

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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?

9. The obvious solution

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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Example

16. Questions; comments ?!

17. 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

18. 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

20. SensusAccess e-learning

22. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. Also an email service … Audio Braille E-books Conversion
Braille
E-books
Conversion
Available on most platforms
Efficient for integration

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

28. 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

29. 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

30. Contact information
Lars Ballieu Christensen
Mail:
Phone:
Tanja Stevns
Mail:
Phone:

31. Questions; comments ?!