Personal Blogs

https://sites.google.com/site/cmahh810activity211/

Wow! This one exercise has taken me about 20 hours to do and it still needs work but I am running out of time this week. I will try to get back to it later and adjust the length of the subtitles on the animated video. They could be on the screen for a little longer but this involves an awful lot of work. I am sure I could get faster with practice but I am still feeling my way around at the moment.

I have published it on Google Sites which they report to be screen reader accessible but I will find out on Thursday when I have access to Supernova. I may also be able to test it with Jaws but cannot get access to WindowEyes at the moment. If anyone else is going to try Google sites they should be aware that you need some coding knowledge. I had to edit the HTML just to add alt tags!

Survey Monkey reports it is easily accessible by screen readers but I don't trust these things so I have included a transcription of the information as well! The reason for including the Survey Monkey format was because some of the students I work with, including those with dyslexia and Asperger syndrome, prefer to see a few lines of text at a time and this is an easy way to assist them to do this with the most important part of the learning exercise.

I also included a transcript of the YouTube Xtranormal animation as the subtitles are in beta and generally come up but I have heard reports that they don't always! The subtitles were done using CaptionTube which was fairly easy to use but fiddly.

I really wanted an accessibility bar at the top of the screen to change font and background colour but I could not find any code that I could use to design a Google gadget and I think it may be a bit beyond my minimal programming skills anyway. I just added a link to the new RSC Scotland "My Study Bar".

This resource is designed to encourage those people supporting students on Open University summer schools to start considering the ethical decisions that they may have to make. These people come from a variety of academic and non-academic backgrounds and so I have kept the language to a sensible level!

Currently the Open University insist that student support workers attend one training weekend every two years and also complete an online training program. In the eight years I have worked in student support, I have come across many situations that were difficult to deal with and the ethics course I was offered as part of my other job has helped me a great deal. I have not been offered this sort of training by The Open University and I think that it would be best offered at the weekend training where there is the possibility of students considering scenarios in small groups but an online resource would also be useful.

I hope that this screed helps anyone who wants to analyse this work for their TMA02. I will add information about its accessibility to the various screenreaders once I test it. Currently I have only tested it by removing the images to see the alt tags.