Read Seale Chapter 7 Designing and developing accessible e-learning experiences: the learning technologist's perspective.
- There is a debate surrounding who is responsible (or most responsible) for accessibility. How helpful is this debate in ensuring that people working in post-16 education change their practices?
Having an ongoing debate for accessibility makes people working in post-16 education hear and express different thoughts and opinions between them and as a result to develop an opinion around accessibility and then to change it though debating etc.
If those with technical skills, such as learning technologists, are not ultimately or solely responsible for ensuring accessibility, what responsibilities do you think they should have and why?
They have to be able to make the online learning material provided from the teacher as accessible as possible to all students because he has the responsibility to know the guidelines needed and to own the necessary knowledge to do so and provide an accessible website to all the students. There are evaluations, specific knowledge needed in order to make a website accessible that a teacher does not have. A teacher might consider the pedagogical aspect.
- On pages 82-83, Seale uses an archaeology metaphor to try to encourage learning technologists to dig deeper beneath the surface of accessibility guidelines and standards. This is intended to develop a greater understanding of approaches to accessible design. How helpful do you think this metaphor is?
It is right that learning technologists have to dig deeper in order to get more in the theme of the accessibility guidelines and standards so that they will be able to support their role and also to provide the teaching staff with their valuable knowledge in order to make their resources more accessible.
Can you think of an alternative metaphor, image, analogy or visualisation that could be used to help develop learning technologists' thinking in this area?
An alternative metaphor might be a small seed that needs soil, water and sun in order to grow and become a tree! Meaning that learning technologists need to get much more knowledge with accessibility, either this is guidelines or standards etc.
- On page 98 Seale discusses the tensions regarding the use of technical tools versus human judgement to evaluate the accessibility of learning resources. What is your position concerning this issue? Can we trust human judgement? If so, whose judgement should we trust - learning technologists working within educational organisations or external experts?
I believe that technical tools should be under human usage and control in order to work and also the human judgment is equally important. The technical tools are created by humans which means that they can get improved if a human wishes to do so. Human judgments of learning technologists working within educational organizations are valuable just like the external experts opinion. While in an organization, the trust should be based mainly on the learning technologists who work there as they know better the environment etc.
Choose one of your answers and post it for discussion in your tutor group forum. If you disagree with Seale about any of the points in this chapter, you could also discuss this in the forum.