Hi everyone. We''re going to give folks about 8 more minutes to logon. We''ll start promptly 1:00 central time. Just so you know I have emailed the hand outs that Robert will be using for today''s presentation and the link for the evaluation. That should be emailed and you should be able to get that before or after the session. Hi everyone we''ll be starting in just about three minutes. People will be coming on maybe as we get started but well let them come. Robert if you''re here could you do a quick sound check.
Hi there Janet, this Robert doing a sound check. So I hope you and everyone else can let me know if you can hear me.
Thank you. Im hearing you fine and well get started in just a couple minutes. Ok. I think we''ll get started because we have a lot of information to cover. I want to welcome everyone to the final series in our Accessible Technology Webinar Series sponsored by the Great Lakes ADA Center. I''m Janet Peters and Im the Project Coordinator for Accessible Technology. And I thank you for joining us today. Our guess speaker is Robert Todd, he is the Senior Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access, CATEA. Robert directs related research on the usability and accessibility of online resources and is a lead designer and instructor for Georgia Techs Professional Education certificate courses in Creating Accessible Web Sites and Usability Engineering. He is an expert in this field and has won many awards in the area and we are thankful to have him sharing his expertise with us today. Before I turn it over to Robert, I just want to mention a few logistics. You can use the microphone by pressing down the control button or using your mouse on the lower part of the screen. I am going to ask people to hold questions until the end of the presentation. Robert will give ample time for questions and answer session. You can also type your questions in the public chat area or send a private message to me and I''ll moderate them for the captioner who is captioning this session. And the handouts have been emailed out to your email account that you registered for this session with. So with that I will turn it over to Robert.
Thank you Janet. I want to say it''s quite a pleasure to be here today. I want to also give a little bit information about the approach we are going to take. We dont have a lot of time and the topic about accessible online education is broad one. So the approach I am going to take today is to give information on sort of a higher level of the general approach to the online education to make it accessible with a few examples. And Then I''m going to show you with some online resources that we''ve created here at CATEA at Georgia Tech that can take you into much more detail. By giving you an intro those online resources Im hoping if you want to do your own follow-up and learn about those specifics you can do so another at your own leisure. And then Im going to finish off by saying a little bit about some Web 2.0 technologies with a couple of specific examples because I think that people often times don''t realize that these features that are relatively new in the web are ones that can be used for online education and can be made very accessible. So, that''s going to be the overall approach. The presentation has been major Links within it that I am going to be using. So you should most of those available to you to research after the presentation is over. And I will leave about five to ten minutes at the end for questions. Okay, with that in mind I want to start the presentation and please speak up with the chat or raise your hand via the conference tool or speak up with the microphone if you are having difficulties as I go along. To begin, I''m going to begin our Power Point presentation. There we are. First of all, the contact information for me should be available, should be visible to you now. You''ve had these slides mailed to you. Please feel free to call or to send an email if you any questions after the fact or if you want to follow up on. A little bit about the background if where this is coming from. CATEA is multidiscipline center and were part of the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech. Primarily we have federally funded projects dealing with accessible and barrier free education and many other types of research related to people and individuals with disabilities. Part of what we do here is develop, evaluate and utilize assistive tech and particularly look at accessible environments including electronic environments which is what we''re concerned about today. If you want to know some more, there''s our URL at the bottom of the page. I think I may reload this Power Point so I have the ability to navigate properly. Let me try that.
Robert is getting the Power Point reloaded and that might be because we tested after I did something. If you aren''t able to hear the presentation, of course, I guess you''re not hearing me, Ill write this in the public chat, the audio is working so be sure you don''t have your mute on. So if you''re reading the captioning site, you can try to un-mute your system of volume. One more logistic, there will be an evaluation link sent to you. Please evaluate the session after we''re completed.
Okay. I think everyone should be following me now. If you are, you''ll see a slide that shows some of the projects that we have at CATEA that deal with barrier free education. Among them are the Georgia Tech research on accessible distance education, the great Project Workplace Engineering Center and our assistivetech.net project. I''ll let you at your own leisure look through those. Too begin with, in terms of accessible E-learning lets look at the fundamentals. The bottom line for accessible E-learning is that whether you use a content management system, CMS or learning management system often called an LMS or not. It''s always important to create materials that are accessible in the first place. I cant emphasis that enough. Sometimes instructors and TAs will choose to upload material to a CMS and they expect it to be made accessible but if the documents were not accessible in the first place they often arent going to be the content management system. So please dont rely on Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle or whatever kind of content management system you are using to do all the work. If you start with accessible documents, each one of the content management systems I list on this slide and many others, have made attempts to become more accessible and I could -- I would be happy to respond to some specific questions about those. But in general, the three that I listed here for example purposes, Blackboard, Sakai and Moodle have attempted to be Section 508 or WCAG compliant. If you make your docs accessible from the beginning and then interface with their system, you''ve at least shown a good Faith effort and probably going be a way toward being accessible except in some specific circumstances. Like I said I can get into those questions if you have them. Now, in terms of the fundamentals, how do you do this? Its one thing to tell people make your materials accessible but everyone needs to know how to do it. You do this by following accepted guidelines and standards when you create materials in the first place. If guidelines do apply to specific case then at the very least apply the principles of universal design. These are best learned by studying an applying the guidelines with you create materials not necessarily trying to memorize standards or guidelines. Universal design, by that I mean to design products and environments to be useable by all people to greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. This is the definition that Ron Mace supplied for the Center of Universal Design. Now to get back to the specifics, lets say youre going to use Web related information on -- in your learning. In that case there are some guidelines and standards. We''re going to look at these briefly. You may have covered these already. You may know something about them. If you dont I want to make certain that you do. They include the WCAG guidelines, which the World Wide Web Consortium has given us and the Section 508 standards that have been created by the Access Board. We''ll look first at the guidelines for the WCAG. You should see the screen change to the website for the W3C guidelines. For those who are not very familiar with them, this is not our course primarily on that topic. We''ll look at them quickly. In affect, the guidelines and they are guidelines. They don''t have the effect of law but are very important guidelines. They tell you about ways that you can make your web-based material more accessible. They dont deal solely with HTML even thought it is web-based but HTML and related technologies that one thinks of when one thinks of web browsers. So some of those items we''re going to look at briefly in the presentation here, such as providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content. You do this because some people may not be able to see or hear your content. You need to provide other sensory input for them. Not relying on color alone because some people don''t see color or don''t see color or see in the same way. Creating tables that transform graceful because tables which are frequently used in online education may become problems for some people, especially say, people using voice output screen readers for example. And on this page, within this site, I should say there''s a plethora of information about how to go about doing this. I encourage you if you or your designers working on online materials or web based material please take a look at the WCAG guidelines because they can give you a lot of help more than just guidelines but provide give good examples and give ideas of how to accommodate specific disabilities all available from this URL listed in this presentation. Similarly, the 508 standards which do have the force of law for U.S. government websites and are often used by other entities in the United States that either have government contracts or have chosen to adopt them voluntarily. These are similar to the information in the WCAG guidelines, not as complete, but similar and they follow what you would call the first of three priorities of the WCAG guidelines for the most part. We''ll look at how you can approach the Section 508 accessibility, which should not be in conflict, but actually is merely could be at looked at as a partnership. Section 508 and WCAG work together do not conflict but instead work together for more accessible web content. I''d like to use our colleagues at WebAims checklist because it is far more readable than the U.S. governments site, Section 508 guidelines. But in affect the guidelines are similar to what we saw a moment ago at the WCAG site. For example, the very first being text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided and this checklist which is very helpful gives examples of how one might pass or fail in that standard. Similarly, for the other standards there are lettered A, B, C, as you can see on the page here equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized to the presentation. Very similarly to the WCAG we just you saw and this checklist as I said gives some ways to pass and learn some ways you might fail. Take a look please or guide your follow developers to take a look at these very helpful guidelines and standards. To give an example for those who are not so familiar with this. Just some important accessibility concerns: Text equivalent for all non-text content important because people will have trouble accessing other types of materials such as audio files because of a lack of hearing or video files because of the lack of ability to see the video. Another would be checking contrast not depending on color alone to convey information for people who have low vision or who have color blindness. Another would be making links distinct and able to stand alone. We probably have seen many sites that have Click here. Well that may sound useful in some content and some cases people with disabilities may using alternative browsing that may not make the context as readily accessible to them and therefore saying what the link actually does makes a big difference. To give you a couple examples of how this plays out in many sites, many e-learning sites, images require alternative text and there are ways to do that properly. If the image is text or the alternative description must be the same as the visual description. If you have an image map then you want to make every area of the image map available via the alternative text. This is an example of how that might work. I am a member of the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Society of North America, RESNA. If on a page you listed the RESNA logo and the purpose was to show the logo and let people know it is a logo for RESNA to use on their own sites. Then you might give an alternative text of RESNA logo type so that someone that cant see the image will at least know what''s there. On the other hand if the logo is actually a place you click to go to the RESNA website like many buttons are, then you might say go to RESNA home. All depends on context. I also mentioned the text equivalence can be good or bad. In this case, a header for a site and this is a header for a site that I helped create for the Southeast DBTAC, the Federal Court Concepts Course. Well if it''s simply an alternative text for a header, then say what the text is in this case federal court concepts. On the other hand, you may remember many sites and I actually found this on a recent one especially from the 90s that show a cute little mailbox with a letter going in. This is a link you clicked to send mail to someone who was referenced on the page. Well, what you see here is actually the KWAJEX.gif 45K was the alternative text provided by an alternative piece of technology. In this case it was a screen reader for voice output. That didnt help anyone much. What happened was the designers didn''t place any alternative text on that image and so the browser, the screen reader tried to find something so it found the name of the image. Unfortunately the name of the image was not useful. Perhaps it was someones name. Did I see your hands up for a moment Janet?
No
Alright. It looked like I saw a hand. Then on the other hand, if this were a graphic that was simply one that people could take and use from the site for different purposes you might want to make alternative text letter entering mailbox because that show what the graphic is. But in this case the actual ALT text should have been mailto and then the person''s name. So all of that, I think probably, makes a little bit of sense. One more example of this, in this case, there is a globe. Many of you may recognize this from the MSNBC. If this were a navigational element you might say ALT=MSNBC homepage and if it were a decorative graphic you might say it''s a globe of the earth. Or one other thing that you might see happen if it were an image that you didn''t need people to hear read you might call it ALT equals NULL (ALT=) in this case. That would tell the assistive technology to ignore it in this case. That''s what that slide is about, telling you what a piece of null Alt text is. In the case I mentioned color and contrast this is a slide showing how contrast can be good or bad. This is something that must be checked on all pages that are web based. Here, you see a button that was created with what looks like high contrast, but if the page is printed in black and white or if you turn your screen black and white what you see the version below it, the second of the two. So you see what the contrast can be low for someone who has poor color apprehension. So always tell people the way the do this is check your screen is in black and white mode or gray scale mode. If you can''t do that easily and youre not very familiar with computers and your not very high tech. Just print it in black and white and that at least gives you a feeling of how good the contrast will be on the page. One more for this the topic image shows a graphic of the United States with several regions outlined. That''s an original graphic. I put it through an online tool that simulates different forms of -- I''m seeing a question by Howard. Do you use different type of browsers to make sure color contrast is consistent? Yes, it''s always an excellent idea to check different browsers. The training I''m going to points us to in a little bit will reiterate that. Short answer, yes and its also a good idea as I said to have the screen appear in gray scale or black and white so you can see if the contrast is good for someone who has poor color apprehension. And if you cant do that also print the page in a regular black and white printer. Youll get a pretty good idea if itll look good for someone who doesn''t see color well. I wouldn''t say its a perfect test but it''s a pretty good low tech test. For this one theyre two different types of color blindness simulating in the two images below. Youll see that you get a very different view of that map which makes it difficult in some cases to tell consistency between adjacent areas, for instance, the third graphic on the far right between area 8 and area 10. If your vision were a little weak, you may have difficulty seeing the difference between those states. So having said that, I also pointed out some of the usability, some of the usability concerns that you need to consider and this is true for the web based an the non-web based content that you may use for E-learning. Make sure navigation is intuitive; make sure the content is clear. The information can be gotten too quickly. You can make mistakes by trying to be too fancy; sometimes being rather cute with multimedia will make the access to the information weak. Fast load times: remember that some people are still using slow internet connections. Not everyone has high speed internet that many of us in universities take for granted now. Prominent search mechanisms, make sure the search is one of the easiest things to find on the page, should be perhaps the easiest. So some of the sample usability concerns, one of the best ways to learn usability in -- forgive me because I realize that it is a rather humorous website, at least it seems to be. There''s a site called web pages that suck and it sounds funny but it really is compendium of poor sites, sites that have very weak usability. So I urge you if you would like to learn and one of the best ways to learn to about it is to direct your designers to look at bad sites and the mistakes those sites have made. And that''s one of the best to do it, in terms of a good site. Most have seen this one, Google.com and the suite of tools in Google. Though, I''m not going to say they''re 100% accessible because they are not. In terms of usability, generally Google is known for very high usability and of course that can always be debated because its good example in some ways and bad in others but generally a good example that most people know. I urge you to take a look at those sites and to learn a little bit about good and bad by contrasting them. One reason I put these two together, I feel it''s important to talk about the higher level of this to talk about usability together. You can make a serious mistake if you try to separate them. I will tell you that in the early days of my exploration in accessibility, back before we had any of the standards or guidelines that I showed you a while ago. An attempt to make a site very accessible, I ended up making an extremely unusable site. Generally the accessibility guideline will push you to make more usable site. That is true. The fast majority of the time, but you can go wrong just by following a checklist. You need to try the usability along with accessibility and make sure that consistent navigation is there, make sure that the content is easy to find, etc. It doesn''t guarantee the usability. So it''s necessary to build both from this start. It''s one important lesson that I''ve learned. Now having said that and looking at the big picture of this, I''d like to go to some of those pieces of online training that I''ve been promising and explore that a little bit. Go first to our Georgia Tech research on accessible distant education, GRADE project. The purpose of GRADE and its not showing too well in this browser inside the Ideal Conference system. I hope it looks better on your browsers when you try it later. It should. There''s a lot of material here that you could find useful for accessible distance education because that''s what this entire project has been about. I am happy to say that we were funded just recently to do an update and some more material for the GRADE project and we''re going begin that project October 1st. In the meantime, this is the current version. Within this, there are many pieces of information in the left navigation you''ll find useful. The one I want to point out first is the guidelines for accessible distance education. I mentioned to you the guidelines for web-based technology. We looked at those. We realized when we began GRADE way back in 2002 and through its work in 2005 that they were not an easy way to find consistent version of guidelines for many other types of documents. We found that they were many types of documents that especially university institutes and institutes of that level were using for E-learning. Some of those documents we found through our research that were most common were Adobe PDF, the entire Microsoft Office Suite products. We found Microsoft Word documents, Excel documents and Power Point used very frequently in E-learning. Flash was used a lot especially in science and mathematics. Video was something else that was used almost ubiquitously by institutions of higher learning for online work. We treated those particular kinds of documents. I''m going to click on the Adobe PDF files and youll see what we did. We followed the work that Section 508 and WCAG had done because we knew -- we encountered people who were familiar with that approach and we figured it was easier to use an approach that would already play upon the area of knowledge that many of these designers had. So these are some of the documents we planned on updating, the new version of the project, but we used the same approach that WCAG did of saying there are some -some points that must be accessible for people with disabilities to use a certain type of document, in this case they were Adobe PDF files. There were some that they should follow in order to make them more accessible and some that you may -- these would be ways that you could work with PDF to increase functionality and make things easier. You may want to get to those last if you don''t have time or resources to devote. To give you an idea of how they work they are very similar to the guidelines for deliberately so that we referenced earlier. We talked about versions of Acrobat that should be used to make the accessible PDF, how it is important, imperative to tag all documents for easier reading. Tagging PDF allow the information to be read by pieces of assistive technology so that they will understand what elements of the PDF are involved. They''ll know an image is an image. Theyll know a header is a header. Theyll know that body text is a piece of body text for example. Here youll also see us also pointing out alternative text must be created for all imaging just like we did for the web. Same thing with contrast, natural language text equivalent for multimedia that''s attached to a PDF and the same type of approached is used in the should and in the items we consider may be used to made accessible. In terms of video it works the same way in this list. Again, text equivalence for video that contains speech or music for Lyrics, provide synchronized subtitles for video with links to a place you can go to find out more how to do that, providing warnings on videos (#3) in case there is flicker because individuals with certain types of disabilities may have photo sensitive seisures. All of these work the same way in terms of navigations and youll see what the different types of documents are. I encourage you if you are using any of those types of documents to work with your staff how to make those more accessible. We have a little time here. Not going to spend more time on that at the moment. I also want to show you our Access E-learning tutorials and this is very extensive training on how to make these types of documents accessible including making web pages, Scripts and Java, teaching individuals about accessibility issues and distance education. These modules in this tutorial were created in response to our initial research. We found university personnel were saying they needed to know and what they knew little of but needed expansion of and these were the topics. So each one of these modules and they show up a lot better in a normal browser, but you can see here that we have a navigation on the left side that tells you what will be treated in the tutorial and we give you information up front such as the estimated time to complete the module, the objectives, the overview and any pre-requisite knowledge that you need to have. So, for all of these modules they work the same way and the training, Ill click on the power point for example we have. The training is quite extensive we talk about all kinds of ways you can work on pretty much any type of Power Point slide that you can make and how you can make it more accessible. I could click on just one of these and give you a quick glance at the way the material looks. I encourage you also to take a look at this. How proprietary -- I''m hearing -- seeing a message. How proprietary are materials modules at the CATEA site? Can we use them freely as long as we indicate our source? Yes, not only can you, but I hope you do that. We used to have a log in for access e-learning just to find out who was using it but now that that project has moved onward we no longer even do that. That was just to keep our own records. But yes, we wish you to use this material freely and to let others know about. The more the merrier in this case. Our time is going to go quickly here. Click back, the easiest way to do this. Go back to our slides. There you see the URLs for the GRADE material and then specifically direct link for the guidelines that I showed you. There''s another one that I think you high find very helpful. This has been updated also. Last year we did an education leadership academy for the Southeast DBTAC and we were very happy with the training. A training that was used for university personnel including teachers, administrative staff and the IT staff, altogether those three individuals from each university and we did this for entities throughout the southeast. So what we have here is something similar to what I showed you in GRADE but more focused and we updated that material for these particular issues. So there''s an introduction and then there are several modules similar to what I showed you in GRADE. There is a video transcript of the training that was taken, so if you want a text transcript you can choose that link. There''s also a video, excuse me audio of the training as well. We actually did that over the ideal conferencing system, which the same as this. You can see the topics here. I''m not going to be able to spend a great deal of time on these either, but I want you to know what''s available. In this case we''re looking at video and audio. You can get a run down of the topics by following this page and if I go to the page, you''ll see how the training works. It''s really rather simple. We refer you to the WCAG, Section 508 guideline where applicable and where not we simply give you other resources or create the material for the training here. So some of this training -- it begins at an elementary level and we want to cover all the bases. In the begin which want to be clear of the file formats, making clear that individuals can find a link to download free players and the other types of issues that one will have to consider from the very beginning when creating videos. Such as, what is the bandwidth you expect your users to have? How much are you going to compress the video? What size videos do want to use if you are doing streaming versus size of video? Talk about transcripts, the importance of them and how to get them. Giving information for example on video capture cards speech to text technology that can help speed up that process; how you would do it by hand and some examples of successful and unsuccessful transcript. And we have links here to video files here and other types of files you can follow and test yourself and see if you are understanding the concepts. Then we get into the meat of captioning which is very important for video. I think all of you will agree is important for e-learning in many cases. We talk about in this module what types of captions are. The good points and bad points may be for them. Other topics such as audio descriptions which as describe the audio within a video which could be important as well as the transcript or synchronized captions for the speech. An example of that, in a video if there was an explosion that occurs then although it''s not speech that would be synchronized you would probably want to place a bit of audio description in the video. So someone that doesn''t hear that knows what is happening because it may be important to the content of the video. And then and this is the part I definitely want to get to once this information is described we give specifics on how to use the media access generator, called MAGPIE. Some of you may have hear of it and it is a free captioning tool available by NCAM, the National Center for Accessible Media. In this tutorial we tell a lot about the features, requirements so you know whether your system will work with it and then give you step by step information on how to install it properly because it can be a little difficult at times to get that first installation working properly. Then after that, we have step by step information of how to do it. How do you caption? How do you get your information created with synchronize captions? There are some captured videos that are linkable here and I''ll find a couple of those for you such as the one that I have here highlighted the MAGPIE track window. Those videos show you if you have trouble picturing how that works in an actual system step by step. All of this available on the ELA site, we do the same thing for web design. There''s a transcript, there''s audio and different topics available for information on web design. Here as in with all of them; we make where possible use of the standards and the guidelines that we previously have been referencing. I don''t think I''ll have time since we''re already well into our hour here to go through all this. But if you look at the links that are available here, you''ll see some of the information that we cover. A lot about navigation, how to make your navigation more usable such as shortcuts so that people who will need to skip over pieces of material will be able do so. Talk about how browsers indicate links. Asked about the different browsers we try to give training here to let you understand how browsers will handle this differently. Meaning -- I see a question here, Deborah asked what captioning recommendations do you have for Mac users. For Mac users, what I was showing a minute ago, the good news is we''re looking at video again is that MAGPIE that I discussed a minute ago has a Mac version. In terms of actually captioning or tools that hem you caption the speech to text I''ll have to do some research on that for the Mac to see specifically what''s available for the Mac for you. The tips that we give in the ELA talk about the tools that are available for the PC. In terms of the actual captioning process, MAGPIE I''ll go back to that in a minute in terms of requirements you''ll note it requires windows versions or Macintosh. I have used the - yes, MAGPIE that is a difficulty. I have tried using recently MAGPIE for the Intel based Mac and I know it can be an issue. If you have the ability to work with a higher end -- with a higher end type of system that you can pay for, I know the Final Cut Pro that is available for the Mac. It''s possible to do captions that is actual captioning not just simply pixels on the screen that imitate captioning. So Final Cut Pro is another option for people with a Mac but I have sent information to MAGPIE to NCAM along with many others discussing the bugs for the latest version. The Intel based Macs and hopefully we''ll see some advancements there. Ill tell you what Deborah, If you''d like to email me Deborah, I''ll be happy to follow up on more information on the Mac for you. All right. Certainly. Past web design the same for Microsoft office here. By now you get the idea of pretty much how this works. The information is very consistent and the tools are basically the ones that I -- the approach is basically what I''ve gone over. In Power Point, there are many, many different ways to make Power Point accessible. Ways to put a lot of time and energy into Power Point and make it 100% accessible or you can work with some tools that will do it rather quickly for you and get you most of the way there. An example of that is the Illinois Web Publishing Wizard which we discuss both in our GRADE materials and in our Education Leadership Academy. So if you are looking for a fast way to get Microsoft office products including Power Point to be more accessible, you may want to take a look at that part of the tutorial. If you are looking for the full proof, more time consuming, if you have the resources, I think we have up to six methods for doing that accessibly. Since we -- access belie. I''m going to let you look over the information on these resources and I''m going to return to the Power Point so I can bring up -- forgive me for backing up here this, perhaps this is the most foolproof way of doing this. Another point I want to make here is we''re not just living in the 1900s here, the 20th century with the tools I''ve mentioned but we''re looking forward to new technologies that can be used for E-learning. This is something I''ve been covering in conference presentations and papers but hope to add to our online tools that you''ve just seen. In this I am referring to Web 2.0 types of tools that can be used for E-learning. Many educators are shying away from these tools accessible because they are afraid that they are truly inaccessible or cant be accessible. The good news is with some effort they can be. To give a specific example of those in terms of Web 2.0, were talking about those things that allow for interaction. You may know some of them like flicker.com for sharing photos or many of the blogging tools. That''s what I want to talk about. A pairing of tools, blogs and RSS feeds can be a really powerful combination for E-learning, although many haven''t thought of that yet. Blogs are web blogs and they consistent of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Many of you are familiar with those. RSS feeds can be a little more mysterious but really there not. They generally stand for Really Simple Syndication. There are other acronyms that can fit but that on works well and there just a way of getting information to you. Basically pushing it to you like subscribing to a magazine or newspaper. Since the blogs can actually be a way to share information well and RSS feeds can push information out to people and they can subscribe in whatever way they want to get it as frequently or infrequently as they want. They can be a great tool for collaboration and online learning and going to experiments more with this on our new version of the GRADE project beginning. They can be used for other things Dynamic web pages, dynamic libraries and learning objects by automatically updating content. They can be used for student research. Group projects are a great way for people to work together on projects. Time stamps are automatically created in blogs and you can see who''s done what and when. They aid communication between students and teachers because people can look at one source and they can see what is the latest version of the document, so to speak. RSS readers that feed the blogs to people allow information to be store and organized in folder in a single and remotely accessible location. One that people can reach from anywhere using often a web browser. So they can be easy for students and teachers to set up their own blogs via services such as blog lines. You can do that as I said to organize and share research, keep journal entries, open topics, specific dialogues so that a course may have an on going dynamic tool for people to discuss specific issues. And a different portion of the blog can be set up for every major issue dealt within a course. I have a link to one of the services to help you create blogs. They are easier than what most people think. All the information stored is based on XML. I won''t go into that right now because we don''t have time. Its information that can be syndicated because its stored in XML. That allows students to subscribe like a magazine or paper to a specific sections of a blog to get information they want and not get information they don''t want or need. There really rather easy to use and more accessible than any traditional database structures that individuals have used in the past to store group information. They can organize into folders so you can have many topics going at once. They can be superior to keeping research groups up to date via email list for each person in the group must organize the information into individual folders creating multiple copies of the same information. I think that most of us have experience this. If youre on email lists you can often override each others version or lose track who has the latest information and who has said what. They can also allow teacher to distribute information according to their needs and how they want information to be distributed. To give you some specifics on how to do this accessibly if you are interested in going into 21st century applications theres American Federation for the Blind test of RSS readers at this address and well take a quick look at it. Its entitled, Reading and Subscribing to Blogs through RSS. How accessible is this world to people with vision loss? It''s a wonderful article. It is some impressive research on AFBs part and for everybody who''s interested in using blogs who are served through RSS feeds this is a good place to start. The one, the service that the AFB recommends in that article is called Blog Lines. Partly because Blog Lines made it easier for people with low vision or blindness to actually create or edit or access blogs so please take a look at Blog Lines if you want to know more about how to do this type of approach. AFB found that blog lines had a fairly accessible registration process with simple forms that had proper labels, very important stuff that you heard me mention previously with a validation email containing a link back to Blog Lines. They found accounts set up to be straightforward. That''s sort of the nitty-gritty of the article. However, Blog Lines does not allow for easy posting of comments which is something if you are using a blog as online learning tool you may want that feature so that students or other individuals using the course can comment on information that''s been posted. If you want to set up a blog and lets subscribers comment on the material, then Word Press with an accessible template is a good option. This is the home page for WordPress. Wordpress.org take as little more time and a little more setup then Blog Lines but it''s an excellent way to make a fully accessible blog and there are templates already existing that you can find in using copy for making more accessible blogs. I say more accessible because some of the templates are truly accessible to the guidelines and others approach it closely. An example of WordPress accessibility in action is a blog that my team here at Georgia Tech is working on conjunction with the Southeast DBTAC, the DBTAC Strategies for Employment Success. This is a blog we have recently posted and we are very proud of it. This is what it looks like. I encourage all of you to continue to it and contribute to it and let us know your experiences with successful employment strategies for successful employment, especially relating to accessible recruitment. Accessible training and other factors that are critical in the online world of business. This blog has been designed through WordPress and it does meet the standards and guidelines I was showing you previously and if you look through this a bit, you might get an idea how this could be used for e-learning. If I were to teach these topics to a class here at Georgia Tech I might want to use this blog and have students look at different areas comment upon them and work on areas independently and have us all share information in this one blog. So lastly on this topic before I take questions, regardless of the affordances provided by blog services or RSS readers. The information is only accessible and usable as its initial construction which is getting back to my original approach here in this presentation. For this reason blogs need to follow standard guidelines for web-based material just like anything else. So now I think we have just enough time for questions and comments and I''ll leave my contact information up here while we''re doing that.
I''m going to say you can use your microphone or type a question. I''m going to repeat the question for the captioner. Or Robert you can repeat the question as well.
Now I know I couldn''t have answered every possible question. So let''s have an individual ask what''s on your minds.
I have a question that came in from someone via email who isn''t able to participate today and her question was just how open are faculty and instructors to using your methods?
One of the reasons why I pointed out as we went along, the easy methods particularly, such as using the Microsoft Accessible Publishing Wizard I showed a few minutes ago. We found through the work we did the instructors are far more interested if it can be automated, something that could be done with a push of a button. That''s actually an oversimplification but that and the Blog Lines that I showed you is an easier tool to use than WordPress, even though WordPress creates the most accessible blogs possible. So in all cases where I stopped, I paused in the presentation told you it was an easy method those are the ones faculty members were far more open to using. They also, I have to say the guidelines on our GRADE side because they wanted them all together. They didn''t want to have to go to the Acrobat website and look for the accessibility. They didn''t want to go to the Microsoft office area and look for accessibility. They wanted it on one page. When I was able to show them this information in one location and particularly where I was able to say here is something to help you, they were far more willing to work with it. In general, I would say the instructors -- it was hit or miss. We worked with a lot of instructors, some of them bought into the idea of accessibility and others simply did not. You pretty much know very quickly when you begin those conversations what you are dealing with. Eric is asking when the program will be archived. Will you be able to use without obtaining information? The information here, I believe the presentation was sent to everybody. As long as youre crediting the source here, I''m fine with this being used. I want people to use this information. As you''ve noticed most of it is available online freely and I strongly encourage people to spread the word as opposed to trying to hold back information.
I''ll just add it takes us a week or two to get the transcript and the presentation archived and the link will be sent out to everyone with that information.
Eric is also asking what is next? As I mentioned we are going to work on an update of much of that material in the GRADE project. We''ve been working to get the funding for that. Once place, I''m going to type in a URL here, another place we have updated information, its project we created specifically for science and math. It was at high school level but very applicable to higher Ed as well. It''s called SCITRAIN. I''ll go to the URL I believe and show it to you. Some of the updated info is. As I mentioned that, we''re going to start working October 1st on some updates to that GRADE material to try to bring it into 2008.
Any other final questions as he types in the website?
This is the home page for the SCITRAIN project. This is currently going. Its National Science Foundation funded. Probably a couple of weeks we''re going to have a third course available here. We have accessible science training, accessible math training at the moment and were going to add a module on accessible computer science training. This follows the research youve been looking at and these other resources and updates some of it and also takes the perspective of how to make the end person training and courses accessible as well. This may be a useful one for you.
Eric, are you talking about the captioning for this session or for captioning on the web to post captioning on the web? In this session, the captioning is sent out in the email and there''s a separate website you can go to to get the captioning and so you need to refer to that registration email. There will be a transcript available for this when it''s archived from the captioning. Are there any last questions from people for Robert? I''m going to put the evaluation link in the public chat area. Please evaluate the session. This was also emailed to you and I''ll email you another reminder. Thank you Robert and thank you for your attention everyone.
Thank you Janet. This has been a pleasure and hope everyone enjoy it.