It is not always easy to present digital accessibility ideas linked to elearning and MOOCs to audiences other than those who work in the field of disability and Higher Education! Yet unless we go beyond the gatekeepers of the accessibility and disability knowledge, we will never spread the news that this is a subject that affects us all. There are ways to get round the many barriers that digital content in teaching and learning can present to those who find using online content challenging.
So many aspects of teaching are happening on the web, via our computers, tablet and phones that we need to be aware of the different way individuals access materials and what knowledge they bring to the table when they are learning. It is a very exciting prospect to feel that we can share knowledge so much more easily now that we have technologies that can help if only we get the way we convey knowledge into a format that is accessible.
In the past year several of us have tried to show the ways in which the MOOCA project is working to ensure that teaching resources can be developed in a way that is easy to use by the widest possible audience. We started our dissemination at the AAATE 2015 conference and I have shared these slides below.
In 2016 I discussed the collaboration taking place within the MOOCA project with:
- An international audience at Bett 2016.
- A group of librarians from different universities attending sessions on alternative formats such as ebook or etexts.
- Slidewiki developers and researchers working on the new version of their online systems and
- those who attended the British Computer Society workshop on Digital Accessibility.