Hot on the heels of University Mental Health Day which took place on 2nd March 2017, Margaret McKay asked Sandy MacLean Inclusion Advisor at College Development Network to share some thoughts on the role of mindfulness in our digital world….. Mindfulness is a particular way of paying attention. It is the mental faculty of purposefully bringing […]
Tag: accessibility
It’s easy to get preoccupied with accessible teaching and learning but much of the information a student requires comes from faculty administrative staff. Ben Watson, the University of Kent’s Accessible Information Advisor takes up the story… At the University of Kent, we have been working closely with Jisc to implement mainstream adjustments and technologies to improve […]
The University of Chester has been actively preparing for the changes to disabled student allowances. In this guest post by Pete Scorey – Assistive Technology Officer for Learning and Information Services – Alistair McNaught invites Pete to explain his approach to benchmarking accessibility. There has been much talk of ‘reasonable adjustments’ recently, along with the […]
We’ve talked before about the inclusivity benefits that are hidden in the tools and technologies that we use every day and are often overlooked. This blog by Margaret McKay and Rohan Slaughter describe ways of (i) taking advantage of the Ease of Access features in Windows (ii) how Roaming Profiles set up by the IT […]
A recent question on the Assistive-technology Jisc mail list (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=ASSISTIVE-TECHNOLOGY) sparked some interesting debate. Alistair McNaught thought the debate was worthwhile enough to summarise as a blog post. In the process he discovered some weird and wonderful things about redeeming inaccessible PDFs… How are PDFs good for accessibility? If a PDF document has been created […]
People are different. Personally, I loathe icons. I am a words person. I hate working with wordless IKEA self-assembly booklets or icon driven tablet and phone screens. Even after 3 months daily use I stare at my Mac screen trying to differentiate between email and word processing symbols because icons are just a jumble of […]
With cuts to disabled student allowance (DSA) it is imperative that organisations become more inclusive, learning how to reduce barriers at source. Dr. Jennifer George, Academic Lead for Learning Technologies and Digital Media at Anglia Ruskin University, explains their approach to ensuring some of the key content students encounter has good accessibility credentials… Introduction Staff […]
Creating an Accessible Organisation starts with policy but this must then translate into accessible practice in order to ensure that support for leaners is delivered effectively. Accessible Organisations should have well-designed systems and clearly documented procedures that efficiently identify, monitor and deliver appropriate support to both students and staff with additional needs. Inclusion goes across the whole […]
We’ve already blogged on supporting reading and using built in browser tools but a question we often get is “What’s the difference between screen reading and text readers (or ‘text to speech’ technology)? Often the terms are used interchangeably but, in reality, they are two different kinds of technologies used in different ways. Margaret McKay helps […]
It’s easy to think that new publishing formats like EPUB3 have made accessibility issues a thing of the past. James Scholes – an expert screen reader user and ebook tester – suggests there’s still a long way to go… It’s no surprise that the eBook revolution has been a boon to many visually impaired people. For […]