Teaching the creation of accessible educational materials through an e-learning course

Handouts Media

Presented at 8:00am in Cotton Creek I on Thursday, November 16, 2017.

#10303

Speaker(s)

  • Lars Ballieu Christensen, Senior Advisor, SensusAccess

Session Details

  • Length of Session: 1-hr
  • Format: Lecture
  • Expertise Level: All Levels
  • Type of session: General Conference

Summary

Creating accessible documents is key to inclusive education but very often educational materials are inacccessible. Teaching the importance of digital accessibility is vital but time consuming. Sensus has developed an accessible e-learning course to increase the impact of training and to promote accessiblility in educational material

Abstract

Accessible documents are a prerequisite for inclusive education: documents must be accessible to be usable with assistive technologies. Also, documents must be accessible if they are to be rendered automatically into alternate formats. Unfortunately, the majority of educational materials are inaccessible. A root cause is that few people know how to author accessible documents. Over the cause of the past five years, Sensus has been training over 1,000 persons on how to create accessible documents. Needless to say, this approach is neither efficient nor sufficient. To increase impact, Sensus has created a comprehensive e-learning course on digital accessibility. The modules teach the importance of digital accessibility, how to use authoring technology correctly, and how to convert documents into alternate formats. The presentation covers the background for the course and also discusses the process of adapting face-to-face training into an accessible e-learning course using Articulate.

Keypoints

  1. Teaching document accessibility
  2. Creating accessible e-learning modules
  3. Producing alternate formats

Disability Areas

Topic Areas

Accessible Course Design, Alternate Format, Uncategorized

Speaker Bio(s)

Lars Ballieu Christensen

Lars Ballieu Christensen (born 1963) works with technology and design for people with special needs. He advises government, organizations, academic institutions and companies on accessibility and inclusive design. Furthermore, he is the inventor of a range of innovative technologies that support inclusion and self-sufficiency amongst people with special needs, including the award-winning RoboBraille service. Lars holds master degrees in computer science and journalism, as well as a Ph.D. degree in computer science, all from the University of Roskilde, Denmark.

Handout(s)