Descriptions of images in online documents help all readers – not just those with vision impairment – to fully understand the photograph, chart or graph and make the information accessible
Matthew Deeprose believes that established communities play a crucial role in fostering education, awareness, and best practices in accessibility. In this article, he will share valuable insights from his colleagues and peers from universities around the world, explore the transformative power of peer learning, the significance of community in achieving accessibility for all, and the impact of communities in higher education.
Accessible content is better content. One way to boost accessibility in visual materials is paying attention to colour contrast during the design process. Here’s a tool to make that simpler.
What’s one activity that everyone who works in an information technology related field could do to make a difference to digital accessibility? The answer could be right in front of you as you read this: your keyboard.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
Captions on videos benefit everyone. It’s important that captions are accurate and follow good practice. Learn how to improve captions using University tools.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
A case study with examples of improving document accessibility. This is based around the work I did on improving the accessibility of the University of Southampton's Teaching Excellence Framework submission.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
TextBox are well known for their accessibility work, most recently the ASPIRE awards. Huw Alexander from TextBox invited me to do an interview for their Lunchbox series.
The iSolutions Digital Accessibility Community of Practice began in December 2020. It aims to share practices, provide peer support, and raise awareness of digital accessibility within the department. Using results from a survey of community members, in this post I review the past year and looks forward to the year to come.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
A common misconception is that Digital Accessibility slows down and impedes IT development process, making them less agile. In this post we cover six aspects we learned in our Agile training course and how they relate to accessibility.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
PowerPoint’s Design Ideas feature helps us create attractive slides quickly. Unfortunately, some of its suggestions do not follow accessibility best practice, creating barriers that may exclude members of your audience. In this blog post we explain three issues and how to fix them.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
For recorded lectures and presentations, some colleagues prefer to create narrated PowerPoint files. You can include your webcam video in these types of recordings, this helps students to see you and your passion for your subject and helps to build a connection with your audience. I received a ticket with a query about whether the background of the video could be blurred.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
Topic: the use, administration, and configuration of the Blackboard Learning Management System
When setting the Answer Set options, use Decimals, and not Significant Figures. If you specify significant figures, then students have to give an answer with the same number of significant figures that you specify, but unless you state this in the question text, they will not know that they need to do so.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
The Digital Learning team worked on a major project last year with our Faculty of Humanities to implement new Blackboard course templates. This introduced new course menus, course menu colour schemes, and course redesign.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
The self and peers assessment tool takes a little practice to become confident with. A major consideration is that the system does not tell students when the submission stage ends and the evaluation stage begins, so careful oversight and communication is essential.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
The ability to hide your background in Blackboard Collaborate is one of the most requested features on the Blackboard Community site. In addition, it has been requested many times by colleagues at the University of Southampton. This post will teach you how to use third-party tools to use virtual backgrounds in Blackboard Collaborate.
Published on The University of Southampton Digital Learning Blog
With the new semester about to start in the UK I wanted to put together a short video that explains how students can create their OWN groups in any Blackboard course. This can be really useful for creating impromptu and dynamic groups on a course that can be used for any purpose, for example working on a project, getting a team together, or just socialising.
Recently I was asked to do a workshop to introduce a department to Collaborate. When I asked what they wanted to cover the list kept getting longer and longer. So rather than spend the time doing live demos I built on some slides that Amy Eyre had shared some time ago, and in the spirit of the community I'm sharing these back. I also have a few examples for ice-breakers that I used.
As we move to SaaS soon I had to update our theme work to be compatible with the latest SaaS version. So this means I have a nice freshly compiled version to share.
As part of my roll-out plan for Blackboard Collaborate I wanted to add some light contextual help that acknowledged that Collaborate was something new, that directed staff and students to support resources, and that stated the recommended browsers. To this end I created a JSHack which I am now sharing to the wider community.
I recently gave a presentation introducing discussion boards for asynchronous communication as part of our drive to engage and inform Blackboard users as our institution moves more learning and teaching online as part strategy to cope with COVID19.
In my last post we had reached an impasse while migrating legacy content. The tool claimed it had worked, but there was no evidence from the data that it had. In this post I share how I got on with Blackboard support and some other news from our SaaS Migration Project.
In this episode of the SaaS Migration Diaries, I share what happened when we tried running the Move Legacy Content to Content System migration tools for the first time on a development server.
After months of writing business cases, project plans, engaging with stakeholders, confirming budgets, and negotiating contracts we are on the road to SaaS.
In the spirit of Chris Boon's fantastic thread on the old Blackboard community site, I would like to share with you how our Blackboard looks now that we have spent half a year on the responsive theme.
The University of Southampton is leading the way in the uptake of computer-based examinations. At the heart of this innovation is the Managed Learning Environment (MLE) Team who have been developing and supporting the computer-based exams experience at UoS since the early 2000s. Last week, our President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Mark E. Smith visited the MLE team to find out about their vital work in supporting several key pillars of the University’s strategy.
This winter like many other institutions we applied the latest CU to enable the crocodoc to box transition. The upgrades worked well as we were able to update and adjust the implementation plans we had spent a lot of time on last year.
This winter like many other institutions we applied the latest CU to enable the crocodoc to box transition. The upgrades worked well as we were able to update and adjust the implementation plans we had spent a lot of time on last year.
Our implementation plan is quite long and hard to skim over. Here I've tried to highlight some of the interesting fixes that we have included that may be of particular interest to others.
Internally we have a service that was set up for getting user id photos. You point a web browser at a URL with the staff/student number of a particular users at the end of the address and you will be presented with their photo. I developed a very simple bash script to look up who was in Blackboard and get their photos.
It's always interesting to see how different institutions handle communications with their users. I thought some might be interested in our approach this year.
As most will know, since 9.1 Q2 2016 Blackboard uses a new installer. We had tried this in our upgrade last year but were not able to get the new installer to work.
The VLE/LMS is such an important resource that for almost any institution downtime is unpopular. Despite this if you are self hosted or managed hosted downtime is inevitable in order to apply upgrades and take care of maintenance.
In my previous post I wrote about how we set up a framework for performing Blackboard upgrades. Having set that up I could start planning the upgrade projec
Our Summer 2016 upgrade was successful, but running an upgrade project from start to finish in eight weeks had been a stressful experience. We had only this short period of time due to local resourcing issues. To improve this going forwards I wrote a paper stating how upgrades would be controlled in the future.