accessibility | Chris Aldrich

📺 Learner Identities | YouTube

Human Diversity and Learner Transformation

I really like this video quite a bit. It definitely has an air of Big History to it, or at least Big History on the human scale portion of the timeline. I recognize and have written a bit about one of the smaller infographics from the video, though here it’s far too small to see what it is or what she’s referring to.

Learner identities, Big History, and collective learning also generally remind me about shrinking numbers of languages, which I’ve mentioned before. In teaching and passing on knowledge, we will need to be even far more accomodating about culture and language, or eventually we’ll loose all of the diversity of languages we’ve got today.

In digging around a bit I note that Dr. Kalantzis has some interesting course content available on Coursera that might be worth delving into shortly as well.

As I look at some of the websites being created for the EDU522 class, it’s exciting to see what people are creating and how they’re expressing themselves. As hinted at in the Who Am I module, I do think it may be useful for some to think about the readability and accessibility of their sites. Even simple things like the color of a background against text can make it unpleasant or difficult to read. For ideas on readability, I recommend Kevin Marks’ WIRED article How the Web Became Unreadable.¹

Be creative and have fun, but remember the multiple audiences and communities who may not consume your content the same way you do.

References

Marks K. How the Web Became Unreadable | Backchannel. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/. Published October 19, 2016. Accessed August 1, 2018.

👓 Why “click here” is a terrible link, and what to write instead | Stephanie Leary

Read Why “click here” is a terrible link, and what to write instead by Stephanie Leary

An astonishing percentage of what I do with my clients’ web copy involves eradicating the phrase “click here” from their links. For more information, click here.
You see it everywhere. Everyone’s doing it, so it must be a best practice, right?

Wrong. It’s the worst possible practice. You should never, ever use “click here” in a web link.

Why?

“Click here” requires context.

Some good solid advice here for creating links!

🔖 Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science from Rajiv Jhangiani, Robert Biswas-Diener (eds.)

Bookmarked Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science by Rajiv Jhangiani, Robert Biswas-Diener (eds.) (Ubiquity Press)

Affordable education. Transparent science. Accessible scholarship.

These ideals are slowly becoming a reality thanks to the open education, open science, and open access movements. Running separate—if parallel—courses, they all share a philosophy of equity, progress, and justice. This book shares the stories, motives, insights, and practical tips from global leaders in the open movement.

It’s not just the book about which there’s so much to find interesting, but the website that’s serving it is well designed, crafted, and very forward thinking in what it is doing.

Accessibility on the Web

I certainly don’t go out of my way to follow the topic of accessibility, though I do think about it occasionally. It’s apparently bubbling up more frequently as something in need of some dire attention on both the web and in real life.

I ran across three different pleas in less than the span of an hour, so it’s something I’ll commend to everyone’s attention. Rachel’s tweet has some nice linked resources. I’ll have to take a closer look at what I can do to better support these ideas myself.

I’m glad that WordPress.org has a feature filter checkbox for “accessibility ready” on their themes page, but they should begin using that flag to filter out those which aren’t and just not showing them. It would be nice to have that type of functionality to be able to sort plugins by as well, or to leverage plugins to support it against the threat of being de-listed.

Dear #WordPress,

Going forward, I’ll only implement or recommend themes/plugins that are accessible or show me they’re working on it.

I’ll even help and create PRs.

If we’re going to power 30% of the Internet, we have a responsibility to build a better web.

— Rachel Cherry (@bamadesigner) December 18, 2017

I highly recommend these two additional articles I saw that touch upon two different areas:

Excluded from Confoo Speaker Dinner: What Happened and How it Made Me Feel by Nicolas Steenhout

Spooled Twitter Thread: OK Third-Party WordPress, We Need To Have A Come-to-Jesus Meeting About Your Accessibility Flare by Amanda Rush

👓 Excluded from Confoo Speaker Dinner – What Happened and How It Made Me Feel | Part of a Whole

Read Excluded from Confoo Speaker Dinner – What Happened and How It Made Me Feel by Nicolas Steenhout (Part of a Whole)

I was an invited speaker at the Confoo YVR conference in December 2017. I gave two talks, both on accessibility. I was the only speaker presenting accessibility-related topics. There was a dinner organized for all the speakers. I was precluded from attending that dinner because the organizers selected a venue on the second floor, with no elevators. There was no way for a wheelchair user to access the venue. I felt embarrassed, and angry.

Wow this was pretty shitty…