H810: Accessibility Ahead

Course News: TMA #2 Results and Discussion January 8, 2009

I just realized that, in the holiday madness, I finished marking TMA 2 and made the nice chart above, but I did not remember to post the chart or comment generally on TMA 2’s results. Here, belatedly, are some comments to remedy that.

The above chart shows the distribution of marks. The actual range was 44% to 87%—very similar to the range in TMA #1. The chunking, however, was more distinct, with the majority of people scoring in the 65% to 69% range. Similar to TMA #1, the big issue for most people was being able to justify what they had done to specific issues and research covered in the course. For the ECA it will be very important to write from your own context but you must specifically relate to content in the course. For example, “I provided both a PDF and an RTF version of my learning resource because, according to Taylor (2008), many assistive technology devices cannot read Word documents but can read RTFs.” This phrasing accomplishes three things. It explains what you did; it explains why you did it; and it supports your action and justification with a course-based reference. Just stating that you did something, while that something may demonstrate good practice, does not illustrate that you understand why it is good practice. Likewise, being very vague about what specifically you did may not be helpful. Adding alternative text descriptions to graphics may be good practice, but it only enhances accessibility when the descriptions are both appropriately added and appropriate in content. The classic example of that is people using blank “spacer” images to position content on web pages and blindly adding text descriptions of “spacer image”. Imagine how tedious, annoying, and useless it is to hear that over and over again via your screen reading software.

On the whole, though, everyone is doing satisfactory and is well on the way to passing the course. I did get to see some very neat resources. I was particularly impressed with Dwayne’s enthusiastic attempt at converting a PowerPoint presentation into a Flash-based application for use on a Moodle site. That was quite brave, even if the result wasn’t completely what would be desired. I’m sure he and everyone else learned a lot in the process of creating their learning resources. I know that I certainly had a very interesting experience in trying out the various resources using the built-in screen reading software for my computer.

That leaves only the end of course assessment (ECA), due January 23rd. I will be posting some separate advice and comments about that later.