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.

You probably have signed up at a web site where you were presented with a graphic showing you some combination of letters, numbers, or words in a graphic to prove that you are a real human being and not some kind of spam bot. The “following/finding” image above is an example of a word-based version of that task. These images are known as CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). My earliest recollection of seeing them in wide use was on blog sites with open commenting. Automated programs would submit “comments” consisting of links to pornographic web sites or pharmacy sites. For popular bloggers, even if they had a system to moderate comments before making the comments publicly visible, the overhead in managing their blog could quickly become unreasonable. For similar reasons, sites like Yahoo Directory, Google Mail, and HotMail were also fairly quick to adopt CAPTCHAs.

For most people, the main issue about CAPTCHAs was whether they were effective or not. As with anti-virus efforts, it is an ongoing fight between the guys in the white hats to protect their systems against the guys in the black hats who want to pervert the protected systems to their own ends. From an accessibility point of view, though, that issue was minor potatoes. Even users with perfect vision often have trouble with CAPTCHAs because of the level of distortion involved in obscuring the letters or words. The solution to that was to add a “refresh” or “recycle” button to the CAPTCHA so it would give you a new CAPTCHA.

However, if you were blind or had poor vision, it was pretty much well impossible to work past the graphic. What the initial CAPTCHA developers had failed to consider was how users relying on assistive technology to surf the web were going to be able to use a CAPTCHA graphic.   Why was that? Consider the usual way of making graphical content accessible: add a description to the image. If the task for our sample CAPTCHA above is to type out the words in the picture, putting “CAPTCHA image with the words ‘following’ and ‘finding’” as the description is going to help those not using images, yes, but it is also one hundred percent accessible to automated programs. While we obviously like to endorse accessibility for all, there is a tension between accessibility and security;it is completely undesirable for automated programs to be able to circumnavigate a security system so easily.

One solution to the accessibility issue was to add an audio component to the CAPTCHA. The “overlooks/inquiry” image shows a reCAPTCHA example that incorporates both the refresh button (the recycle-like symbol at the top of the column of icons), a help icons (at the bottom of the icon column), and the audio CAPTCHA icon (middle of the icon column). When you click the audio icon, the large word area of the CAPTCHA is replaced with a mini audio player and you are instructed to type what you hear. The audio in most examples I have tried is not the words in the graphical version. The audio quality is usually poor and may, on purpose, be distorted with additional people speaking or background noise in order to make it difficult for automated speech recognition programs to function. I often have trouble with the audio because of my own neurological hearing problems and the interference caused by background noise and lack of context. Try it yourself on a few examples at the reCAPTCHA site.

You might be thinking that the audio reCAPTCHA is a good compromise at trying to ensure accessibility for human beings while denying it to automated programs. Unfortunately, recent research studies have revealed that all of the common audio CAPTCHAs in use were vulnerable to automated speech processing techniques, with anywhere from roughly 50 percent to 70 percent accuracy. This excerpt from the December 8, 2008 Ars Technica article Computer scientists find audio CAPTCHAs easy to crack summarizes the important results:

The work involved gathering 1,000 audio CAPTCHAs from Google, Digg, and the reCAPTCHA service. 900 of these were used as a training set and the remaining 100 were set aside to test the system when done. The software first did a rough audio analysis, dividing each item into equal-sized chunks, each sufficiently long to fit any spoken character. Those segments with the highest energy peaks, which are considered most likely to contain actual letters, were set aside for analysis.

The authors tested a number of methods used to extract features from recordings of speech (for the curious, these are mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and two forms each of perceptual linear prediction and relative spectral transform-PLP). These features were then subjected to analysis using machine learning programs, which were trained on the identification of individual characters. Three methods—AdaBoost, support vector machines (SVM), and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN)—were trained using the 900 audio CAPTCHAs that had been processed manually. The result of this pairing of processing and analysis methods was a total of 15 different attempts at cracking each of the 100 test audio CAPTCHAs.

Google’s audio CAPTCHAs consist of a series of the digits 0 through 9 recited over background noise of speech played backwards. That was nowhere close to enough to consistently fool the researchers’ software; the SVM technique got the CAPTCHA right about two-thirds of the time, and AdaBoost wasn’t far behind (k-NN performed badly in this test). Digg uses both digits and letters, but plays them over a less complex background that sounds like flowing water. AdaBoost failed this test entirely, but SVM was able to clear 70 percent accuracy with several of the processing techniques; k-NN trailed it by a significant margin.

reCAPTCHA’s own audio version was similar to Google’s but used different speakers for different digits. This proved to be a significant barrier to the learning algorithms, which, at best, got it right a bit less than half the time (again, SVM was the star). As the authors point out, however, getting it right half the time would be more than worth the effort for spammers that may have hundreds or thousands of computers at their disposal. Some sites also allow the answer to be off by one digit, which would significantly increase the success rate.

[From Computer scientists find audio CAPTCHAs easy to crack]

We again have that tension between accessibility for people but inaccessibility for automated programs. A 50 percent success rate is not low enough to deter the bad guys. What can be done? The researchers, however, did conclude that “more of just about everything is better: more speakers, more characters, more distortion, and longer strings of tokens all seem to make a difference. As a result, they have expanded their own service to include all numbers from 0 to 99.” Time will tell how that pans out. I still wish we did not have to rely on different speakers, distortion, and entire sentences for audio CAPTCHAs as that too poses its own accessibility issues for those with physical or neurological hearing problems.

Perhaps there is mileage in some of the lesser-used systems that ask people to do simple mathematics or ask common-sense questions like “What colour is grass?” I suspect those too will be quite vulnerable to automated systems as the number of questions will be limited. Unsatisfactorily, we may have to settle with the situation as it currently stands until someone cleverer than me has a bright idea. If you had to solve the problem of making CAPTCHA technology accessible but secure, how would you do it? Or is there a better way to separate the people from the programs?

Further Reading:

• What Is reCAPTCHA? (http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html)
• CAPTCHA – Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha)

I’m afraid I’m only just starting the TMA 2 marking as my laptop had a horrible fan death a few days after I picked up everyone’s TMA 2. I had to back everything up and send the laptop away, which sucked up a week. The good news is that I am starting today and I hope <crosses fingers> to do at least one per day, returning all submitted on time by Saturday. I’d already hoped to be done, but these things happen.

In the meantime, I’ve noticed it’s been pretty quiet. Threads for Weeks 13 and 14 were created previously, so why not stop in and give those a whirl while you’re waiting for TMA 2 to come back? I’ll probably work ahead a little and create Week 15’s before TMA 2 is submitted.

If you’re in the region of the University of Sussex at Falmer this Friday afternoon, you might want to consider attending the Human-Centred Technology group’s seminar series. The speaker on November 28th is Sarah Lewthwaite from the University of Nottingham’s School of Education. She’ll be giving a talk about the experiences of disabled students and Web 2.0 technologies. The abstract is as follows:

Presenter: Sarah Lewthwaite (University of Nottingham)

Title: Disability 2.0: Facebook, the Academy and Student (dis)Connections.

Abstract: For many young people, online social networks such as Facebook are an essential part of their student experience. Other social web-based services like Wikipedia and YouTube are also an important facet of everyday student life. New technologies have always been scrutinized for their capacity to support education and, as these social technologies become more pervasive, universities are increasingly seeking to appropriate them for teaching and learning.

However, the educational impact of applying these Web 2.0 technologies for all users is unclear.

The experiences of disabled students crystallize many of the issues raised by the movement of the academy into the digital domain, disputing the notion of social networks as universally popular, transparent and inclusive. This presentation is based upon ongoing qualitative PhD research. Discussion will focus on data collected during 14 interviews with disabled students at different stages in their University studies. Interviews utilise screen capture, participatory and accessible methods to explore how the societal elements of disability transpire and transform online.

The seminar will be in the Interact Lab (Arundel 223), starting at 13:30 and lasting for an hour, with tea/coffee & cake afterwards. All are welcome to attend. More information can be found at http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/events/HCTSeminars/. I shall be there and I’ve heard a rumour that Chris Douce will also be attending.

As you know, access to the the e-book version of Jane Seale’s E-Learning and Disability in Higher Education: Accessibility Research and Practice was a little problematic at the beginning of the course, due to restrictions on concurrent access and saving/printing. Many people ended up ordering print copies of their own. The Course Team was aware of issues and was working with Library to come up with some kind of a satisfactory solution. While they haven’t got the ideal solution, the situation has improved somewhat. Mary Taylor posted a message on the 21st of November in the course’s General Forum saying that an agreement had been reached whereby students could be given a one-time only download link to a DRM-protected Adobe PDF version of the e-book. It can be printed out or read offline, but you cannot copy and paste from it. Nevertheless, it is an improvement. If you’re interested, drop Mary an e-mail as per the instructions in her post (Requires authentication).

BBC recently aired a two-part Horizon series on the thin line between normalcy and madness entitled “How Mad Are You”. The premise was interesting: they took ten people, five of whom had been previously diagnosed with a mental health difficulty, and five normal people and put them in a castle together for a week. Two psychiatrists and a psychiatric nurse were told that five out of the ten had suffered from depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, bipolar disorder, or social anxiety disorder. The psychiatric specialists’ job was simple: on the basis of observation, identify the five. There were some twists, of course, and the entire group of ten was subjected to some different kinds of tests designed to potentially reveal clues for the different disorders, but that is the basics of it in a nutshell.,/p>

I commented on Twitter that I was watching this and Alan Cann responded saying, “Yup, and Horizon made that point well. I do have some reservations re. diagnosis and remission, but hang on, it’s Seesmic time.” With that, he disappeared off and made the following Seesmic video (unfortunately, I don’t have a transcript of this).

After a little bit of thinking time, I formulated a response. You can either watch the Seesmic video or read my response:

The most important thing to take away is that people who have had a history of mental health problems or even who are currently experiencing a problem can appear on the surface perfectly normal to you or me. Indeed they can appear “normal” even under close scrutiny by trained professionals. The trained professionals were only able to identify 2 out of 5 disorders correctly: one who currently continued to experience obsessive compulsive disorder and one who had anorexia nervosa in the past.

You commented that normally psychiatrists or other professionals see people because people come to them realizing they have a problem or they’re recommended by others who think they have a problem. Psychiatrists don’t normally diagnose people on the basis of their current behaviour and certainly can’t diagnose them when they’ve been ill in the past. That’s not always true. Some mental health disorders leave people with permanent changes to their psyche and we saw that in the case of Alex, the mother of three who had experienced problems with anorexia nervosa in her teens. Her body image is permanently changed even though she’s “well”. Granted, that’s not going to be always the case, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that serious episodes of mental disorder can mark you in ways for life.

As educators in the United Kingdom, under the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act, we’re required to be proactive about accessibility issues for those with impairments, which can include mental health difficulties. At the Open University, as an associate lecturer, I am notified when people have disclosed mental health difficulties and the subsequent listing of potential problems, most of which I’ve never actually noticed occurring in my primarily distance education contact with them. This show is a good reminder that just because people seem to be “normal”, they might not be normal and may, in fact, be dealing with significant internal trauma or difficulties. How can we as front-line educators react appropriately or know when to intervene when all seems “normal”? How can we predict when a sensible, helpful e-mail might send someone who hasn’t disclosed any issues into a chasm? Also, once someone’s disclosed that they’ve had depression or OCD, which may not be lifelong diagnoses, unlike dyslexia or bipolar disorder, when do we stop trying to take that into account or should we? Yes, I certainly have questions, but I don’t have the answers.

Like you, I was really impressed with some of the participants and their abilities to “bounce back” or to deal with their difficulties. In particular, I thought Dan was fantastic with his handling of his obsessive compulsive disorder. I could also readily appreciate Yasmin’s elation at “fooling” the panel time and time again, especially when they picked her out initially as being “normal.” I have an impairment myself and the desire to feel “normal” permeates the thread of my life. I know that opportunities to feel “normal” are few, so I’m happy she has been given that confidence-building jolt.

Nice work, BBC. It was another impressive Horizon episode. I’m happy to see my television tax pounds at work in high quality productions such as this.

Since making the video response, I’ve realized I left out some things. The situation of the ten people in the castle was contrived, yes, and some people have questioned what could really be learned from such a situation. What they’re overlooking is the excellent job the program has done of highlighting mental health issues. It tells us that some of the questions I had will never have a good answer simply because people can look like you or me. The show also demonstrates that even after people are “well”, they still struggle with residual issues about their illness and that can continue to impact their lives and their self-worth. It probably wouldn’t hurt for us to keep that in mind or maybe for us all to just remember to be a little kinder in general to one another. The world is harsh enough.

H810: Accessible Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students is in its first presentation at the Open University. While I have a strong background and interest in accessibility issues for the Web, I do not have much expertise in applying this to e-learning particularly. As a result, I have been working through the course materials on a week-by-week basis myself, linking my own knowledge to pedagogy and research and ensuring that I am familiar with what my students are expected to know. Given that the course is rated at 15 hours a week, this has not been a trivial exercise, although some of the hours have been set aside for students to reflect and contribute to blog or forum entries. Those activities I have omitted, but I have worked through all of the resources (and beyond) and tried out many of the practical activities included in the course. When it came time to grade student essays at the end of Week 6, I discovered that all of that reading had a cognitive price to pay in terms of remembering what had come from where and the specifics.

I wrote the following short message back on November 4th in one of my H810 threads discussing possible alternatives for content delivery in the H810 course:

I’m going to write a more detailed blog post about this (when I have some time!), but one thing I noticed especially about this course is that it’s merciless if you have any kind of memory problem. I’m not sure if you’ve seen my previous blog posting about my own memory problems, but I found my memory particularly problematic while commenting on your TMAs. I’d remember that I’d read/seen something somewhere that I wanted to share with you, but I couldn’t remember where exactly. Normally this doesn’t cause me too much trouble because I either helped write the course or the majority of the course is available as downloadable PDFs, that I can then easily search in tools that I have locally. Where you’re being sent off here, there, and everywhere, and the descriptions of where you’ve been going are fairly general, then it’s very difficult to search. Although I knew I relied on electronic records and notes a lot, it didn’t really hit home how much I really do need to rely on that to supplement my tenuous memory.

H810 is one of the Open University’s predominantly “contentless courses.” That is, the majority of the course is actually drawn from third-party resources and the Open University predominantly acts as a kind of editor in choosing out the appropriate resources and providing a framework of activities and commentary in which to situate those resources. I’ve helped write one of these contentless courses myself, but the degree to which it is contentless depends on the subject matter and availability of high-quality, stable, authoritative resources in the area. The stability and authoritative aspects are particularly important. Just because it is on the Web does not automatically guarantee that what the resource says is true. Just because it is on the Web now does not guarantee it will be still on the Web in six months. We have already seen the “BBC Ouch!” student diaries we used as case studies in the course disappear suddenly, a few weeks after we used them.

H810 relies extensively on external resources. In Week 4, where we first met the “BBC Ouch!” student diaries, students are asked to read accounts from the following:

1. 4 one-month long web diaries of students with disabilities starting university at “BBC Ouch!“
2. 12 student profiles drawn out of forty available ones at the SKILL Student Experiences site.
3. 3 video case studies of students from Skills for Access.
4. 7 case studies plus any that interest out of twenty-five case studies at DART.
5. 30 case studies from LExDIS project, which were unavailable at time of writing and time of use.
6. A lengthy (20,000+ words) essay on the history of Worcester College for the Blind from http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/visugate/public_exprmedu.hcsp.
7. Review a collection of typewriter adaptations from http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/1284.htm.

That makes 26 case studies by my account that were actually available and I know I personally reviewed a great many more. Without having taken notes on all the case studies I reviewed, could I remember which case study, or from where, something had been mentioned? No. You might think that’s only natural, but even in units where there weren’t such a vast number of case studies, the number of web sites visited or pages read in the e-book become very difficult to keep track of when you decide later, “Oh, I remember reading something about this” and then your memory fails you and you cannot remember where.

As I commented in my short forum posting, this previously had not been that big of an issue for me as most courses are delivered electronically and I can just search the materials for what little I do remember. That strategy failed me here, because all of the content is actually external to what the course directly provides. It was quite frustrating trying to recall where I had seen something. At the same time, it was enlightening to realize how much reliance I have placed on search as a scaffold for my own inability to retrieve or commit things to memory. Again, in retrospect, it seems obvious. That is why I keep such detailed research journal notes and maintain a bibliography database with extended information in a very disciplined fashion. I am providing myself with the data I will need later to remember something.

How can I do that on a “contentless course” without making and keeping notes on everything by hand? Keeping notes would likely work, but it is too much work given how many resources are being used in this particular course. One possible solution is that, similar to a list of references, an annotated resource list is provided by the course team. The problem with that is that it would likely summarize the SKILL Student Experiences site as “Profiles of students with various disabilities or impairments in a higher education setting”, which does not help you remember which students or interesting profiles were there.

Another possibility is the Firefox ScrapBook extension. I originally started using it to keep local copies of some course content pages because the Open University’s VLE has been acting up at inconvenient moments. This very cool Firefox extension allows you to make a complete, painless local copy of an individual web page (or a set of pages), as well as allows you to use customizable highlighting pens on the content, remove some content, or even add annotations as text or links to other material. In addition, you can organize your saved content into folders, like bookmarks, and, most importantly for my purposes, do a full-text search. If I was using Firefox full time instead of its Gecko-powered, Mac-enhanced Camino brother, I might be tempted.

I think a better solution is for me to use something I’m already using: DevonThink Pro for the Macintosh. I’ve been using DevonThink Pro as a research notebook, miscellaneous journal, and grade notebook. It handles many kinds of media with ease: images, PDFs, RTF, text, etc, allowing you to easily search and classify those documents, whether they’ve been imported completely into its database or just imported by reference. It also can handle bookmarks or web archives. A web archive, just like in ScrapBook, is a complete record of a single web page or even an entire web site. While it is some work to add an entire web site or specific pages to DevonThink, the task is made easier through the use of a bookmarklet I can install in my browser (see picture above). If I want an entire web site, it’s easier to use the built-in download tool in DevonThink itself, which will download anything linked to a given start page. The end result is the same: a local and completely searchable copy. It has the additional bonus that DevonThink’s classification engine will also thoughtfully suggest related content it already knows about (see last picture)

I have only touched on the capabilities of ScrapBook and DevonThink, but I think they both have strong possibilities for supporting other people with memory committal or retrieval problems, even though that is not their primary function. ScrapBook is available free, whereas DevonThink Pro is a commercial software product sold for $79.95 US. It is available at 25% discount for educational users or non-profits. There is also a “personal” edition available, which has fewer features, but is half the cost.

I now have a job ahead of me going back through the first ten weeks of the course and archive the resources I previously read or reviewed into a new H810 DevonThink notebook.

More information:

• Devon Technologies. 2008. “DevonThink”. Retrieved on November 17, 2008 from http://universalusability.com/index.html.
• ScrapBook Firefox Extension. 2008. Available online from http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/.

As with many academics, I’m often behind on my journal reading, so I’ve only just noticed that August’s Communications of the ACM contained a news article entitled “Access For All” by Peggy Aycinena, summarizing some recent research work into accessibility initiatives. Quite a bit of what was reported was about communication initiatives:

• Repeating words of TV announcers in Japan by a separate speaker to improve real-time, speech recognition for captioning.
• Wheelchairs that use verbal commands to navigate an automatically built map being developed at MIT.
• University of Washington’s MobileASL project that’s modified a cell phone into a video phone with a split view for American Sign Language users, with one side showing a remote translator and the other the cell phone user, improving communication between ASL users and text relay services.
• The Rochester Institute of Technology is working on establishing a deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) CyberCommunity between different universities with the goal of increasing enrollment in science, engineering, and mathematics at all levels.
• Ladner’s team at Rochester is also developing a textbook translation tool. Textbooks are fairly accessible, but figures, graphs, and charts are still problematic. Their Tactile Graphics Assistant produces texture versions of figures automatically.
• Carnegie Mellon University scientists Tom M. Mitchell and Marcel Just have been using functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to detect when a person thinks of a specific noun–mindreading, sort of–that could be useful in autism, paranoid schizophrenia, and Pick’s disease studie

Not too surprisingly, there was also quite a bit about the web and general accessibility there. Ladner, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was quoted as saying:

Unfortunately, a lot of Web pages are not that accessible for people who are blind or dyslexic… Web designers use commercial development tools to make this looks good, but don’t create a logical structure behind the page’s that’s navigable with a screen reader. Frequently, there’s also no alternative text inserted for figures.”

I’d have to agree with that. Although tools like DreamWeaver have come a long way, especially with their much improved support for CSS style sheets, it is far too easy to design things which look pretty but which do not meet accessibility needs. Many designers probably do not realize this is the case and their clients, in many cases are ignorant or do not care, being unwilling to “pay for designs that will work with people they’re not intending to sell to anyway.” Simon Harper, University of Manchester researcher and chair of this year’s SIGACCESS conference, agrees that accessibility starts with the design,

It would cost nothing and would be very easy to make a Web site from the outset that’s supportive of accessible technology.

However, as I’ve already said: you can lead the horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Vicki Hanson, chair of SIGACCESS & researcher at IBM’s T.J. Watson Center, is cognizant of this too and thinks it’s a legal thing in the United States and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI), believes it’s a matter of international law. ICDRI chair Mike Burks comments:

Some people maintain that pursuing accessible technology is too expensive but people in the U.S. who have disabilities have approximately 70% unemployment rate… That’s a huge price for any society to pay for ICT not being accessible to all.”

I think Burks might be stretching it a bit to equate inaccessible ICT to the huge unemployment rate for the disabled, but I can certainly see his point that we are impacting the lives of many, many people in ways that, in many cases, could be avoided with some forethought and care.

In closing, the article quotes Simon Harper about accessibility being about choice:

Everyone of us is bizarrely unique, and in the real world we do things in many different ways… There is no single solution to accessibility technologies. The solution is to have a whole menu of solutions from which each of us can pick and choose.

That is just as applicable to us in designing e-learning, if not more so! Not only does having a whole menu of choices perhaps cater to accessibility, it also caters to people’s individual learning styles. I was just talking on Twitter with Tony Hirst (Open University) about learning styles and personalized course content delivery. With his idea, I would receive the heavily text-based delivery I crave and process better, whereas he would receive the “talking head” content he prefers. Notice the contrast there between more inaccessible video content and accessible text content as well as learning styles? That also resonates with the ideas about universal design.

The seven principles of universal design are:

1. Equitable use
2. Flexibility in use
3. Simple and intuitive
4. Perceptible information
5. Tolerance for error
6. Low physical effort
7. Size and space for approach and use

If you’re interested in reading more about universal design and usability, Sarah Horton’s Access By Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers is available online. The web site contrasts universal usability from accessibility by saying:

Accessibility is primarily concerned with making the content and functionality of web sites accessible–within reach–to all users. University usability goes one step further, striving to make the content and functionality accessible and usable by all.

Life may be unfair, but it is up to each one of us to try to improve the world around us. For educators, that includes making education as accessible as possible.

More information:

• Aycinena, Peggy. 2008. “Access for All” in Communications of the ACM. 08(08). Available online from doi:10.1145/1378704.1378709.
• Center for Universal Design. 2008. “UD Principles HTLM Format”. Retrieved on November 17, 2008 from http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html.
• Horton, Sarah. 2006. “Universal Usability.” Retrieved on November 17, 2008 from http://universalusability.com/index.html.

All TMAs that were submitted on by October 18th have now been returned. You can pick your assignment back up from the eTMA system. Your returned assignment will contain additional files: an electronic PT3 form and another Word document named something like “MyAssignment-MARKED”, where “MyAssignment” is whatever you originally named your assignment file. The electronic PT3 contains a statement of your assignment mark plus my overall comments. These overall comments and a specific breakdown of how the marks were allocated is included in the “MARKED” copy of your assignment. That copy also contains numerous inline comments in large blue Verdana typeface as well as grammar corrections in large purple Verdana typeface. It should be easy to read either visually or using screen reader. If you have any problems, please let me know.

The above chart shows the distribution of marks. The actual range was 45% to 87%. In reviewing the allocation of scores, it was difficult to generalize where people tended to lose points. Some people lost points for online participation. Others lost points for not addressing all four topics in their essay or for not writing from a specific context. In general, though, people tended to do quite well at writing from their own context, but did not necessarily do so well at tying their context to concepts and ideas we have been covering in the course, like models of disability, the need for disability awareness and training, or how assistive technology can address identified challenges. While you are invited to reflect and write from your own context, I am looking for you to demonstrate that you can apply the ideas from the course to that context.

All in all, though, it was a good start to the course for everyone and there’s TMA 2 ahead in which to improve.

If you’ve been too busy to keep up with news from the Course Team, here’s a quick recap of news from the last few weeks:

• The Institute of Educational Technology’s periodic review of the MAODE, PCAP, MScRMET courses and awards has been completed. Professor Mary S. Thorpe, Programme Director, reports that “we achieved the best possible result in that the reviewers stated that they had ‘full confidence’ in both quality and academic standards, and information published.” She also comments that they received a number of commendations for teaching materials, assessment tasks, and links between research and teaching.

• The OU will be piloting Turnitin, a plagiarism detection system. On this pilot, the university will submit work for you, sans personal details (although your PI might be on it from where you added it yourself). For each assignment, a report will be given to the Course Team showing the percentage of your assignment text that matches specific web sites. This may result in additional guidance being provided to you or more serious action.

The full text of both of these announcements is available from the H810 Course News page.

The October 2008 issue of Transactions on Accessible Computing looks to be really interesting if you want to see how far (or not) we’ve come with respect to assistive technology and accessibility of computing for people with disabilities. Here is the issue’s description from the editors:

“Computers and People with Disabilities” is a reprint of an article originally published in Communications of the ACM in 1992. In this article, Glinert and York issued a “call-to-arms” for research and development on technologies for people with disabilities. Specifically, they highlighted that human-computer interfaces at the time generally failed to take into account the needs of disabled users. Their challenge was to change computing culture to address this need. Their article remains timely today in its consideration of government, industry, and private foundations working with researchers to achieve accessible technology. With the recent launch of Transactions on Accessible Computing, this seems an appropriate time to consider progress in the field since, as well as current research trends.

The reprinting of this article is followed by four commentaries by leaders in accessibility research. Each was cited in the 1992 article and each now gives their view on how the field has progressed since that time. In their commentaries, some themes emerge and new technologies are discussed. In short, their commentaries point to both a great deal of progress and a lack of progress. All four of the commentators note areas where computing continues to present barriers rather than assist users with disabilities.

Sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it? The good news is: if you’re an H810 student, you can read full text versions of the articles via the Open University’s ACM subscription.

I had this news release from Nottingham Trent University about the Interactive Technologies: Education, Disability and Rehabilitation Conference pointed in my direction and I thought some H810 students might be interested:

Interactive Technologies: Education, Disability and Rehabilitation Conference
The aim of the conference is to bring together academics and practitioners to showcase practice and to mainstream research ideas and outcomes. It will introduce a wider audience to key findings and products from research and will illustrate how practice feeds back into and informs research. Joint academic-practitioner papers are welcomed; the conference will create a forum for two-way communication between the academic and practitioner communities.

The conference takes place on Wednesday, November 12th, between 09:15 and 16:30. There’s a student rate of £25 or £50/person for everyone else.

A PDF copy of the presentation schedule and speakers is available with the news release, but here is what the line-up looks like at the moment:

• Paul Penn: A Multimedia and Virtual Reality Aging and Driving Awareness CD for Older Drivers
• Penny Standen: An Evaluation of the Use of Microswitch Controlled Computer Games in Improving Choice Reaction Time for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities
• Claire Johnson: Creative Coding: Developing Programming Skills at KS3 Through Computer Game Authoring – A Case Study
• Pauline Smith: A Human Factors Approach To Assessing the Usability of Assistive Technology Devices
• Patricia Heyn: Evidence-Based Applications of Virtual Reality Therapy
• Matthew Bates: Playing To Win: Motivation for Teaching and Learning in Today’s Gaming Culture
• Lesley Axelrod: The Reality of Homes Fit for Heroes: Design Challenges for Rehabilitation Technology
• Penny Standen: The Internet: A Comfortable Communication Medium for Autistic People? A Study To Investigate How People with Asperger Syndrome (AS) Or High Functioning Autism (HFA) Experience the Internet as a Communication Medium
• Gary Priestnall: The Geospatial Widgets Project: Interactive Visual Tools To Support Spatial Thinking
• David Jeckells: Enhancing Student Reflective Practice/Writing by Using A Wiki for Collaborative Investigations
• Mark Griffiths: Online Advice, Guidance and Counselling for Addictive Behaviours
• Penny Standen: Effect of Playing Computer Games On Decision Making in People with Intellectual Disabilities
• David Brown: GAM ON: Future Proofing Games Based Learning Objects for Use by Offenders and Those at Risk of Offending throughout Europe
• Alexis Gizikis: Navigabile: Communicating through AAC for People with Cognitive Difficulties
• Lindsay Evett: A Wiimote Controlled Interface to Virtual Environments for the Blind – Mental Models and Attentional Demands
• Zoe Robertson: Expanding the Peer Network for Students Who Use Communication Aids Via Video Conferencing
• Anne Emerson: An Examination of Facilitated Communication Through the Use of Eye- Tracking and Video Analysis: the Potential for Eye-Gaze Communication for People with Disabilities
• David Brown: GOAL.NET: Game On Accessible Learning

Thanks to @MaddyLou for sharing the news posting with me.