Using learning management systems and other tools

- [Instructor] As I mentioned earlier, there's an increased amount of responsibility on people who are creating their own content. Because we need to make it accessible. And this isn't always easy. But don't let that deter you. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you to create accessible learning content. And to check content to make sure that it's accessible. I recommend utilizing resources that are already available to you because there are many tools that have accessibility features built in. And moving forward, I think that most tools will include this, but not yet. A couple of examples of tools that do incorporate accessibility features include Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. Right now, I'm inside of a support page for Microsoft. And it's telling me about the accessibility support for Word. If I scroll down, I can select my device and then you'll see that they put a ton of time into these accessibility features and letting you know what they are and how to use them. If I switch up here at the top, it's the same for PowerPoint. I can select my device and then they have all of these resources down below. Now let's take a look at this inside of Word and PowerPoint. I'm going to navigate to a resume that I have in Microsoft Word. And this is for Julie Parker. Now, if I'm on the home tab and adjusting things like the text and other things, I can then go up to the top and over on the right, there's a tab for review. If I click there, you'll see on the left-hand side that there's an icon that says check accessibility. If I click on this, I get the accessibility checker. And over here to the right, it is giving me some warnings. It's telling me hard to read text contrast. And if I click on it, it shows me where. Now, I agree with them. This doesn't have very high contrast. So maybe I'd want to consider making this text a darker color so it does have better contrast and is easier to see. This is the accessibility checker inside of Microsoft Word. Let's take a look at it in PowerPoint. Here's a random presentation and this guy here seems pretty cool. And up at the top, I'm on the home tab. But again, if I go over to the review tab, there is the check accessibility icon. I'll click this. And before I do, I want to warn you that this presentation is just a randomly created one that wasn't built for accessibility yet. When I click on the checker, we can see here that there are quite a few errors. Missing alternative text. When I click on it or go like this, it tells me which ones. And they're correct. Because with these images, I have not yet added any alternative text. Now another thing is missing slide titles. I didn't name the slide titles yet. Also, check the reading order. And it tells me several slides, which they think I should check the reading order for. So this is the accessibility checker inside of PowerPoint. One of the best examples of a tool that you can use which will help make your content more accessible is a learning management system. Learning management systems have revolutionized the ways that we're able to deliver instruction, to communicate, provide feedback and more. They really provide a one-stop shop for your course and I recommend using one. One of the biggest advantages to using one and the reason I'm bringing it up here is that most of them have really good accessibility tools built into them. For example, here, inside of the Moodle LMS, I'm going to go down and create an activity. Now, when I do this, I'm going to add a page here. And down here is where I can begin creating it. I'm actually going to get rid of this image and I'll add it again. I'll go up here, browse, find this file. And I'm going to add it. I'll click upload. I'll overwrite that old one. And you can see here, it's a really big file. I'm first of all, going to adjust the size and then I'll click on it. Now, if I click save image, it's telling me I can't yet. An image must have a description unless it's marked as decorative only. There is a button here if it's decorative only. But in this one, it really is relevant to the assignment. I'm going to put in here. And now I've added in a description. The picture shows several large solar panels with sunny skies in the background. So essentially, they're forcing us to add alt text to these images. And that is a good thing because all of your images should have alt text. So that screen readers can notify people of what the image represents. Now, when I'm done, I can click save image and it adds that image here. Now we can't see the alt text, but screen readers can, and it's important to have it there. Now other things that our learning management system will let you do is to add links. So you can add in real text links to organize anything that you're constructing. You can add in here, different paragraph styles. You can add headers and more. But a lot of them will have accessibility checkers built in and Moodle is actually an example of that. They recently collaborated with Brickfield Education Labs to create an accessibility checker that you can utilize inside of Moodle to see if your content is accessible. Now up at the top, I want to click here just to show you that if you go look up these learning management systems, you'll be able to see how serious they take accessibility. So search for them and then search within them to look up accessibility. Here you can see Moodle has their accessibility documentation. And there is a ton here that you can read and they're showing all the ways that they are accessible and they provide accessibility resources. Now you can do that for any learning management system. And I highly recommend doing that before you decide on one. Here is accessibility in Adobe Captivate Prime, another popular one. And when you go down, you can see here that they are letting you know about all stuff we're talking about. So my advice is to utilize a learning management system. However, when choosing one, pay attention to or ask about the accessibility features they provide. This will be a very important factor moving forward.