The Moodle Podcast

Proactive vs. Reactive: A Toolkit for Accessible Course Design

• Moodle • Season 2 • Episode 3

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 40:38

For millions of learners, a missing caption or a low-contrast screen is more than a glitch—it’s a barrier.  In this episode, Shalimar is joined by Moodle accessibility specialists Jun Pataleta and Carli Cockrell to discuss why accessibility is a fundamental right, not a luxury.

We dive into the Moodle accessibility toolkit, and discuss the power and benefits of Moodle integration partners Brickfield and ReadSpeaker.  We also cover how AI is changing the game for transcripts and summaries.

From "Spoon Theory" and personal journeys to the practical magic of the POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust), we explore how designing for the few benefits everyone. 

https://moodle.com/accessibility/

Visit Moodle at Moodle.com

Shalimar:

There's a moment. Maybe you've had it where you open a course or land on a website and something just doesn't work. Maybe you're trying to navigate Maybe a video plays, but there's Maybe the contrast is so low the text just disappears into the page. For most of us, that's a small But for millions of learners moment learning stops. Today on the Moodle podcast, we're talking about accessibility, not as a compliance checkbox, not as a line item on a launch checklist, but as a fundamental question about who we're actually building for. I'm Shalimar, and I'm so glad You may notice it's just me My co-host Dan is sitting this be back next month. In the meantime, I've got Joining me today are two both part of the Moodle family, accessibility central to the I could introduce them, but I'd because I think the way someone you something really important So over to you both. Tell us who you are in your own words

Jun:

Hi, I'm Jun Pataleta, accessibility specialist from Moodle products. I am based here in Perth, been here in Moodle since twenty developer for Moodle LMS or I first got involved in accessibility when, uh, we launched our, um, inaugural accessibility audit initiative for Moodle LMS back in 2020. So since then, I've been one of the default workers, um, when it comes to organizing our annual accessibility audits for the LMS and addressing any issues, um, found to help us achieve the WCAG AA conformance accreditation. So last year we reorganized the product team and the accessibility specialist role was created. And I feel like it resonated with me. So I've put my hand up and here we are. And so yeah, aside from helping improve the accessibility of Moodle LMS, I've also been working with other product teams such as Moodle Workplace to provide support for anything related to accessibility.

Shalimar:

Welcome, Jun

Carli:

And I'm Carli Cockrell. Um, I have been at Moodle since I believe. Oh 2021. I have a background in education prior to coming to Moodle as both a K-12 educator and then also higher ed. My background is in instructional technology and educational technology. So I currently hold a role at Moodle as a learning designer, with a little asterisk next to it as accessibility specialist within the learning design team. And essentially what my day to day tole is, I get to liase with people within the services department with moodle, client facing roles on what does accessibility mean in their to day work. But then also I get to what the where my bread and butter is, is talking to clients about accessibility and why it's so important to include it in their site builds. And so as much as possible, I try to get in there and have some accessibility time with folks, because it is near and dear to my heart, which might be what we are talking about next, in fact.

Shalimar:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great guess because I definitely want to start somewhere personal, right? Accessibility is one of those topics that tends to find people before they go looking for it. So I'm interested to hear from both of you... What is it that made accessibility your thing? Where does that passion come from?

Carli:

This is a little bit of a tale is my journey and it is is so important to me. So as many people who get there's often a personal that makes them go, huh, this is an interesting field, or needs more advocacy. And for myself, I was actually diagnosed with one of my first autoimmune conditions when I was 8 years old. It was somewhat rare of a, of a condition for a child of that age to actually acquire. And one thing that happens in the autoimmune world that a lot of people who affectionately kind of called spoonies, uh, people who know about spoon theory and, and that kind of thing. We tend to acquire multiple automimmune conditions. That is kind of what happens. And so I've become somewhat of a collector of autoimmune conditions over my life, which has presented, you know, various various challenges. But the most accessible thing for me since I did leave the classroom, teaching has been remote work. Getting to work with clients about things that I am passionate about. The other little thing that I grew up in Southeast Idaho. I went to public school, but we had a really interesting program where all of the kiddos who were deaf in that area were actually brought to our school. So inside of our classroom, in a public classroom, we had over 25% deaf kiddos inside of the class. And so I got to. I was fascinated just by watchign and learning ASL. We did like all of our Holiday and Christmas programs in ASL. One of my best friends at the time was deaf, you know, and we were able to kind of get on. And so it was just a really ...it made me realise just how important it is. Um, the lived experience and, and just, you know, basically how advocacy is so important to ensure that everybody has an equitable experience.

Shalimar:

Yeah. Carli, I'm hearing you basically say that in your formative years community, a community of people with needs that maybe were a little bit different than what we see every day. Got you there. And we love community at Moodle, What about you? Jun.

Jun:

I've been involved with, um, our accessibility work since 2020 . So I, I've gained some greater form of awareness about the importance of accessibility and making Moodle more accessible, especially like when we first launched our auditing for LMS in 2020. As I learned more about it, I we have 1 out of six people experiencing disability according to world to the World Health Organization, we support the UN goal number four, which is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote opportunities for all. So I believe that making our products accessible plays an important part in supporting that goal.

Shalimar:

Absolutely. I'm also feel really blessed to, and interacted with and disability justice programs. That really helped kind of get me into this conversation back in the late eighties, um, which feels like an eternity ago actually. But, uh, yeah. Okay. Well, let's, let's get into it. Um, I want to really peel it back. So let's start with if we could like, I don't know, sit alongside a learner who's really struggling to get through their course. What would we see? What are the barriers that, you know, keep showing up again and again?

Carli:

One thing that I will say, and I actually share their real lived learners with me, because it is always so impactful. One thing that I advocate for is something called proactive accessibility versus reactive accessibility. And not to say that reactive accessibility isn't still accessibility and still definitely needed, but proactive accessibility is literally, those practices are baked in from the beginning and you're designing with accessibility from in mind from the very start. If for some reason that hasn't things that you might see is with a keyboard, possibly no alt text for images, lack of headings. Color contrast concerns. And then also, I'm reminded of a more of a lived experience from a previous employer. We had a situation where many, many professors were scanning pages of textbooks without using an optical character recognition scanner, which actually turns that into text instead of just an image. And so you can see just multiple images placed into a course. They're actually, you know, text pages and they don't have correct alt text. And so people with using screen reading technology wouldn't be able to hear it. So those are just a sample of the issues that can, can come up. And what's a barrier for one person may not be a barrier for another person, even within the same disability diagnosis as well. So because diagnosis is or disability is so dynamic. So that's one thing I always consider.

Jun:

For me in the context of Moodle LMS: So we usually get reports about Accessibility bugs in Moodle Um, some um people with disability might use some JavaScript widgets by keyboard. So those are critical that, uh, so they end up needing assistance to perform the task in Moodle. So for me, that's a critical barrier that we have to address soon as possible. So yeah, those are kind of the challenges that we face for Moodle users.

Shalimar:

Thinking back to what you said know that accessibility needs are not one size fits all. And honestly, that's part of what makes this work so fascinating. So how do we genuinely center the learner when what one person needs might look completely different from what the next person needs.

Carli:

Fortunately, across the globe, consensus to follow. The Web Content accessibility guidelines, or WCAG is what you will often hear it um, pronounced as. And those guidelines are meant to cover many, many, many scenarios in which somebody may actually, um, have an accessibility need. And so as much as humanly my perspective in this call, people who are designing content Moodle can be conscientious of, do within their design that are prevent what may be a barrier for another person. And that's actually why within actually, um, just started course review in accessibility. It's an accessibility focused course review, and it's all about what is the course designer able to control within that regard? So the specific WCAG guidelines And then also we touch on what for learning or UDL standards One thing I like to remember is accessibility, in my personal other people who do use more day to day, is people being accessibility concern too. And actually listening to that with empathy, working on a plan to resolve that, that goes very far because, you know, there's a willingness there to learn, there's a willingness there to fix it. And so a lot of times, if a barrier is presented, knowing that there is somebody out there that can help you do something about it. Is also a relief that many people will experience.

Shalimar:

And Jun, what would you say is how we tackle the, you know, disparate needs? Um, in the accessibility world.

Jun:

I recently learned about this while I was reviewing for an accessibility, uh, certificate certification exam. So it's, uh, as I said earlier, the universal design for So, which means we move away from one size fits all, uh, form of instruction and instead offer offering multiple options for how learners engage with, perceive and demonstrate their knowledge. So the key is designing for the sets, needs, and interests that providing accommodations later So in practice, this aligns with methodology, where we create diversity of methods to access To access the same content rather than one rigid path, we should provide flexible alternatives like. Just like buildings in construction, we have some sometimes buildings have stairs and they offer elevators as well. So. So in the context of digital might mean offering content in texts, audio and video with So ensuring all interactions work with different assistive technologies, basically. So similar. That's kind of similar as well to developing accessible features in Moodle where we consider the needs of people with disabilities. First, we develop solutions that end up benefitting everyone.

Shalimar:

I love that. As somebody who's been a Dungeon Master of DnD games for a very long time, I love flexibility. Let your players find their way. They are way more motivated when they can explore and click as needed, rather than being railroaded towards a particular destination. Right? Sorry to bring my nerdery into This is about accessibility, not Okay, actually, that is a perfect segue though, because I want to get into the toolkit, right? So when it comes to reducing the cognitive load, which Moodle tools or plugins do you find yourself reaching for most often?

Jun:

In general, I think that each each major release of Moodle LMS is a step towards better accessibility and usability in particular. Um, we have when we released Moodle four point zero, it was a game changer. So it was it made the Moodle LMS for both educators and learners. So it basically, it was basically aimed at reducing the cognitive load for all of the users. Since then, we kept iterating In the subsequent major And then in four point five, we introduced the AI features, um, including, uh, AI and AI summarize. I think, uh, that if configured can be powerful tools to reduce So personally, I find the summarized feature really useful as it highlights the, the key points for me without having to read through entire walls of text. Um, especially if I am short on And I believe it will just keep the upcoming release of Moodle 5.2

Carli:

Yeah. And you know, I completely about, especially as we got into being more clean and intuitive. Um, I'm hearing that a lot from people who muddled in the three series and coming into for when I'm working with clients and they're like, oh, look, everybody understands what the journey is. So I can definitely tell that load was really considered. Now I'm one of those people that's a little bit of use Moodle with what comes in already naturally. Not necessarily. I mean, there are plugins which I will mention one. But one particular thing that I it's a very simple win. We used to have, um, a course It's called custom sections now configured so that you're time, but also in an accordion And it helps with what we often That can happen when you first oh my goodness, there's twenty about ten items in there. I don't even possibly know how I'm going to conquer all of this. So even a section at a time view can really reduce that cognitive load and highlight the actual section that you're wanting to work on right now with the learner. Speaking of plugins though, I If you do ever want to check it out, but one of my favorite plugins that we do have access to within our certified integration program is read speaker. So read speaker is a text to And essentially it can read what is right there on the Moodle page. It has other things too, such as on specific areas of the text. You know, contrast options, And the reason that I love the it's actually a universal design Universal design is all about, like Jun said, you're empowering the person to have choice. They don't even necessarily have possibly have even a learning versus reading it on the page. And so I am a big fan of In fact, at a previous employer that I worked at, we actually had Readspeaker on our Moodle site. And we were always fascinated by actually you couldn't see it, but we could see some people were using it, which was investment that we needed to be choice for us to go ahead and So I'm a big fan of Readspeaker.

Shalimar:

Me too. Because here's the deal. Here's the tea. I'm an avid reader. I had an undergrad in English Lit. And if I can't get an audiobook format of the book, Like, I literally don't. How do I fit that into my life. Right? So I especially love seeing when it all comes together, Like if you get the, the digital audiobook in one purchase. Oh, that's the sweet spot for me. So love that. Um, Readspeaker is a really great tool. Speaking of tools, though, I wanna talk about Brickfield! Yes, Specifically the accessibility starter toolkit. Can you maybe walk us through what it actually does and why it matters for teachers and learners in practice?

Carli:

Yeah. And I'm happy to take this Um, because we talk about this implementation we have with the client in fact. So I love that Brickfield starter toolkit is built into Moodle. Um, at this point, and essentially what it is, is it allows the person who is doing the designing, whether that's the teacher or the site administrator to run a report on the course, and it will flag things that are inside the HTML that can use some accessibility adjustment. So, um, quite literally the site the site goes to their site plugins follows the prompts to You know, agreeing to their terms of use essentionally And from there, the teachers can go ahead and add a little accessibility review block to every course and run that report. They can even see a heat map of which of their items passed and hwich of their cback and look at again. So it is one of those methods proactive accessibility method. Before you're even releasing tnoc taht lready getting a report wet hat that link is opening in a oesn't automatically, it to a new tab or you should make actually human readable instead You know, that doesn't mean xactly., Robot style. Slml of those, uh, the quick And then of course, Brickfield premium, um, that we might talk But, uh, as far as like alternate formats that people can just readily download and things like that, it's a really cool too I love that it's built in.

Shalimar:

Yeah, I love that. Love that. Okay, I'm going to do something going to channel Dan, right. He can't be with us today, but I'm, I'm going to pretend that for a moment that I have a Dan brain. I'm not going to do a British It would sound like Dick Van needs to hear that. I'm putting on my Dan hat. A guy is having a moment accessibility is no exception. I'm wondering, can AI genuinely content like transcripts, without losing the human element feel like learning?

Carli:

I believe. Yes. And I'm actually going to use this exact scenario that we're doing right now is the example. So for example, we are recording This podcast is going to be ways as audio. It's going to be released as a, as a video to listen on YouTube, you know, snippets on, on social media and you can generate a transcript. And actually, we've been for a long time. People sometimes will use they're not even going to So taking that transcript, what people have a human in the flow. And I actually there's a term that they're calling it in the development world right now that Jun you may even remember, but basically a human in the mix with the AI situation, things that are created by AI should be human verified. And that's what we've been saying all along since we've been generating transcripts and captions and things like that, using AI and other tools in the past. .Somebody should go in and refine Somebody should go in and say, This is Carli speaking. This is Jun speaking. Um, somebody should be making sure that the names are spelled correctly, that things are capitalized correctly, that context isn't being lost just because it's being run through AI. And the win of that is, it is less of a burden on the person who is actually doing the course design to put something accessible from the get go out there. Just right away, it becomes part make sure, all right, I've got going to be the human in the iterate on it to make sure that ca cext isn't lost. aSo absolutely. I think AI has a place in

Shalimar:

Conceivably some people who are never had to come up against reason or whatever, right? So I want to introduce a p o u r perceivable, operable. Understandable. Robust. These are the foundational So the question is how do we course design from the start so bolted on at the end?

Carli:

I love this question and is exactly why we talk about proactive accessibility versus reactive accessibility in all of our conversations with our clients. So a lot of our clients do run launch checklist, right? Because there are a lot of to verify that all of those are just jump right in and put that And you can utilise pour in the So for example, course designers perceivable content by asking content be perceived with more So for example, if you are that's one sense. But if you're also adding in the I'm also going to give them an That's another sense. So you're already making a There. For operable, you can be thinking about something as commonplace as. Moodle has that wonderful specific time limit to a quiz. Sometimes when we talk to having conversations with people the reason for the time limit? And are you, um, is it actually actually serving as more of a taking the taking the quiz? So actually thinking a little actually necessary, using it But then other methods for operable adding things because people who are using assistive technology can navigate heading by heading and also visually, we scan by headings and then even consistent navigation, keeping things consistent. Very common thing that we understandable course designers, content is readable and appropriate to their audience as And also by even helping users even happen, by having clear help you with some instructions be able to anticipate exactly particular activity type? So your embedded instructions that you put on there are even more impactful. And then for robust. Of course, if you are somebody go straight into the editor and making sure that it's properly versions change as tech keeps It's using appropriate HTML that's going to be able to interface correctly with those future technologies. So that those are the things recommend as far as poor goes perspective and not making it Shalimar.

Shalimar:

I think that the immortal words of Riri or Rihanna, uh, say it best. Pour it up, pour it up. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Okay, Carli, I want to go back to what you were just talking about, though. Like you were talking about the the different senses that can perceive. So I want to talk about like alternate formats, transcripts, captions, readable text alternatives. How high are the stakes, really? When a learner doesn't have

Carli:

Okay, I do have a story about And Jun, you may have some additional stories about about this type kind of thing, but so the stakes can actually be quite high. Um, I was fortunate enough to experience about just how high I mentioned earlier on in the situation once that I observed utilizing the optical character were scanning in content to be And, um, that was actually found out as a result of an office of a civil rights complaint here in the US. Um, one of our sister campuses that very specific thing. The person who was, um, the They had just experienced a transition into becoming blind and they were asking for alternate formats of the content. And what ended up happening is have to send that textbook out And what ended up happening is that textbook didn't even come back until after the course was over. So it was not a good experience And obviously, their entire trajectory of what they were going to go into for their career was completely dismantled because of that particular situation. Had the team of professors that were designing those courses realized we should be using the optical character recognition scanner, which I will admit was in the library and there was only one. Now it's a lot better because with AI, things are getting built into regular scanning that you might have, like within Adobe and there's optical character character recognition built in. So it's a, it's less of a barrier for the instructors as well. But essentially, you know, is if documents and you have things alternate format, it can be as premium within your LMS. And it's literally a click that transform it into the format Instead of waiting for that to specific institution that had to quite high stakes.

Shalimar:

Yeah, that sounds high stakes. Make or break careers or education pathways, it sounds like. I really want to dig in to the accessibility conversations that we're just not having in education that we absolutely should be like, what's the frontier here? Where, where do we need to start really looking and having the hard convos?

Carli:

So this is something that I talk come to me and say, I'm worried I'm just hearing about it. We've got lots of content out Carli. How do we even consider going And one thing that I know for that accessibility is has not in various educational pathways and I are currently in. So for example, doing my you know, uh, college career It was mentioned in like one It was very minor. Now coming up in getting a credential in a K twelve kind of field, accessibility wasn't actually mentioned, but special education was. And a lot of what was mentioned was providing one on one which absolutely is needed. And I remember distinctly having this experience early on in my teaching career, where I had more students that needed to be part of the part of the special ed program. And we were at capacity. And so we were challenged in And I remember what would happen is that this one particular special education teacher that we had was providing a lot of one on one reading support to my students, where they would come and pull them out of my classroom and actually provide them reading support of the textbook. And I remember thinking, and gosh, this is probably like twenty twelve. I just remember thinking, we Like the technology is out there this very well trained person and more targeted services than And I remember thinking, what, And so when I actually became a pre-service educator myself, I've taught educational technology courses for pre-service educators. I remember looking at the realizing accessibility isn't And so I brought it in. And so what I definitely see one of the concerns that I do development with AI is that people to pause, step back, and perspective before they put it And potentially that is going to get missed and it's going to get missed at a higher pace than it was before. Given that it was already being So fundamentally, I think that possibly its own. It needs to be baked into a lot pathways, but also needs to be Um, in specialization within a I don't know if you agree with me, Jun, about, about any of that.

Jun:

Yeah, I totally agree. Basically, I think it's also content learning, learning designers to know the value of with disabilities, they are also If we are excluding people with disabilities from accessing our courses, we will be introducing barriers to them from achieving their goals of becoming more independent, becoming more productive members of the society. We are also are missing out on opportunities from gaining revenue from their business as well. So it's essential, it's very essential to, um, think about accessibility when designing courses.

Carli:

And Jun, actually, you mentioned something that that piqued my interest here that I just wanted to talk about a little bit. So there's something dubbed the Basically the money that gets lost because people leave and in the disability space, when they did a survey about this in twenty nineteen, this number has grown to seventeen point one billion pounds of lost revenue because people by and large, are going to click away from a website that they can't actually interact with. Um, sixty nine percent of users than tell somebody that they're Obviously, there's a market considered as well, and ensuring opportunity to interact with benefits you financially too.

Shalimar:

Absolutely. Here at Moodle, we are a society of ardent learners, like lifelong learners, right? That we all share kind of a trait of possessing joyful curiosity and everything that we approach. And I feel like that diversity, you know, diversity, oftentimes we think about like kind of the hot button diversity things out there, right? Like someone's, you know, sexual orientation, gender identity, race. And we so often overlook And diverse perspectives necessitate that we make these spaces inclusive for folks with disabilities. So good points. Okay, now we are almost out of So I have one final question There are educators listening to to do better, but I genuinely So a, I want to know what you And B, I want to know if you know of any resources that you wish. Everybody who is an educator or course designer already had bookmarked.

Carli:

Speaking my language, Shalimar, because the one thing that I love most about Moodle is that we are fans of giving information to people and letting it be out there for free. So that is something that I just So first of all, we already have free on Moodle Academy. There's perspectives from the, And then there's perspectives So those, those free the Moodle Academy. And then I would also say, um, step further and you really do bolts of how exactly do we I already have a course designed what I could adjust to make this plan of how am I going to eat If I'm doing reactive accessibility, like I had mentioned, the Moodle services team. We do have a course review with you'll get to hang out with me, your course and go over it. And it's a safe place to learn and be honest about how sometimes accessibility can feel overwhelming. Um, and you need a guide in your your pocket, as I call it, to And finally, I do want to just, mention a lot of content isn't It's brought in to Moodle. So the thing that I just want to building your content on a particular tool, Microsoft Word, you are going to have a wealth your fingertips, and many of actual third party organizations because accessibility is and they have features built accessibility as you go. And so does Moodle. I do want to mention that too. That's the other thing I want to mention is not just the Brickfield accessibility toolkit, but right within your editor, you've got an accessibility checker that you could be clicking as you build as well. That's going to flag your journey as well.

Jun:

For me, I believe there's like a similarity between this, um, and, uh, accessible Moodle development. So speaking from experience, my with accessibility is to start by understanding what benefits from it. And the answer, the answer just people with disabilities. And then focus on one or two high impact areas first, such as ensuring your course content is properly structured with headings or images have alt text, or maybe even ensuring that videos have captions and transcript transcripts. And finally, I think it's a remember that accessibility is a one time project. So it's, it doesn't really end, Moodle LMS and our Moodle they can be. It's an ongoing journey.

Shalimar:

Yeah. To get back to something It's not a checkbox. It's a practice. It's a practice. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much, both of episode of the podcast for you next month with another little bit of Dan.

Carli:

Thank you.

Shalimar:

Thank you.