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PowerPoint’s Design Ideas feature helps us create attractive slides quickly. Unfortunately, some of its suggestions do not follow accessibility best practice, creating barriers that may exclude members of your audience. In this blog post we explain three issues and how to fix them.
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Text in all caps can present a barrier to readers with dyslexia. Moreover, it slows down reading speed for all. Design Ideas will often set short bullet points in all caps. Find out how to fix this and more.
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Centre-aligned text can be difficult to read if it spans more than one line in length. This can be a particular barrier to readers with dyslexia
When presented in this way your presentation appears less professional. Design Ideas often centre aligns text. In this article we explain why it’s important to fix this and how.
Too little contrast between colours will not only make your presentation disagreeable, it also presents a barrier to many. Design ideas will sometimes suggest designs that do not have sufficient contrast between colours. In this article we explain this in more detail and how to fix it.
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Amongst the various media assets we produce to support and enhance education, 360 virtual tours is one that is growing in popularity. Whether it’s to view on Youtube, Thinglink or upload onto a VR headset, 360 images and videos empower
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A new norm- Yes, it’s a phrase that divides the audience. Some of us are weary of the over used phrases (unprecedented, anyone?). Others are excited at the prospect of real change. In education I don’t think we really want
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In a year of many challenges, one common story is that students feel short-changed by their online learning experience. It’s therefore been both heartening and humbling to receive 1235 nominations from students for our 9th annual Blackboard & Virtual Learning
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My children went back to school seven weeks ago. This blog post sat in a corner of my brain, waiting for when I had caught up on workload. That is unlikely to actually happen, and the raw edges of the
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At the start of the pandemic, the Media Development team produced the Video Survival Guide to help staff get the basics right for producing videos from home. Continuing the University’s strategy to enhance the quality of our online offering, the Digital Learning team are now setting up a broader Film School for later in 2021.
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The University of Kent runs a successful series of Digitally Enhanced Education webinars. One of which was on the theme of Technology to Develop Inclusive Learning Experiences. I presented “Making it simple to ensure the use of colour is both
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The Digital Learning team worked on a major project last year with our Faculty of Humanities to implement new Blackboard course templates. This introduced new course menus, course menu colour schemes, and course redesign.
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On February 4th and 5th, Matt Deeprose and I took part in UDLHE Digicon. This was an online conference about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in Higher Education. It was our first time attending this event. The conference was wholly
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About the project With online education still very much a hot topic, the Media team have been busy producing several teaching resources for Biological Sciences in the run up to the Christmas holidays. To date, we have produced 6 practical
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Decorate our Christmas Tree and read some useful tips on resources that will help you out with the educational technology.
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I recently attended AbilityNet’s TechShare Pro 2020 conference. In this post, I’m going to share a top tip I learned from Microsoft. When creating an email in Outlook 365 you can check for any accessibility issues. Checking Email Accessibility Once
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Blackboard tests are a hot topic at the moment. On the Digital Learning Connect Teams Area we recently received a question from Dr Gabriel Weymouth: I’m positive this is clearly documented somewhere, but I can’t find it. How do you
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Have you experienced the following scenario? You teach a class online and ask a question at the cohort, a few seconds have passed, and no answer. This awkwardness makes you continue with the answers. So what can you do not
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On the CHEP Community Team Dr Poshak Gandhi asked some questions about peer assessment: “My module has 170 students, split into 4 groups of about 42 students each. I want to create an assignment for peer assessment, with each group
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“As a technologist, I see how Artificial Intelligence [AI] and the fourth industrial revolution will impact every aspect of people’s lives.” – Fei-Fei Li , Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University AI ‘s main goal is to automate routine
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Forums are more essential than you would think and they can help your students to engage with the courses. Forums are very useful and play a key role in the online classroom, helping the students connect with each other, and
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Earlier this month, I was given access to an Articulate 360 license which included a whole load of goodies developed by Articulate; Storyline 360, Studio 360, Replay 360 and Peek 360, Review 360 and Rise 360. From this bundle, I
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When we were asked to create an online version of our face-to-face workshop, aligned to the university’s Common Framework for Online Education, it presented an exciting opportunity to develop something new – and a challenge. The content of our workshop
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Today, (14th of July) for the first time in over four months, my colleague Sofy Bazzini and I had a real video shoot, in a real location, with real people and real cameras… and it was… odd! This may sound
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Captain’s Log: June 2020 I find myself in a strange world. The inhabitants are sentient yet look like cartoons. They appear to be talking to me in my own language, asking me questions about my latest work in innovation. No,
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If you work with student assessment, then you will be familiar with Banner and GradeBook administration. It’s the place where you enter the format and structure of modules and assessments so that student marks can be calculated. You may also
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The Blackboard European Teaching and Learning Conference was online this year. 871 people attended from 276 educational institutions in 32 countries. Being online allowed attendees from further afield to attend such as the US, Singapore, and Lebanon. The conference ran across 3 weeks
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The iSolutions restructure has led to a few changes for Digital Learning. On the 1st of June, the new structure took effect. Yes, we did keep the name this time (!) and we are very pleased about it. The team
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As the saying goes “The Show must go on” …. And throughout this COVID19 pandemic, this saying very much reflects on the work of our academic staff who are doing a sterling job in ensuring that teaching continues, albeit more
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Like all current gatherings, the University of Kent and Kent County Council hosted this year’s Digital Accessibility Conference virtually. It ran from 9th to 11th June. In its second year, the conference aims to inform Public Sector organisations about digital
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This year, Blackboard’s Teaching and Learning Conference was held online, featuring a range of topical discussions. Further details of the programme can be found here: TLC Europe. Our colleague Matthew Deeprose contributed two well-received presentations, firstly explaining how custom changes
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