We (at RSC Wales) have just completed the first four of our series of roadshows and, now that I have recovered from all of the planning, travelling and delivering that was involved, I am taking a moment to reflect briefly on ‘Barrier Busters – Accessibility and Inclusion’.

In my opinion (and many others I’m sure) accessibility and inclusion is something that should be of interest to anyone involved with learners and our partner JISC service, JISC TechDis, believe (having complete a number of accessibility self evaluation surveys with a range of education organisations last year) that ‘there should be a shift from specific support for disabled people (to help them over institutional barriers) to a focus on reducing the institutional barriers in the first place’. Following JISC TechDis’ advice there are many small (and free) things you can do in order to make the whole learning experience more inclusive for learners. There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ solution but by making small changes to the things you already do, you can probably make that ’size’ fit more learners than it currently does. Things like the way you present your Word documents/PowerPoints/pdfs, the variety of formats you make your resources available in and the open source and free tools you make available to your learners will all help to ‘bust’ those barriers to learning that many face. Raising awareness of these potential solutions has been the focus of the series of 4 ‘BarrierBusters – Accessibility & Inclusion’ roadshows that we have been running for the last 4 weeks.

Those of you who didn’t make it but who would like to share the resources from the event can do so by visiting our online information and resources area at: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/aandi2010

Those who did make it to the event (over 110 people from FE, HE, WBL, ACL and schools) have given us very positive and constructive feedback, some of which I’ll share here:

Feedback via the text wall on the day:

• Discussion of barriers very interesting. Plenty of food for thought.
• Accessible word a whole new way of thinking! Lot of training now has to be provided but hopefully won’t take long to become second nature
• Access apps will be a really useful tool. Good to practice this afternoon
• Barriers exercise has got me thinking that one of the biggest barriers to my learners might be me!

Feedback via the evaluation form after the event. The most useful part of the day was …

• Exploring the idea that accessibility issues are not just linked to disability
• Excellent awareness raising of the materials that are available
• Learning how to make document such as Word and Acrobat Reader more accessible to learners
• Learning about AccessApps
• Making a video in Windows MovieMaker
• The practical activities – the workshop approach
• The opportunity to discuss issues raised with colleagues from different sectors of education

Following on from this last comment … this was the first cross sector event we have run and I will admit that whilst we were planning these roadshows we did have a tiny question in our minds as to whether the different sectors would work together … but of course they did! We are all focussed on improving the learning experience for all learners, after all, aren’t we?

With the launch of Amazon’s new Kindle (currently only available in the USA) and Google’s Book Search service designed to run on i-Phone and Android phones E-books are getting a lot of press at the moment. Speaking at the launch of the Kindle, Amazon Founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said: “Our vision is every book, ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” This is quite a commitment!

Recently Nintendo released their 100 Classic Book Collection which Contains 100 classic books from authors such as Austen, Dickens, and Shakespeare. You might think that the DS screen is a little small for reading books but we’ve tried it and it’s surprisingly easy particularly as you can change the text size.

So how can you jump on the band wagon? Well you don’t need to go out and buy a dedicated e-book reader although they are an excellent solution (if a little expensive at present).

Most “modern” devices including laptops, mobile phones, portable games consoles and e-book readers can display PDF documents. Some devices are more convenient than others; reading a complete book on a 5cm screen might be a little difficult for some but being able to search for relevant text or information on the go could be invaluable. Bite sized revision notes here we come! PDFs are also very accessible so they cover a lot of bases in one technology.

Another format that many devices have no problem reading is plain old text (.txt) files. Project Gutenberg and their affiliates have over 127,000 texts are available for free on their website. To search their database go here: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

If you prefer to listen to a book or need to make it into a podcast then you can convert it using free software such as DSpeech.  DSpeech will read to you or convert the text into an mp3 which can be loaded onto a computer, portable mp3 player, uploaded into Moodle or embedded into learning materials. DSpeech does sound a bit robotic at first but you do get used to it after a while. Other voices can be purchased from various companies a quick search engine trawl will find them.