Speaker 1: I live in Germany, but I'm from Belgium, so it is coming to Valdemst a bit like coming home to the Bethuadral, which is also a tradition at Valdemst. So what I'm going to talk about is a mouthful of open educational resources on digital accessibility for building your own courses. This is the output of an Erasmus Plus project, funded by the European Commission, that already ended in 2017, but the open educational resources we created are still available. So what was the background for this project? Basically, we noticed that there was a lack of accessible design in computer design, information design courses in higher education, especially in the mandatory part of higher education. There's also a lack of expertise of university teachers in accessible teaching, and there's also a lack of accessible course materials. There's also a lack of expertise about accessible design in government, industry and academia, and this is becoming very important now, especially because of the changing legal requirements about accessibility in ICT in Europe. In 2016, there was the EU Directive 2016-2102 about accessibility for websites, internets and apps for public sector bodies, not for everybody, and there's also an upcoming European Accessibility Act. It was expected to get through the European Parliament last year, but it didn't. Maybe it will work this year. So basically, a lot more people need to know about accessibility in ICT than in the past. So a bit about this directive. As I said, it only applies to public sector bodies, so city councils, national governments, their websites also, in some countries also, publicly funded universities, and this is already basically valid now, because since 23 September 2018, each EU member state was supposed to have national laws and regulations that comply with the directive, and it goes on. In 23 September this year, all websites created since September last year will need to be accessible. And then almost two years from now, all websites, also the older ones from public sector bodies, will need to be accessible. And then also in 2021, mobile apps created by public sector bodies or offered by public sector bodies will need to be accessible. By accessible, we mean basically full web, which refers to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines created by the W3C. There is also a European standard EN 301549 from ETSI that is freely available with accessibility requirements, and these will also be relevant to the European Accessibility Act, which will apply to much more. We have just selected a few items, computers and operating systems, ATMs, ticketing machines, check-in machines, smart phones, banking services, e-books. So there's basically a lot more. Projects will need to become accessible, of course, commercial vendors of software will of course do that, and we wouldn't want the open source community to be left behind because they didn't know about it. So that's why I want to talk about this, one of the reasons. But as I said at the beginning of my presentation, what I'm talking about is the result of a European project called MOOCAP, or MOOC Accessibility Partnership. It was coordinated by the university where I work, Stuttgart Media University in Germany, and we had partners from around Europe, so University in Oslo, Techno University Dresden, Johannes Kappel University Lens, University of the Aegean, so they're really on the islands of the Aegean, Dublin Institute of Technology, University of Southampton, and the Universite Paris VIII in France. What we did in this project, I'm just not going to tell the whole story, but some of the main outputs, the most relevant outputs in this context, is that we created 11 online courses on digital accessibility. So one introductory course, and then some further courses. Four of these courses were MOOCs. If you don't know what a MOOC is, it's MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. There are a few big MOOC platforms like FutureLearn in UK, Annex, Coursera, so some of the courses were MOOCs, and all the registrations, we had about 20,000 registrations in total for all these courses together. There's one thing I need to add. Not every registration means that that person also starts the course after registration. The course, that's also big. There's also always a lot of people who abandon the course during a MOOC or a freely available online course. And not only that, the resources from those courses were made available as open education resources. So they're available under the CC BY license, so Creative Commons license attribution. And we chose this specific license because it's much more important to have the largest possible audience for it than to prevent, for example, commercial exploitation by adding the NC clause from Creative Commons. So yes, if you want to use it for commercial purposes, you can. We also have a network of departments who were involved and anyone can join to continue production of our resources. The images at the bottom are some images from the resources we created. So-called day-in-the-life stories. Some people would refer to them as personas, but they weren't actually based on real user research, so we shouldn't call them personas. Basically, the partners involved in the project already had a large body of knowledge about accessibility and used that to create these stories. We'll talk a little bit about the courses we created. The first course was an introductory course called Digital Accessibility Enabling Participation in Information Society. It ran on FutureLearn because one of the partners in the project, University of Southampton, is a member of FutureLearn, so we could host it there. It was a big legal hassle that led to an 18-month delay, actually, in the project before we could actually put the course on FutureLearn, but it worked in the end. This course has run four times so far. I don't know if it's going to be repeated, but you can register interest if you're interested. The resources from that course are available on the MOOCAP website, so at moocap.gpi.eu. There you'll find a navigation bar that I'll also show at the end that takes you to these resources. That's also where you'll find those data libraries that contain the images I showed in the previous slides. What we have in these resources are text documents. Some of those resources are videos, and those videos have captions for accessibility reasons, so people who are deaf need to know what's going on in the dialogue, for example. Those videos are on Vimeo. Some of them are also on YouTube, but the downside of YouTube is that you can't download videos from YouTube without violating YouTube's terms of use. Of course, I know there are browsers and parsers that do that, but yeah. We put them on Vimeo, but it's actually the default option to make a video download. Yeah. We have also text documents, quizzes. Basically, those documents are stored on Google Docs, so you can download them, add them, edit them, whatever you like. This is a view of... Oops, yeah. That was not what I intended. An example video on Vimeo where we have... The moocap account on Vimeo has several channels for each... Well, a channel for each course where I have the videos for these courses. Three more. There was one course called User-Centered Design for Accessibility, which is about involving people with disabilities in ICT design. This was from our partner in Norway. This was not a MOOC. They hosted it on their own e-learning platform from Canvas. It has a few videos with Jonathan Lazar, who is rather an expert in this course. If you're interested in how to involve people with disabilities in open-source design, for example, that's something you can look at. A bit of a special case among the courses we created was one of my colleagues about accessible gamification. It's a little bit more about gamification than strictly accessibility, but still interesting. This is one of the courses we managed to put on edX thanks to a partnership between Stuttgart Media University and Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech is a member of edX, and we aren't. If you wonder why, I inquired about prices for joining edX a few years ago, and they said that prices started at $250,000. That would have been roughly half of the project budget. This might be repeated on edX. You can still find it there. There are lots of videos where my colleague Andy Stiegler explains a lot of things about gamification, but also involving a bit of accessibility. This view is from Vimeo. Is this link going to work?

Speaker 2: Is this link going to work? I just have this strange view where I can't see where I'm clicking. Ah, okay. Nice.

Speaker 1: And then, yeah, it's on a different screen, of course. Which direction?

Speaker 2: Ah. Ah, no. This is going to be the wrong way. Okay.

Speaker 1: Then there's another one which I created about user interface personalization. It's also in edX. It's going to be repeated starting the 11th of February. This is about basically the fundamentals of creating web applications that can automatically adapt to the user's needs and preferences. It explains the basics of personalization. It gives you some so-called needs and preference sets, which are JSON files that describe what kind of adaptations a specific user would need. Then, as an exercise, you can adapt either an example website that I provided, or, well, if you would like to use something else, you can use a website of your own. It's a fairly short course. The last, or the one-bit last part, is really just a task of adapting a website or web application. So, there were a bunch of other courses. One was, for example, inclusive learning and teaching environments, which is really specifically for higher education institutions that want to know how to better cater for students with disabilities. Accessible documents is mainly about office formats. Also PDF, including PDF, how to make that accessible. There's a course about accessible mobile apps. One about accessible websites. Assistant analogies, so screen readers, magnifiers. Many of the systems haven't been built in any way, but it's interesting to know about them. One course called Design Innovation Inclusive Approaches, which is about how you can support innovations by actually including people with disabilities in your design process. The last one is about intellectual disabilities and inclusion. So, if you're interested in these resources, they're on the MOOCAP website. I can perhaps switch to that view anyway. I don't know why the resolution is a bit... So, this is the navigation menu. This goes through the explanation of what all the courses are. And this is where you find the links to all the open education resources. All carefully documented with a license and copyright, because you still need to... You still need to acknowledge the original author, of course. So, that's it, basically, for my presentation. If you have any questions... Yes? Lots of people that follow the MOOCs download them. Is the accessibility component also addressed in the offline edition of the material? So, the accessibility of the materials... So, we make sure that every document is accessible, that every video has subtitles. You can also download the subtitles, et cetera. So, absolutely. It would have been ironic if you hadn't done that. Yeah. Also, when we looked at platforms where to host the MOOCs...

Speaker 2: Are all the courses still available online in some format?

Speaker 1: So, whether the courses are still available... Well, as I said, some of these courses were MOOCs. So, two were in edX, and they still exist. Two ran on FutureLearn. Well, the content is still there, but I don't know whether they will be repeated. So, if you weren't registered before, you can't access them at the moment. For the other ones, they ran on, basically, the e-learning platforms of the project partners. So, they were available during the duration of the project, but they're not currently available as courses. Not to the public, at least. So, that's why it's important that these resources, these OERs, are still available. So, anyone can take them and create their own course and their own platform. And if somebody wanted to take those resources and create their own platform or MOOC? Their own course? Yeah, they can do that. That's the point.

Speaker 2: Where would they go to find them?

Speaker 1: So, when you go to this page, this site, for the introductory course, and then you find, for example, you have an accessibility glossary as a PDF, and this is on Google Drive, yes? In fact, if it's a document, it's on Google Drive, and if it's a video, it's going to be on Vimeo. So, they're still available? Yeah, the resources are available. Okay, well, thank you very much, David. You're welcome.