System preferences - Universal Access
On a Mac, under System Preferences there is a Universal Access button. It was interesting to look at this to enable me to amend the computer to suit my needs, but it will be also be useful for working with learners.
Helpfully, the font in this window was larger than standard size. A user can change options for Seeing, Hearing, Keyboard, Mouse and Trackpad. I read through the different options and decided to change 'For difficulties seeing the cursor, Cursor Size' and moved it to just above Normal as sometimes I lose the cursor on the screen!
Screen grab from a Mac of Universal Access with Cursor Size changed to greater than Normal
A learner I work with who is visually impaired would also find it helpful to change the size of her computer's cursor. As she uses a PC rather than a Mac I can refer to Jisc's Accessibility Features of Microsoft Windows® to check how to change cursor settings on her computer.
In the Hearing section you can select to flash the screen when an alert sounds, this would be helpful for learners with hearing impairment (such as my uncle). Using sticky keys or repeated key strokes will be helpful for users who would take time to press key combinations or might accidentally hit a key more than once.
WebbIE
WebbIE is a web browser for blind and visually impaired people. I hadn't come across this browser before, it's useful to know about. It displays a page as a plain text output in a window allowing the user to explore a page, follow links and complete forms. However, what surprised me about this was their guide to alt tags, recommending that web developers shouldn't use them. For a visually impaired user the information is superfluous as they can't see the image. However, I'd argue that as a visual user I often hover my cursor over an image to get more information about it from the alt tag. It was an interesting view point I'd not thought of before.
Webbie can also be used by web developers to test the accessibility of their website. This is really helpful for me as I also develop websites for companies.
Finally, the site contains lots of links to other great websites and programmes, such as Easy YouTube and screen readers.
Web browser accessibility
I didn't realise that there are so many accessibility options for web browsers. Di linked to a great summary list on Wikipedia comparing common accessibility features of web browsers.
I've viewed as far as Slide 5, have to stop now and start from Slide 6 of the presentation later.
Comment: I've noticed when I save images and upload they're rather degraded which can make text difficult to read. At present I'm using Grab on the Mac to take screen grabs as a tiff and then exporting as jpgs using iPhoto. I'll have to investigate to improve quality of the image.
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