Wednesday 8 May 2019

Good practice for accessibility

This blog post was first published on UCEM Online Education Blog - 7 May, 2019

I came across Lee Fallin and Sue Watling 's  Designing for diverse learners poster where they have adapted work from Accessibility Poster Series from the Home Office Digital.  I am promoting accessible materials at UCEM and was looking to put up some posters in the Hub area (communal space) to remind my colleagues of accessibility good practice when I found Lee and Sue's poster shared with CC license.

Though I have published some of my work with CC license in open access journals, this is my first re-mix of CC licensed work . I wasn't sure how much of a change was considered a re-mix. So after talking to Lucy, Information Governance Manager at UCEM I am confident in publishing it with share-alike license similar to the work I adapted. Asma, our Graphic Designer at UCEM, helped me by designing it with her graphic design software and saving it as a PDF.
An image of the Accessibility poster
In this version of work, we wanted to say why we needed to do each of these suggested accessibility enhancing steps. For example, we should not use colour as the only means to convey meaning (e.g. red  letters for wrong answers and green letters for correct answers) because colour-blind learners may not be able to  access the content as they may not be able to distinguish the different colours. I think giving reasons why something needs  to be done in a certain way makes it more real as people can make connections.
This poster was designed to be visual as we are hoping to print it and display it at UCEM.  I also created an accessible version of this poster in a text only version which can also be downloaded.
Again I want to thank Lee and Sue for their amazing work. Had they not shared this with CC license we would not have been able to adapt it.
Creative Commons License
Good practice for accessibility version 1.0 by Tharindu Liyanagunawardena and Asma Hussain is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To provide feedback on this poster, download a copy access: https://bit.ly/2COygZv 
This poster is based on Designing for diverse learners by Lee Fallin and Sue Watling at: http://bit.ly/2EsDn1g.