A new phase: creating content

This post brings you up to date with recent group activities, and outlines the work that lies ahead for us. To date, the AccessLearn Community Group has accomplished the following:

• reviewed W3C resources to identify areas where current resources exist and additional resources may be needed to facilitate participation of people with disabilities in online learning experiences;
• produced a set of recommendations for new or supplemental content for the WAI web site that focus on online learning accessibility to fill gaps in information;
• produced a Requirements Analysis on where information that is directly relevant to a range of stakeholder groups in online learning could be added or made easier to find on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) web site; and
• requested the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) review our requirements analysis with a goal of working with them to produce content outlined in our proposal.

Where we are now

EOWG has now given us approval to move to the next phase of work, which will involve creating content for a Landing page on Accessibility and Online Learning. This will be a new page in the WAI web site, intended to provide a first point of entry to the site for audience that need information on accessibility and online learning, but who may otherwise find it difficult to locate the information they need. This may become the first of several audience-specific portal pages for the WAI web site, so we have an opportunity to show the way in how such a page might be structured.

We now have the following assets:

• Our requirements analysis, which defines what content we are going to provide on the Landing page. This identifies four key sections of content we will include on the page (each to include relevant links to other relevant WAI pages):
  • Introduction
  • Accessible online learning fundamentals
  • Processes
  • Specific online learning content types
• A Github page where we can add the content we create, ready to be reviewed by EOWG;
• A preview version of the Github page, showing what the Landing page would look like in its published form as a W3C web page.

What happens next

We have two main tasks ahead of us.

We need to create the content for the Landing page.

And to do that successfully, we need to define a process for group members to contribute to the content creation task.

We want to make sure that the content creation process is collaborative and inclusive, and we know that working in Github has its own challenges. So we would like to define a process that allows everyone who wants to help out do so.

The key steps of this process as we see it are:

1. Reviewing the requirements definition to identify pieces of content to create.
2. Drafting each content piece
3. Reviewing content piece
4. Revising content piece
5. Assembling content pieces into one page
6. Reviewing page content as a whole
7. Revising content to be editorially coherent
8. When content is ready to add to Github, copying it into our Github page

With this approach, each chunk of content should be relatively small—perhaps no more than a couple of paragraphs. Authoring, reviewing and editing of specific content pieces could take place in a number of different places, depending on author/reviewer preferences.

Getting involved

This is where we need your help! We need the following roles:

• Authors for specified chunks of content
• Reviewers

Please let us know in which way you can contribute, via the AccessLearn email forum. If you’re not already a group member, you’ll need to sign up first.

At this point, we don’t have a deadline by which the landing page content needs to be created. But we know that it’s taken a long time to get to this stage, and we’re keen to increase the pace so that we can have some quality content ready for EOWG to review reasonably soon, ideally within the first couple of months of 2020.

This is an exciting phase for the group, as we move from a research and definition phase into a creative phase. We’re very grateful to all group members old and new for your contributions and your patience, and we’d love to have your help in influencing how WAI can support people working in online learning accessibility. We look forward to working with you in this phase!

An update, post-Accessing Higher Ground

Hi, and welcome to new members who joined us after learning about the group at the Accessing Higher Ground 2017 conference! This short post reviews our time at the conference and outlines next steps for the group.

Our conference session gave some background to this group’s creation and motives—our focus on supporting W3C accessibility initiatives by providing insight to the needs of people working with online learning, in particular identifying where and how more information applicable to online learning could be provided on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) web site. A session abstract and a link to slides is available.

We were delighted that several people joined the group straight after the session, and we look forward to working with you!

During AHG, we also had the opportunity to have a very good constructive chat with Sharron Rush, one of the co-chairs of the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG), the group leading the redesign of the WAI Web site. They plan to launch a new site early in 2018, and we have a window of opportunity to influence the new site before the launch. AccessLearn will need to work closely with EOWG on providing clear, prioritized recommendations, and a plan for creating the recommended new content.

We’re pleased that so many group members have provided feedback on our list of recommended actions for plugging content gaps. Our next step is to finalise this prioritization as soon as possible, so that EOWG has a clear message of what content we think should be included and how it should be provided.

Then, we plan to define how that content will be written. In some cases, EOWG may be able to do it; in other cases they will look to us as subject matter experts. So, while you review and indicate your priority for each recommendation, please consider whether you would be willing to be involved in authoring or reviewing the content associated with the recommendation. Thank you!

We’ll continue discussions through the group email list; we also have the opportunity of having a group teleconference if necessary.

Access Learn Update, August 2017

It’s been a while since our last post, and since then we’ve welcomed a few new members to the group. So it’s time we shared an update of what we’ve been doing.

As a reminder, AccessLearn’s initial focus has been to:

1. identify information gaps that exist in the intersection of accessibility and online learning,
2. review the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) website to understand how well it provides information that could address those knowledge gaps
3. based on the first two steps, make recommendations for improving the WAI site’s coverage of accessibility applied to online learning.

We’ve now completed Steps 1 and 2, and created some draft recommendations for addressing the knowledge gaps. These recommendations vary from providing new content, adding examples that are relevant to online learning, to better signposting of existing content.

The next step is for the AccessLearn Community Group to review and comment on these recommendations, before we shape them into a draft report to share with W3C’s Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG).

So, we invite all group members to review the recommended actions, and add your comments. You can do so by adding comments directly in the Google Sheet, or via the group email list.

If you’d prefer to wait until the recommendations are formulated into a more readable report, that’s okay. We plan to circulate that in early September.

The group chairs, Mary and Dave, will be presenting AccessLearn’s work at the Accessing Higher Ground conference in Colorado in November this year. We’ll also be using the opportunity to gather feedback on what the group should focus on next. If you plan to attend AHG, we look forward to seeing you there!

AccessLearn Group update, May 2016

The evidence of our work is generally found in the group email discussions, or on the group’s wiki. But, after a year of existence, it seemed like a good time for a short update here, just so you know that the group is keeping busy!

Our mission is to explore how to support the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative in providing resources and guidance for people who want to provide accessible, quality online learning experiences for learners and instructors with disabilities.

That’s a broad remit for a community group that relies on unspecified commitments of volunteer time. For the group to be successful we need to target achievable and meaningful objectives.

So in our first year we ran an online survey to gather some information from group members on issues such as the relevance of current W3C accessibility specifications, and key challenges to creating and delivering accessible online learning. A summary of the survey findings is available on the wiki.

Following group discussion and a further survey, we have agreed on two parallel work streams:

1. Work stream 1: Gap Analysis of current WAI resources. This will look at current WAI resources from the perspective of accessible online learning, to understand what’s there and what might be missing.
2. Work stream 2: Documenting what the online learning community needs. This is a more blue-sky activity, profiling the “online learning community” and trying to identify what information different stakeholder groups in that community need.

We’re now in the process of organizing how each workstream will operate, and the best way to convey output to the relevant WAI Working Groups so that it has positive impact.

We’ll make sure to document progress and output via email and on the wiki, so you can keep track on what we’re doing. And if you’d like to get involved, please join us!