A new phase: creating content
Posted on: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:
- Reviewing the requirements definition to identify pieces of content to create.
- Drafting each content piece
- Reviewing content piece
- Revising content piece
- Assembling content pieces into one page
- Reviewing page content as a whole
- Revising content to be editorially coherent
- 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!