Weekly Blog 3

What did you find when you ran the WAVE accessibility report on your blog post(s)? What did you expect and what was surprising? Is there anything you will do differently going forward? 

The WAVE accessibility report was not at all what I expected. It did a check on my blog in about 3 seconds and detailed all the structures, features, errors, and alerts that it has. It also checks text size and contrast ratio to make sure everything is visually acceptable and easy to follow for the readers. The report was a lot more detailed than I thought it would be. Going forward, I will remember to use a larger header for titles as compared to the paragraph bodies so it can be distinguished easier. It is still amazing to me how much technology has advanced to be able to calculate such a detailed report in such a short amount of time. 

Have you used Text to Speech tools before? Did you find it useful? Did you try out some of the different voices? What impact did the different voices have on your ability to absorb information?

Having never used Text to Speech tools before I was amazed at how the Read Aloud App extension can extract the text so fast from the webpage and read it out. I have tested about 10 different voices from the options page which consisted of many different languages speaking bots with different accents. The different voices with stronger accents were harder to understand than the ones with little to no accents. I do believe that having an accent I am more familiar with, in this case, a western accent helps me absorb information better. Having many different accent options helps for a more inclusive design for the Text to Speech add on. It helps recognize exclusion for those that have visual impairment, solve for one, extend to many by making it compatible for multiple languages, and even learn from diversity by adding so many different voices to accommodate users from across the world. 

What role do you think media and multimedia can play in a learning environment designed with UDL guidelines in mind? Which of the promising practices for text, images and video are in alignment with these guidelines?

I think that media and multimedia can help in a learning environment by playing the role of representation where it offers information in more than just text by having a video, or screen cast to have students follow along. It can also have students increase their engagement similar to when watching Khan academy videos, we follow along with the examples to gain a further understanding of the concepts. Adding closed captions in videos give the audience more than one way to absorb the information (reading and listening). Another one would be having the option to choose playback speed on videos which help with the action and expression by having students engage with the material at their own comfortable pace 

What does inclusive design mean to you?

I think inclusive design means to have one solution to solve the problem for a billion people. This means that the design accommodates everyone around the world (diversity) and also to all the disabilities that affect learning. It means to put into consideration all possible problems that may arise that can bring hardships to learning and solving it. 

References:

Gernsbacher MA.(2015)  Video Captions Benefit Everyone. Policy Insights Behav Brain Sci. 2015 Oct;2(1):195-202. doi: 10.1177/2372732215602130. Epub 2015 Oct 1. PMID: 28066803; PMCID: PMC5214590.

Holmes, K. (2020). Mismatch: How inclusion shapes design. MIT Press.

Inclusive Design (2018) Microsoft Design Principles