1. Accessibility and Moodle:
Jailbreak your LMS

2. Agenda for the Session
• Neil Squire who? What do these guys do?
• Accessibility
–Types and things to consider
–What does Moodle do?
–What should a teacher / instructional designer do?
–What customizations we’ve done?
• Jailbreak
• Get Engaged with Accessibility

3. Who are these guys?

4. Introduction
The Neil Squire Society has for
over 25 years empowered
people with physical disabilities
through knowledge,
technology, and passion.
Offices:
–Burnaby, BC
–Regina, SK
–Ottawa, ON
–Fredericton & Moncton, NB

5. Neil Squire and e-Learning
• Two major programs delivered through Blended
e-Learning:
– Employ-Ability
• 12 week Career and Wellness Program
– Computer Comfort
• one-on-one computer tutoring program, lead by volunteers
• Delivered with partners throughout the country

6. Neil Squire: Reach of Projects

7. Technology for Connectivity
• Elluminate (Web Conference)
• TeamViewer / VNC
• Moodle (LMS)

8. Computer Materials Mashup
• Microsoft Digital Literacy
• Moodle Commons
• OpenCoursewareConsortium
• GCF Learn Free
• Existing Neil Squire Society
resources

9. Accessibility

10. Types of Accessibility / Disability
• Mobility
• Vision
• Auditory
• Cognitive

11. Why Accessibility?
• Uber - use case
• Better usability
• Scalability
• Legality

12. Support doesn’t stop at the server
• User Assistive Technologies
http://solutions.neilsquire.ca

13. Future Accessibility
• WAI-ARIA
–Web Accessibility Initiative: Accessible Rich Internet
Applications
• HTML5
• Browser Adoption

14. What Does Moodle Do?
** we are on 1.9

15. Accessibility Update
• Moodle 1.6 & 1.8?
• “Skip to”
• Requires “Alt” Tags
• Screen Reader profile field

16. What doesn’t Moodle do
• Theme is not separate layer, more of a “skin”
• User interface is built by Moodle, not your
theme (semantics come from database and
function calls)
–Find .lib file that produces bad semantics
–Override it in the theme

17. What Can You Do?

18. Accessibility Testing
Quick tests
•Select All
•Fangs (Firefox plugin)
•Tab-through page

19. Accessibility Pitfalls
• AJAX (flaw that can’t be fixed for all browsers)
• Flash (poorly/commonly developed)
• Moodle modules

20. Semantic Mark-up
All users
•Separate meaning from appearance.
•Use CSS for appearance
•Don’t “click here”
•If it’s a list, use <li>
•If it’s a heading, use <h1> <h2> <h3>
•Don’t style with a table, use <div>

21. Accessibility Block
Visual
•Text Size
•Contrast Settings
•*snag with newer Moodle versions

22. Captioning of Videos
Auditory
•Captioning
of videos

23. Elastic & Liquid Theme
Visual
•Elastic: Page scales to font size
•Liquid: Page scales to resolution
•Relative ratios instead of fixed pixel values
•“em” Width of letters
•% Width of parent block or text

24. What Did we Do?

25. Welcome Course
Cognitive, Universal Design
•Sample course introducing:
– Organization
– e-Learning and Moodle
– Demos and sample activities
– Learning Styles

26. Marking Block
Cognitive, Visual
•Queries facilitator’s participants
•Shows the assignments, and who has
submitted assignments
•Assignments sorted by name (labeled
resources)
•Clicking the name links directly to their
submission

27. Template Answers
Cognitive
•Forums/Online Text Assignments – core hack

28. Duplicate Navigation
Cognitive, Mobility, Vision
•Navigation between resource is both in the
Header and Footer

29. Audio Responses to Answers
Cognitive, Universal Design
•NanoGong – submit audio for answer

30. Keyboard Controls for Multimedia
Visual
Mobility

31. Keyboard Controls for Multimedia
Visual,
Mobility

32. Liberated Learning Overview
• Consortium of universities utilizing speech
recognition technology to enhance
accessibility for students with disabilities in
the university classroom.
• http://www.transcribeyourclass.ca

33. Transcribe Your Class

34. Liberated Learning Player
• Vision, Cognitive
http://moodle.neilsquire.ca/mod/resource/view.php?id=445
http://moodle.neilsquire.ca/transcribed/CD/cdf09.php

35. Audio Player
Visual, Cognitive
•JavaScript Scrapes text of page
•Looks for audio in browser cache
•Looks for audio in server cache
•Else passes text to TTS web service, retrieves
and caches mp3 for text segments
•Play sound

36. Accommodations (End-user)
• Firefox Language plug-in: highlight2translate
• All Google Translate Languages available

37. Accommodations (End-user)
• Firefox Dictionary / Thesaurus plugin

38. Jailbreak

39. Elluminate Integration
Cognitive
•User profile field
•Links to assigned classroom
•Links to archives of class
•Three line block

40. Built Multimedia filters
Visual, Mobility
•Builds entire accessible player with one line of
code in wysiwyg
•[[swf|ytORppt|title|url|normalORwide]]
–yt – YouTube
–ppt – Flash outputted Power Points
–Title – HTML output
–url – just ID for YouTube, url for PPT
–Aspect ratio

41. View by Role
• Assign site-level roles, sorts alphabetically
• Allows easy interface to create groups

42. PHP Labels
• Allow PHP code on course page

43. PHP Resources
• Allow PHP code in resource page (separate
resource)

44. PHP Resource Example

45. Building the Jailbreaker
• Programmed to work only for super-admin
• eval('?>' . $phpage->content . '<?php ');
• “eval is evil”

46. Get Engaged with Neil Squire

47. Distance Computer Comfort
• Be a one-on-one computer tutor to a
Canadian with a disability
• Tutoring done online using Elluminate
• Once a week for two hours

48. Liberated Learning
• Liberated Learning
http://www.transcribeyourclass.ca
• Record your lecture
• Upload the audio
• Receive a multimedia transcript
• First five uploads are edited for accuracy

49. Work towards Accessibility
• We provide fee-for-service:
–Consultation
–Procedure writing
–Site audit
–Development
–Content creation
–Staff training

50. Thank you for your time
Chad Leaman –
chadl@neilsquire.ca
Ryan Thomas –
ryant@neilsquire.ca
604 - 473 - 9363