Accessible Content for Moodle Online Conference
Monday June 28th, 2021
Our First Accessibility Conference
We are super excited to invite you to our first online accessibility conference on Monday, 28th June, 2021! This will be a full day event with speakers from various backgrounds and organisations, including Moodle and Brickfield Education Labs.
This new annual event is a chance for you to understand more about accessibility and how to approach implementing accessibility improvements for your Moodle courses and content.
Whether you’re just starting off on your accessibility journey or want to brush up on your knowledge, join us on June 28th. This will be a day jam-packed with voices from various backgrounds and organisations sharing their tips, tricks, and insights for how you can enhance your Moodle content. The conference will take place on Zoom Webinar, with a live Q & A session to close.
What's in Store?
This will be a full day event starting at 9am and finishing at 5:30 pm. You can join for any or all of the sessions – there is just one zoom webinar link for the whole day!
We are over the moon to have some fabulous speakers including Sander Bangma from Moodle, Alistair McNaught from Alistair McNaught Consultancy, Lars Ballieu Christensen and Tanja Stevns from SensusAccess, Stephen Howell from Microsoft, Huw Alexander from textBOX and others!
The Schedule
Morning Sessions
- 09:00 – 09:15 – Introduction Gavin Henrick – Brickfield
- 09:05 – 09:15 – Welcome – Sander Bangma – Moodle
- 09:15 – 10:00 – Finding, Fixing and Futureproofing your Moodle courses – Gavin Henrick, Karen Holland – Brickfield
- 10:00 – 10:45 – Course Design Consistency – Mark Glynn, DCU
- 10:45 – 11:00 – Break
- 11:00 – 11:45 – Writing Alt Text for images – Huw Alexander, textBOX
- 11:45 – 12:30 – The student voice – DCU Students
Lunch 12:30 – 13:30
Afternoon Sessions
- 13:30 – 14:15 – SCULPT: Accessibility Awareness Building – Helen Wilson, Worcestershire County Council
- 14:15 – 15:00 – Accessibility maturity at institution and module level – Alistair McNaught
- 15:00 – 15:15 – Break
- 15:15 – 16:00 – Automating Accessible File Formats – Lars Ballieu Christensen, Tanja Stevns – SensusAccess
- 16:00 – 16:45 – Microsoft Learning Tools – Stephen Howell – Microsoft
- 16:45 – 17:30 – Closing Panel
Our Speakers
Karen Holland and Gavin Henrick, Co-Founder Brickfield Education Labs
Karen is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Brickfield Education Labs. Karen has over 19 years experience in software development and solution design.
Karen brings a track record in UX design, developing plugins and integrations for Moodle. She is passionate about user experience design and leads the product development process at Brickfield.
Gavin is the co-founder and CEO of Brickfield Education Labs. He has 16 years experience assisting organisations to implement a range of open source learning solutions. His expertise in management and education technology has aided organisations with enhancing their virtual learning environment and processes. He has an extensive track record working with Moodle in the corporate and academic sectors since 2007.
Brickfield Education Labs offers a comprehensive platform to improve the accessibility of Moodle course content. Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit provides accessibility auditing and remediation of course content with improved editor and creation of accessible file formats.
Set up in 2019, Brickfield Education Labs combines more than 50 years of experience delivering educational solutions, together with a passion for accessibility, inclusion, and good user experience.
Sander Bangma, Moodle LMS
Sander is a product manager for Moodle LMS. Sander will kick off the event by highlighting Moodle’s approach to accessibility and the journey to achieving accessibility accreditation. Moodle values inclusion and access to high quality education for all. This is why accessibility is key for Moodle LMS.
Moodle provides the world’s most customisable and trusted online learning solution. Moodle LMS, the open source learning management system, is used by hundreds of millions of learners worldwide.
Mark Glynn, DCU Teaching Enhancement Unit
Mark currently leads a team of eight people charged with enhancing the learning experience of students within Dublin City University. As such Mark has direct involvement with cutting edge innovative teaching techniques and learning technologies that are being implemented throughout the university. Furthermore Mark plays a key role in both local and national strategically important teaching initiatives. The main aim of his current role is to encourage and enable staff in DCU to increase their capacity to offer flexible learning.
Mark’s presentation will highlight the use of a UDL template for all courses on Moodle and the adoption of this template. The presentation will highlight the various features for the template, our experience rolling it out and how staff actually implemented it across the university.
The TEU is DCU’s centre for Teaching and Learning with the primary role of supporting DCU teaching staff . They provide research-informed leadership in Teaching and Learning guided by DCU’s Strategic Plan and responsive to developments in contemporary higher education.
Huw Alexander, textBOX
Enriching the Moodle environment with alt text and image descriptions. Huw will show us how using the focus|LOCUS method to write immersive image descriptions to improve the accessibility of content on Moodle.
textBOX provide alt text description services for publishers and universities to ensure the accessibility of digital content.
Alistair McNaught, Alistair McNaught Consultancy
Translating accessibility into everyday language and practice is the key to culture change. In his session, Alistair McNaught introduces two education-focused models that help locate digital accessibility in holistic frameworks that are meaningful to all staff and reflect their different spheres of influence. This could be your MAMA moment – Make Accessibility Meaningful Again…
Alistair McNaught Consultancy Ltd draws on 20 years front line teaching experience devoted to making students more independent, creative and resourceful. The success of this work led to national roles with Becta, Jisc TechDis and Jisc, promoting and supporting technology enhanced learning and inclusive practice. Alistair now works independently but with strong partnerships like AbilityNet, the Education and Training Foundation and textBox Digital.
Helen Wilson, SCULPT Accessibility Worcestershire County Council
SCULPT for Accessibility came out of research into digital literacy and digital accessibility. The presentation will take you through the journey of how we developed SCULPT, embedded it as part of our mandatory learning expectation for all new starters and existing staff, and our plans for next steps.
At Worcestershire County Council it is our aim to be a digitally inclusive council and part of that is educating our workforce to be digitally accessible. We have developed SCULPT for Accessibility as a workforce approach to lay the foundations of accessibility awareness and the basic skills to produce accessible content.
Stephen Howell, Microsoft
Stephen Howell has 22 years’ experience in software engineering, lecturing, program management, and the education industry. He is currently the Academic Program Manager for Microsoft Ireland. In this role he advocates for STEM skills at K12, computer science skills to higher and further education customers, and digital transformation to government educational agencies.
Stephen is an advocate for STE(A)M, Autism & ADHD awareness, Gender Diversity in Tech, and increasing accessibility in technology for all. He is the Diversity and Inclusion Council Accessibility Pillar Lead for Microsoft Ireland (from July 2019).
Tanja Stevns and Lars Ballieu Christensen, SensusAccess
Lars Ballieu Christensen works with technology and design for people with disabilities. He advises government, organizations, academic institutions on accessibility and inclusive design. He is the inventor of a range of innovative technologies that support inclusion, including the award-winning RoboBraille service.
Empowering students, faculty and staff with disabilities, Lars and Tanja will present how easy the automated document conversion and remediation service SensusAccess can convert documents into a range of alternate formats such as Braille, e-books, digital large-print and audio. The service can also convert inaccessible and tricky documents into better accessible formats
Tanja Stevns works with education and technology to support inclusion of people with disabilities. With more than 27 years of experience working at the Danish National Center for Blind and Partially Sighted Children and Youth, Tanja is a special education teacher and speech therapist, specializing in visual impairment and general learning disorders.
Closing Panelists
Our speakers from throughout the day will be joined in our final panel by Karen Buckley and Suzanne Stone.
Karen Buckley
School of Inclusive & Special Education
Suzanne Stone
Dublin City University Teaching Enhancement Unit
Register Now
Spaces are filling quickly, so be sure to book your spot. You can register for free over on our event registration page.
Stay in Contact
You can keep up to date with us on social media by following the hashtag #MoodleAccessibility2021 or the @brickfieldlabs twitter account
We also have a LinkedIn event page, be sure to click interested on that!