Globalambition dot ie

Start in Ireland 

Start in Ireland is a new online repository of start-up supports in Ireland. The portal simplifies the process of finding relevant start-up information and provides a pathway for people who want to start or grow their early-stage businesses. 

https://globalambition.ie/startinireland/

SensusAccess

SensusAccess - Accessible File Conversion

For UCD students and staff - you can use SensusAccess to convert documents:

• if you own the copyright 
• if it's your own work
• if you have permission from the copyright owner
• if the copyright has expired 
• if it's for someone with a print disability.

https://www.ucd.ie/all/ucdstudents/support/sensusaccessfileconversion/

Sharing how the CORE Project is making its material accessible

I just wanted to share this news that the CORE Project is committed to making its material accessible.

CORE is committed to making its ebooks accessible to everyone. We have worked closely with Electric Book Works, the developers of the CORE publishing platform, to improve the accessibility by:

• adding video captions to all the Economist in Action videos, and to Ramin's video tutorials. Captions can also be downloaded as transcripts (so far, available only in English, with French, Italian and Spanish pending),
• making forms accessible, for example altering the underlying HTML of the multiple choice questions to make it easier for users with screen reading software to answer them,
• providing descriptive hyperlinks.

Currently, we are producing alternative text (alt-text) for all the figures in The Economy (more than 500 figures with over 1300 images). Alt-text is a description of the figure’s content that enables visually impaired users to have the same understanding of the figure as a non-visually-impaired user would have. Next steps include:

• making ebooks fully keyboard-operable,
• replacing images of figures with .svg format, which allows for sharper quality and requires less data to load the images,
• a complete audit of The Economy's current accessibility level in preparation for the 2.0 edition, which CORE is aiming at making accessible under the WCAG AA standards.

Review https://www.core-econ.org for more and to find out about the CORE project.

Today is The Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

Thursday, May 20, 2021, marks the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities.

Illustration of diverse population (source: GAAD homepage)

For more information about GAAD visit...

https://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org

LEP Report and Showcase

The Design Thinking Class of 2021 hosted and recorded a series of guest speaker workshops inspired by the theme of design choices and design for universal access. The speaker series was published and is available to listen to by stream online or download. These recordings constitute Season 02 of the Design Talk podcast (https://www.designtalk.ie).

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The LEP project report

"Recipients of funding are required to showcase and disseminate the approach taken and key outcomes from their project at a Teaching and Learning event(s) and through the development of a case study for publication on the UCD T&L website."

(Ref: https://www.ucd.ie/teaching/awardsgrantsfellowships/learningenhancementprojects/)

This project aimed to demonstrate the efficacy of experiential learning to engender a design attitude among students. The project employs a mix of physical accessibility equipment, simulation devices, and computing device accessibility functionality for awareness and skills development.

RESOURCES FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING OF THE DISABILITY ENVIRONMENT FOR A NEW MODULE (MIS20090 DESIGN THINKING)

Overview

Module Coordinator: Allen Higgins, UCD College of Business

Collaborators: Tina Lowe & Lisa Padden, UCD Access and Lifelong Learning; Darren Baker, UCD College of Business

Module/Programme Title: Design Thinking (2nd year option/elective)

Module Code: MIS20090

Student Cohort: 75 undergraduate students (AY 2019-2020 plus AY 2020-2021)

Background – What is the context and what factors led to trying the new approach?

This project aimed to demonstrate the efficacy of experiential learning to engender a design attitude among students. The design thinking class is inspired by the last several decades of shift towards socially inclusive and engaged design approaches. Human-centred design methods are gaining increased attention and design thinking has become a headline format promoted by firms such as IDEO, IBM, Google, Accenture, and EY. These organisations and others are developing and sharing their methodologies for design thinking and design processes in an open non-proprietary environment.

The class applies design thinking methods to the goal of ‘enabling organisational spaces’. The project supported the involvement of expert workshops and the acquisition of experiential teaching resources for students to experiment and props for experiential simulation of the spatial/digital environment encountered by people with disabilities. These resources included workshops, physical accessibility equipment, simulation devices, and computing device accessibility functionality for awareness and skills development. Students gain experience in requirements gathering for action research, applied research methods, data gathering, fieldwork.

This project involved the NCBI, AHEAD, the UCD Access & Lifelong Learning Centre, and the UCD College of Business.

Goals - What we aimed to do

The project sought support for the purchase of resources and learning tools for the analysis, design and redesign of digital/spatial environments impacting people with different accessibility needs.

Our goals were:

1. That students could experience and learn from practical and simulated reduced access of the physical+digital environment.
2. That students would gain practical experience: in user/customer facilitation sessions; gathering data for requirements; and how to run collaborative design ideation for human-centred design initiatives.
3. Students on the module would actively contribute to an improved campus environment in conjunction with our partners in UCD Access and Lifelong Learning, Disability Support  and campus Estate Services by preparing As-Is reports and evaluations of the spatial/digital environment to enhance the campus experience.
4. That the resources funded by this initiative would be made available for others where possible and could be used subsequent iterations of the module and other teaching initiatives.

The Innovative Approach - How we did it

The central tenet of the class is that “Universal Design is a Universal Requirement.” The class employs this idea of universal requirements to illustrate design processes in general and to link design thinking with design action without necessarily limiting the domain of application. (Thus they could investigate challenges equally across a range of domains - in terms of defining the accessibility context to study, i.e.: visual, audio, mobility, other; and the research subject or focus, e.g.: physical access, digital access, transactional workflows, navigating the campus, etc.).

The students are introduced to a range of empathy-oriented research methods and apply them to practical, local, experiential investigations of design in-the-wild. They are free to choose their own research contexts. The use of empathy methods and the design thinking process ensure they share a common language and conceptual approach to problem identification and primary research. Research projects could range over analysing the built environment, the digital environment, or hybrids of physical and digital systems from a usability perspective emphasising universal design and accessibility. 

Student research projects are captured by a “design brief”; a document describing the context, need and potential for design action. The document synthesises evidence gathered and offers and interpretation of that evidence without necessarily prefiguring the subsequent design response. In real-world projects the design brief acts as the initiation, input, and boundary object for user, customer, designer, and other stakeholders. 

While introducing the concepts of end-to-end design processes, the innovation in the design of this class was to employ experiential learning pedagogy. Students select one or more research methods, develop a field protocol, gather data, analyse and present the findings as inputs to a subsequent design process. They are also taught research writing techniques: citing sources, preparing bibliography, applying standard templates. The experiential learning approach facilitates the development and application of practical skills and techniques for capturing empirical design evidence and requirements. All of the preceding skills are recognised as career achievements for their personal resumés.

Meaningful participation by students:

The syllabus and teaching exercises emphasise empirical research, data capture, analysis and communication through research writing. The resulting “design brief” produced by each student presents evidence of customer goals, user needs, describing empirical contexts and the challenges posed by a status-quo or “AS-IS” situation. The design brief may suggest potential “TO-BE” solutions but explicitly does not prescribe them, based on the belief that design action should be the outcome of a subsequent iterative material design processes drawing continuously on traceable empirical requirements and data. (These activities constitute the first part of the double-diamond innovation model.)

Learning from Experiential Learning:

We realised early on that there are disagreements and difficulties with a teaching approach founded on simulating accessibility challenges for people without disability. We agreed that some accessibility experiences cannot be adequately simulated, they must be demonstrated and explained by experts. Consequently, the formulation of actionable design requirements demands the involvement of the very people who experience those needs and those who construct design responses. Thus, the class involves:

1. Participants and practitioners from access and accessibility services; the people impacted by poor design choices and the people who support them.
2. In addition we introduce industry design practitioners with experience creating actionable design responses.  The reason being that some design responses absolutely require the involvement of architects, software engineers, product designers and others.

Impact on teaching staff:

As educators, the design and running of this class ended up challenging our own assumptions about the design process. The widespread belief, that we also held, that design process can be made more democratic and open to all, is supported in part but also challenged. Design initiatives need to be inclusive and open but they also need the involvement of experts and expertise (design specialists, 

A solitary 5 credit class cannot assume the mantel of teaching all there is to know about the design process. It is sufficient to focus on learning outcomes such as training in research skills that feed into the product design process and other research initiatives more generally.

Future directions:

This class may offer a foundation for or lead-in to a new multi-part design studies programme; branching eventually into specialised application areas such as: built environment, digital, computing, and physical product design specialisms.

Results - How it went

The results of the learning enhancement project are expressed in student comments.

"the use of the wheelchair really helped me to understand the importance of empathy in design, something that I would not have given much thought to before" (3)

"The course has also taught me valuable lessons about inclusion and equality and that are ways in which I can help spreading these lessons." (5)

"I feel like companies fail too often in understanding the people who actually use their products. There is so much missed opportunity in this area... using the props such as the glasses provided by the NCBI or the wheelchair where we got a chance to simulate to some degree, everyday problems. Things such as this forced us to think in ways we normal would not, such as 'how do I navigate from the 3rd floor to the bathrooms', etc." (7)

"...the main point that I would take forward in future would be the importance of using as many different experiences and research methods to build the best picture and then develop from there. " (39)

Resources

• Teaching resources for classroom experiential learning exercises:
• Simulation Spectacles Kit – Visual impairment teaching aids ( https://vinesimspecs.com/simulation-package.html)
• 2x refurbished wheelchairs for student exercises; sourced from the Irish Wheelchair Association (IWA - https://iwa.ie/)
• • 2x Amazon Echo for use in classroom simulations and experimentation – smart assistant friendly speaker systems for handsfree and visually impaired users.
• Accessible Open Learning Resource materials published by this project include:
• Publication of “Design Thinking 2 - Open Educational Resource” website (https://ucddt2.blogspot.com). Sharing the class syllabus, readings and informational posts on Design Thinking, Universal Design, and UDL.
• • Publication of the Design Talk podcast (https://www.designtalk.ie): an on-going series of guest speaker podcasts discussing design choices and design for universal access.
• Conference presentation:
• [1] Higgins, A., and Lowe, T. The design thinking class: experiencing the extremes to inform universal design. In Reconnection: Placing Inclusion at the Heart of Online Learning and Support in Further and Higher Education (East Hall, UCD, Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin, 6th April to 7th May 2021 2021), N. Grennan, Ed., AHEAD Online Conference, AHEAD.

Alphabet of Accessibility for Game Designers

This is a really essential tool for any game developer (indeed, for any product designer) to have and to apply to designing your game.

Alphabet of Accessibility Deck for Game Designers (source:link)

Empathetic, thought provoking, needed to understand who you are designing for and perhaps more importantly who you aren't able to reach.

Persona driven design process

Model users: 'personas'

In following up on the topic of Persona driven design processes, we wanted to highlight that the WCAG Guidelines actually provide example personas for designer. "Stories of Web Users" offer character centred scenarios. While not actual persons nor comprehensively addressing every kind of disability, the characters illustrate and challenge designers to consider users with a range of needs and goals. https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/

Personas offer a cast of synthetic characters complete with values, personal histories, needs and goals. Personas are not average demographic 'types', they are individual characters whose biographical detail allows designers to 'imagine' the persona's individual aspirations, choices and behaviour as realistic, plausible, meaningful. It is simply another way for designers to generate empathy with their users. It enables them to build up a cast of characters, socialised and known among the design team, in order to focus the team's design attention, to enable and contain design ideation, development action, testing, user acceptance, etc.A persona is employed as a shared sense making device, a fictional 'identity' or a character who is imagined in putative roles wherein some future version of the product is employed. These design strategies occupy the conceptual boundary between the design-world and the use-world. Each persona can be used to...

“Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish.” (Cooper, 2004) “Personas are not real people, but they are based on the behaviours and motivations of real people we have observed and represent them throughout the design process. They are composite archetypes based on behavioural data gathered from the many actual users encountered in ethnographic interviews.” (Cooper et al., 2007)

We can use “personas” or special classes of users as representative clients/user/consumers in order to overcome the impossibility of maintaining dialog with each and every participant.

Further reading

For example: Lee, online shopper with color blindness (link)

[Cooper, 2004] Cooper, A. (2004). The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Sams, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

[Cooper et al., 2007] Cooper, A., Reimann, R., and Cronin, D. (2007). About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons, Indianapolis, Indiana.

[Triple U, 2018] Triple U blog (2018). "Accessibility Cards" (link)

Ally for Brightspace

UCD IT Services in partnership with UCD Access and Lifelong Learning have recently purchased Ally which has now been integrated into Brightspace. 

Ally is a content accessibility tool that helps build a more inclusive learning environment and improve the student experience by helping students take clear control of course content with usability, accessibility and quality in mind.

Ally will assist with the University's objective of University for All and assist with the Universal Design principles for Teaching & Learning, providing the student population with alternative options to receive their learning materials.

Ally provides detailed insight and guidance to staff on best practice in relation to the accessibility of their content and guidelines on how best to improve on it.

(From the blurb...)

"
Students and staff now have the facility to view their learning content in different formats. The alternative format options are accessed by clicking on the “Download alternative formats icon” beside the learning content. Some of the alternative formats include:

• Semantic HTML
• ePub
• Audio
• Electronic Braille

A fantastic learning resource "Stark opens its doors to the Public Library"

In what Stark says is the largest, centralised accessibility resource on the internet now including Hannah Milan’s a11yresources, this library has the potential to reshape the future of accessibility education and community.

...with over ~1,000 carefully curated accessibility content aggregated from all over the internet—including articles and tools, to courses and guides and the spectrum of topics from Gaming, Software & Tools, Standards, and more.

https://www.getstark.co/library/

Overcoming “Design Bias” by employing Persona based design

The world is disclosed to each of us in our own particular ways. As designers we want our designs to be functional, we want them to be useful but also more importantly, we want them to be usable.

So, my designs need to be useable by more people than "just me." Why? Because I respond to the world in response to how the world is disclosed to me. But I am a population of one.
What about the other billions of people in the world? Are they me?

I (we) can't just make an assumption that everyone is like me. A designed thing, a thing in the world, must therefore be inclusive, not biased (in so far as that is possible).  

And so, in principle, I should ensure that everyone who wants to use my software can use it. Design thinking attempts to authentically shift the focus of design towards designing for inclusion. The challenge is no longer to develop a bare minimum of functionality. The challenge is to design for some one, any number of "some ones". Not design for everybody because "everybody" ends up being nobody. Design for a somebody, a person, and many persons.

As a designer I need to be aware of my own biases (we all have them). Our (my) biases may be gendered, cultural, age related. Our (my) biases skew our (my) understanding of the world. Consequently it is almost inevitable that our (my) designs encode these assumptions and biases, our (my) own ways of perceiving the world. And as an aside; unfortunately, AI, and technology, simply applied without reflection, will almost certainly amplify the various biases. A bias is a pre-judgement, you can consider it a kind of decision-making shortcut, a way to quickly resolve complex questions. They have utility, acting as a shorthand for a personal preference, and bias as preference, mostly, does the job, expressing our preferred choice or configuration. But they frequently go awry.

Design bias is particularly insidious in software design, particularly in systems that use data to drive the performance of the system which in turn generates more data for ‘tweaking’ or driving the performance of the system; basically, algorithmic bias. neural nets, AI, machine learning.

The deep problem with design biases is that they produce systemic effects upon the entire population:

• Confirmation bias (interpreting information in a way that confirms my preconception)
• Interaction bias (homophily, preferring interaction with others exhibiting certain traits or behaviours)
• Automation bias (preferring information presented by a computer or other interface rather than people or situation)
• Association bias (attributing qualities to new situations based on limited previous experience)
• Dataset bias (algorithmic bias arising from a skewed, partial, or non-representative dataset)

And there are many many other forms of human cognitive bias that spill over into the designs and things we make.

How can we solve this challenge? Cooper Design, (founded by Alan Cooper author of "About Face" and designer of Microsoft Visual Basic) is often credited with creating the "persona" method. The persona method is a disciplined approach to design for a person with a biography, a person with an age, a height, a history. A person who lives in the work, with their own projects, their own goals. A persona has a name, she/he could be busy, they could be using a design in a public space or while performing some specific activity, they are a fictional somebody, not an average somebody.

The persona approach is one way. A more authentic and valid approach is to bring in experts, people from different communities, backgrounds, abilities. People who represent themselves and people like them.

A11Y - accessibility catalogues and other resources

A curated catalogue of accessibility information created and maintained by Hannah of humbleuidesigns

https://a11yresources.webflow.io

a11yresources "about"

a11y stands for ACCESSIBILITY. 

The A11YPROJECT https://www.a11yproject.com helps you get started, learning, auditing, community and growing the available resources.

A11Y PROJECT "about"

The WCAG Guidelines

WCAG Guidelines

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - currently at version at version 2.1 - are freely available online at

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

"WCAG 2.1 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific... and testable with a combination of automated testing and human evaluation."

This version of the WCAG aimed to expand the definitions to include "criteria to address cognitive, language, and learning disabilities" however significant challenges remain and will be the subject of future work.

WCAG describes three levels of testable conformance with the guidelines for accessibility: A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest). https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/conformance#levels

One of the most enabling resources an author, publisher, developer can provide for accessibility is to offer metadata for objects. Metadata is 'data about data', descriptive text, alternate text, transcripts of recordings, visual captioning, audio captioning, and many other approaches. Metadata should be machine readable for users of assistive devices to translate or represent the data in the desired format. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/understanding-metadata

The WCAG provides an extensive library of techniques and design principles for developers and content publishers to apply. 

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/

These web-centric techniques and technologies range over 

• General Techniques for Web Page Design
• CSS Techniques
• HTML Techniques
• PDF Techniques
• Plain-Text techniques and technologies
• Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) technology (like .vtt - video text track files) 
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)
• And design architectural guidelines for Client-Side Scripting, Server-Side Scripting
• With commentary on negative criteria or Failure Modes

Further Reading

For more see "How People with Disabilities Use the Web" and in particular review the "Stories of Web Users" for Personas being applied https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/

An overview of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Overview:

The following is a brief overview of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the system used in internet browsers to deliver content, control the rendering or display of the content, and to make web pages dynamic or interactive for users. We can think of these three different but complementary technologies as responsible, respectively, for a web page's: Structure; Appearance; and Behaviour.

Terminology

What is HTML, CSS, and Javascript? Are they separate, can they appear in the same place, the same file, is it software, why do we use them? 

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. 

"HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img /> and <input /> directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as <p> surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page." (link: Wikipedia entry on HTML: opens in a new window)

CSS

The presentation of HTML is aided by technologies like Cascading Style Sheets.

"CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple web pages to share formatting by specifying the relevant CSS in a separate .css file which reduces complexity and repetition in the structural content as well as enabling the .css file to be cached to improve the page load speed between the pages that share the file and its formatting. (link: Wikipedia entry on CSS: opens in a new window)

Responsive Design

Responsive web design, and by implication the interface design of applications and apps that use web elements for the user interface, is a design approach that allows for fluid presentation of the view of a web page, app or application. Responsive web design has grown in importance as much of our consumption of technology has shifted from personal computers to mobile devices. Mobile devices pose design challenges screen size varies wildly across desktop computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

"[The] Separation of formatting and content also makes it feasible to present the same markup page in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (via speech-based browser or screen reader), and on Braille-based tactile devices. CSS also has rules for alternate formatting if the content is accessed on a mobile device." (link: Wikipedia entry on CSS: opens in a new window)

JavaScript

JavaScript is an interpreted scripting language, a way of programming simple browser-side behaviour for web pages. Server-side programming for more sophisticated and intensive computation will be written in programming languages like Java, Python and others.

"Alongside HTML and CSS, JavaScript is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web.[10] JavaScript enables interactive web pages and is an essential part of web applications. The vast majority of websites use it for client-side page behavior,[11] and all major web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine to execute it.

As a multi-paradigm language, JavaScript supports event-driven, functional, and imperative programming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM)." (link: Wikipedia entry on JavaScript: opens in a new window)

Example

Create local copies of three new files using a plain text editor using the code/text below. Save the files as plain text. Make sure the 'dot' suffix indicated is correct. These three files provide the HTML, JS and CSS for a web page. Open the HTML file in a browser to confirm the result illustrated here.

An example of HTML+JS+CSS working together.

1. Save a the text below into a new text file “intro.html”

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

    <title>Intro to HTML CSS and Javascript</title>

    <script type="text/javascript" src="FirstExternalJSFile.js">

    </script>

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="FirstCSSFile.css">

</head>

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">

  <h1 style="text-align: left;">Overview:</h1>

  <p>This page is an example of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript system. This is the same system used in internet browsers to deliver content, control the rendering or display of the content, and to make web pages dynamic or interactive for users.</p>

  <p> The text displayed below displays a string named "helloMessage" which this HTML document knows about because it loaded a JavaScript source file in the script tag in the head section.</p>

  <p>This is some text marked up as paragraph</p>

  <div class="heading">This heading uses the CSS</div>

  <div class="body">Paragraph text can also use the div instruction.</div>

  <h2 id="helloMessage"</h2>

</body>

</html>

2. Save a the text below into a new text file “FirstExternalJSFile.js”

window.onload = writeMessage;

function writeMessage() 

    {

        // JavaScript can include comments which are not displayed

        document.getElementById("helloMessage").

        innerHTML = "Hello, World! A message from the file 'FirstExternalJSFile.js'";

    }

3. Save a the text below into a new text file “FirstCSSFile.css”

body {

        font:14px arial;

        text-align:left;

      }

div.heading {

        font:16px arial;

        font-weight:bold;

        margin-bottom:15px;

        text-align:center;

        color:blue;

      }