Shalimar: 0:07

There's a moment. Maybe you've had it where you open a course or land on a website and something just doesn't work. Maybe you're trying to navigate a keyboard and nothing responds. Maybe a video plays, but there's no captions. Maybe the contrast is so low the text just disappears into the page. For most of us, that's a small frustration, but for millions of learners around the world, that is the moment learning stops. Today on the Moodle podcast, we're talking about accessibility, not as a compliance checkbox, not as a line item on a launch checklist, but as a fundamental question about who we're actually building for. I'm Shalimar, and I'm so glad you’re here. You may notice it's just me today. My co-host Dan is sitting this one out, but don’t worry, he’ll be back next month. In the meantime, I've got excellent company. Joining me today are two colleagues I genuinely cherish; both part of the Moodle family,  accessibility central to the I could introduce them, but I'd rather let them do that themselves because I think the way someone describes their own work tells you something really important about why it matters to them. So, over to you both. Tell us who you are in your own words.

Jun: 1:23

Hi, I'm Jun Pataleta, accessibility specialist from Moodle products. I am based here in Perth, Western Australia, and I’ve been here in Moodle since 2015 where I started as a developer for Moodle LMS or learning management system. I first got involved in accessibility when, uh, we launched our, um, inaugural accessibility audit initiative for Moodle LMS back in 2020. So since then, I've been one of the default workers, um, grunt workers, when it comes to organizing our annual accessibility audits for the LMS and addressing any issues, um, found to help us achieve the WCAG AA conformance accreditation. So last year we reorganized the product team and the accessibility specialist role was created. And I feel like it resonated with me. So I've put my hand up and here we are. And so yeah, aside from helping improve the accessibility of Moodle LMS, I've also been working with other product teams such as Moodle Workplace to provide support for anything related to accessibility.

Shalimar: 2:43

Welcome, Jun.

Carli: 2:44

And I'm Carli Cockrell. Um, I have been at Moodle since I believe, oh, 2021. I have a background in education prior to coming to Moodle as both a K-12 educator and then also higher ed. My background is in instructional technology and educational technology. So I currently hold a role at Moodle as a learning designer, with a little asterisk next to it of accessibility specialist within the learning design team. And, essentially, what my day-to-day role is, I get to liaison with people within the services department with Moodle, client facing roles, on what does accessibility mean in their day-to-day work. But then also I get to - what the - where my bread and butter is, is talking to clients about accessibility and why it's so important to include it in their site builds. And so, as much as possible, I try to get in there and have some accessibility time with folks, because it is near and dear to my heart, which might be what we are talking about next, in fact.

Shalimar: 3:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great guess because I definitely want to start somewhere personal, right? Accessibility is one of those topics that tends to find people before they go looking for it. So I'm interested to hear from both of you; what is it that made accessibility your thing? Where does that passion come from?

Carli: 4:07

This is a little bit of a tale, but my personal tale is my journey, and it is fundamental to why accessibility is so important to me. So, as many people who get started in accessibility, there's often a personal situation that actually occurs that makes them go, huh, this is an interesting field, or needs more advocacy. And for myself, I was actually diagnosed with one of my first autoimmune conditions when I was 8 years old. It was somewhat rare of a condition for a child of that age to actually acquire. And one thing that happens in the autoimmune world that a lot of people who affectionately, kind of called spoonies, uh, people who know about spoon theory and, and that kind of thing, we tend to acquire multiple autoimmune conditions. That is kind of what happens. And so, I've become somewhat of a collector of autoimmune conditions over my life, which has presented, you know, various - various challenges. But the most accessible thing for me since I did leave the classroom teaching, has been remote work, getting to work with clients about things that I am passionate about. The other little thing that I like to share is that I grew up in Southeast Idaho. I went to public school, but we had a really interesting program where all of the kiddos who were deaf in that area were actually brought to our school. So inside of our classroom, in a public classroom, we had over 25% deaf kiddos inside of the class. And so I got to - I was fascinated just by watching and learning ASL. We did like all of our Christmas and holiday programs in ASL. One of my best friends at the time was deaf, you know, and we were able to kind of get on. And so it was just a really - it made me realise just how important it is. Um, the lived experience and, and just, you know, basically how advocacy is so important to ensure that everybody has an equitable experience.

Shalimar: 6:11

Yeah. Carli, I'm hearing you basically say that in your formative years community, a community of people with needs that maybe were a little bit different than what we see every day. Got you there. And we love community at Moodle, right? What about you, Jun?

Jun: 6:26

I've been involved with, um, our accessibility work since 2020 . So I - I've gained some greater form of awareness about the importance of accessibility and making Moodle more accessible, especially like when we first launched our auditing for LMS in 2020. As I learned more about it, I learned that we have one out of six people experiencing disability according to the World Health Organization. As an organisation, we support the UN goal #4, which is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote opportunities for all. So I believe that making our products accessible plays an important part in supporting that goal.

Shalimar: 7:15

Absolutely. I'm also feel really blessed to have brushed up against, and have interacted with and supported friends in disability justice programs. That really helped kind of get me into this conversation back in the late aughties, um, which feels like an eternity ago actually. But, uh, yeah. Okay. Well, let's, let's get into it. Um, I want to really peel it back on accessibility. So let's start with if we could like, I don't know, sit alongside a learner who's really struggling to get through their course. What would we see? What are the barriers that, you know, keep showing up again and again?

Carli: 7:58

One thing that I will say, and I love getting to see my clients actually share their real lived experience with their learners with me, because it is always so impactful. One thing that I advocate for is something called proactive accessibility versus reactive accessibility. And not to say that reactive accessibility isn't still accessibility and still definitely needed, but proactive accessibility is literally, those practices are baked in from the beginning and you're designing with accessibility from - in mind from the very start. If for some reason that hasn't actually occurred, some of the things that you might see is difficulty navigating the course with a keyboard, possibly no alt text for images, lack of headings, color contrast concerns. And then also, I'm reminded of a story, more of a lived experience from a previous employer, we had a situation where many, many professors were scanning pages of textbooks without using an optical character recognition scanner, which actually turns that into text instead of just an image. And so you can see just multiple images placed into a course. They're actually, you know, text pages and they don't have the correct alt text. And so people using screen reading technology wouldn't be able to hear it. So those are just a sample of the issues that can come up. And what's a barrier for one person may not be a barrier for another person, even within the same disability diagnosis as well. So, because diagnosis is - or disability is so dynamic. So, that's one thing I always consider.

Jun: 9:44

For me in the context of Moodle LMS, so we usually get reports about accessibility bugs in Moodle. Um, for example, some people with disabilities might not be able to use some JavaScript widgets by keyboard. So those are critical that, uh, so they end up needing assistance to perform the task in Moodle. So for me, that's a critical barrier that we have to fix as soon as possible. So yeah, those are kind of the challenges that we face for Moodle users.

Shalimar: 10:20

Thinking back to what you said just a second ago, Carli, we know that accessibility needs are not one-size-fits-all. And honestly, that's part of what makes this work so fascinating. So how do we genuinely center the learner when what one person needs might look completely different from what the next person needs?

Carli: 10:40

Fortunately, across the globe, there has been more of a consensus to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG is what you will often hear it pronounced as. And those guidelines are meant to cover many, many, many scenarios in which somebody may actually have an accessibility need. And so as much as humanly possible, course designers from my perspective in this call, because I work mostly with people who are designing content Moodle and using the front-end of Moodle, can be conscientious of specific things that they can do within their design that are going to preemptively, hopefully, prevent what may be a barrier for one person and not a barrier for another person. And that's actually why within, actually, the Moodle Services team we just started working on what we are calling a course review in accessibility. It's an accessibility-focused course review, and it's all about what is the course designer able to control within that regard. So the specific WCAG guidelines within that and then we touch on what are relevant Universal Design for Learning or UDL standards that go even further. One thing I like to remember is that the biggest thing with accessibility, in my personal opinion and what I’ve heard from other people who do use more assistive technology in their day-to-day is that people being available to actually share the accessibility concern to and actually listening to that with empathy, working on a plan to resolve that, that goes very far because, you know, there's a willingness there to learn, there's a willingness there to fix it. And so a lot of times, if a barrier is presented, knowing that there is somebody out there that can help you do something about it is also a relief that many people will experience.

Shalimar: 12:41

And Jun, what would you say is how we tackle the, you know, disparate needs? Um, in the accessibility world.

Jun: 12:50

I recently learned about this while I was reviewing for an accessibility, uh, certificate certification exam. So it's, uh, as Carli said earlier, it’s about embracing the universal design for learning principles. So, which means we move away from one-size-fits-all form of instruction and instead offer - offering multiple options for how learners engage with, perceive, and demonstrate their knowledge. So the key is designing for the versatile backgrounds, skillsets, needs, and interests that learners bring rather than providing accommodations later in their learning needs. So in practice, this aligns with the inclusive design of technology, where we create experiences that enable a diversity of methods to access the same content rather than one rigid path, we should provide flexible alternatives, like, just like buildings in construction, we have, some - sometimes buildings have stairs and they offer elevators as well. So in the context of digital learning such as Moodle, this might mean offering content in multiple formats like texts, audio, and video with captions or transcripts. So ensuring all interactions work with different assistive technologies, basically. That's kind of similar as well to developing accessible features in Moodle where we consider the needs of people with disabilities first, we develop solutions that end up benefitting everyone.

Shalimar: 14:31

I love that. As somebody who's been a Dungeon Master of D&D games for a very long time, I love flexibility. Let your players find their way. They are way more motivated when they can explore and click as needed, rather than being railroaded towards a particular destination. Right? Sorry to bring my nerdery into this conversation. This is about accessibility not Dungeons and Dragons, Shalimar. Okay, actually, that is a perfect segue though, because I want to get into the toolkit, right? So when it comes to reducing the cognitive load, which Moodle tools or plugins do you find yourself reaching for most often?

Jun: 15:09

In general, I think that each major release of Moodle LMS is a step towards better accessibility and usability in particular. We have - when we released Moodle f4.0, it was a game changer. So it made the Moodle LMS look cleaner and more intuitive for both educators and learners. So it basically, it was basically aimed at reducing the cognitive load for all of the users. Since then, we kept iterating and improving. In the subsequent major releases. And then in 4.5, we introduced the AI features including AI explain and AI summarise. I think, uh, that if configured and enabled on the site, they can be powerful tools to reduce the cognitive load. So personally, I find the summarise feature really useful as it highlights the key points for me without having to read through entire walls of text. Um, especially if I am short on time. And I believe it will just keep getting better especially with the upcoming release of Moodle 5.2.

Carli: 16:20

Yeah. And you know, I completely agree with what you said, Jun, about, about especially as we got into the 4 series, about being more clean and intuitive. Um, I'm hearing that a lot from people who Moodled in the 3 series and coming into 4 when I'm working with clients and they're like, “Oh, look, everybody understands what the journey is.” So I can definitely tell that when we got into 4, cognitive load was really considered. Now I'm one of those people that's a little bit of use Moodle with what comes in already naturally. Not necessarily. I mean, there are plugins that I’m a fan of which I will mention one. But one particular thing that I talk about a lot with clients and it's a very simple win. We used to have, um, a course format called topics, it's called custom sections now. And custom sections can be configured so that you're basically showing a section at a time, but also in an accordion type of format. And it helps with what we often “scroll of death.” That can happen when you first come into a course and you go, “Oh my goodness, there's twenty weeks here and each thing has about ten items in there. I don't even possibly know how I'm going to conquer all of this.” So even a section at a time view can really reduce that cognitive load and highlight the actual section that you're wanting to work on right now with the learner. Speaking of plugins though, I have done a webinar about this if you do ever want to check it out, but one of my favorite plugins that we do have access to within our certified integration program is Readspeaker. So Readspeaker is a text-to-speech tool, and essentially it can read what is right there on the Moodle page. It has other things too, such highlighting, being able to focus on specific areas of the text. You know, contrast options, things of that nature. And the reason that I love the text-to-speech tool is because it's actually a universal design for learning win as well. Universal design is all about, like Jun said, you're empowering the person to have choice. They don't even necessarily have to disclose to anybody that they possibly have even a learning preference of listening to audio versus reading it on the page. And so I am a big fan of Readspeaker. In fact, at a previous employer that I worked at, we actually had Readspeaker on our Moodle site. And we were always fascinated by looking at how many people actually - you couldn't see necessarily who clicked and used it, but we could see some information about how many people were using it, which was automatically that return on investment that we needed to be like, “Yes, this was the right choice for us to go ahead and purchase this integration,” and so I'm a big fan of Readspeaker.

Shalimar: 19:01

Me too. Because here's the deal. Here's the tea. I'm an avid reader. I had an undergrad in English Lit. And if I can't get an audiobook format of the book, like, it’s dead to me. I literally don't. How do I fit that into my life at this stage in my life, right? So I especially love seeing when it all comes together, right? Like if you get the digital copy of the book and then the audiobook in one purchase. Oh, that's the sweet spot for me. So love that. Um, Readspeaker is a really great tool. Speaking of tools, though, I wanna talk about Brickfield! 

Carli: Yes!

Shalimar: 

Specifically the accessibility starter toolkit. Can you maybe walk us through what it actually does and why it matters for teachers and learners in practice?

Carli: 19:43

Yeah. And I'm happy to take this one because we talk about this actually almost every implementation we have with the client, in fact. So I love that Brickfield Starter Toolkit is built into Moodle, um, at this point, and essentially what it is, is it allows the person who is doing the designing, whether that's the teacher or the site administrator to run a report on the course, and it will flag things that are inside the HTML that can use some accessibility adjustment. So, um, quite literally the site admin when their setting up the site goes to their site administration menu under plugins, follows the prompts to do a Brickfield registration, you know, agreeing to their terms of use essentially, and from there, the teachers can go ahead and add a little accessibility review block to every course and run that report. They can even see a heat map of which of their particular items passed and which of their content items they need to go back and look at again. So it is one of those methods that I consider to be a proactive accessibility method. Before you're even releasing that course out into the wild you’re already getting a report of “Hey, you should warn people that link is opening in a new tab,” you know, so it doesn't automatically - it doesn’t move their user journey to a new tab or “You should make that link is actually human readable instead of the http:...” You know, that doesn't mean anything to a screenreader. Exactly, robot style. So all of those, uh, the quick wins that Brickfield can add, and then of course, Brickfield ahs even more under their Premium that we might talk about in the future, but, as far as like alternate formats that people can just readily download and things like that. It's a really cool tool and I love that it's built in.

Shalimar: 21:32

Yeah, I love that. Love that. Okay, I'm going to do something really awesome right now and I’m going to channel Dan, right. He can't be with us today, but I'm going to pretend that for a moment that I have a Dan brain. I'm not going to do a British accent because I’m fearful it would sound like Dick Van Dyke In Mary Poppins and nobody needs to hear that. I'm putting on my Dan hat. AI is having a moment everywhere right now and accessibility is no exception. I'm wondering, can AI genuinely help us create accessible content like transcripts, summaries, that kind of thing, without losing the human element that makes learning feel like learning?

Carli: 22:15 

I believe, yes. And I'm actually going to use this exact scenario that we're doing right now as the example. So, for example, we are recording a podcast right now. This podcast is going to be released in multiple different ways as audio, it's going to be released as a video to listen on YouTube, you know, snippets on social media, and you can generate a transcript. And actually, we've been generating transcripts like this for a long time. People sometimes will use YouTube just for that, even if they're not even going to release it on YouTube. So taking that transcript, what I like to see is that people have a human in the flow. And I actually there's a term that they're calling it in the development world right now that, Jun, you may even remember, but basically a human in the mix with the AI situation. Things that are created by AI should be human verified. And that's what we've been saying all along since we've been generating transcripts and captions and things like that, using AI and other tools in the past. Somebody should go in and refine it, somebody should go in and say, “This is Shalimar speaking. This is Carli speaking. This is Jun speaking.” Somebody should be making sure that the names are spelled correctly, that things are capitalised correctly, that context isn't being lost just because it's being run through AI. And the win of that is, it is less of a burden on the person who is actually doing the course design to put something accessible from the get go out there. Just right away, it becomes part of your workflow to simply make sure, all right, I've got an AI version of this but I’m going to be the human in the middle and verify and iterate on it to make sure it is accurate and that context isn't lost. So, absolutely, I think AI has a place in accessibility.

Shalimar: 24:09 

Conceivably some people who are listening to this podcast have never had to come up against accessibility issues for one reason or whatever, right? So I want to introduce a concept, an acronym called POUR: P-O-U-R. Perceivable, operable, understandable, robust. These are the foundational principles of web accessibility. So the question is how do we actually weave them into the course design from the start so that they’re built in and not bolted on at the end?

Carli: I love this question and is exactly why we talk about proactive accessibility versus reactive accessibility in all of our conversations with our clients. So a lot of our clients do run some sort of a like pre-course launch checklist, right? Because there are a lot of settings in Moodle and you want to verify that all of those are working correctly before you just jump right in and put that in front of the student, and you can utilise POUR in the same type of way. So, for example, course designers are able to make decisions about perceivable content by asking themselves things like, “Can this content be perceived with more than one sense?” So, for example, if you are putting text on a page, that's one sense. But if you're also adding in the extra layer of I'm also going to give them an opportunity to listen to this, that's another sense. So you're already making a decision with Perceivable there. For operable, you can be thinking about something as commonplace as Moodle has that wonderful feature where you can add a specific time limit to a quiz. Sometimes when we talk to clients about that and we’ve having conversations with people who Moodle, we’ve asking what’s the reason for the time limit? And are you, um - is it actually serving a purpose or is actually serving as more of a barrier to the people that are taking the taking the quiz? So actually thinking a little more about is the time limit actually necessary, using it only when necessary, as well. But then other methods for Operable, adding headings because people who are using assistive technology can navigate heading by heading and also visually, we scan by headings and then even consistent navigation, keeping things consistent. A very common thing that we recommend as well. For Understandable, course designers making sure that the course content is readable and understandable to a level that is appropriate to their audience as well is a big one. And also by even helping users prevent mistakes before they even happen, by having clear instructions. Moodle’s going to help you with some instructions and tooltips, but they may not be able to anticipate exactly how are you going to use this particular activity type? So your embedded instructions that you put on there are even more impactful. And then for Robust. Of course, if you are somebody that likes to utilise HTML and go straight into the editor and get all fancy with your code, making sure that it's properly formatted so that as versions change, as tech keeps getting better and better, it's using appropriate HTML that's going to be able to interface correctly with those future technologies. So that - those are the things that I would definitely recommend as far as POUR goes from the course designer perspective and not making it bolted on as you said, Shalimar.

Shalimar: 27:41

I think that the immortal words of Riri or Rihanna say it best, “Pour it up, pour it up.”

Carli: 

[Laughs]

Shalimar:

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Okay, Carli, I want to go back to what you were just talking about, though. Like you were talking about the the different senses that can perceive. So I want to talk about like alternate formats, transcripts, captions, readable text alternatives. How high are the stakes, really, when a learner doesn't have access to these?

Carli: 28:10

Okay, I do have a story about this. And Jun, you may have some additional stories about this kind of thing, but so the stakes can actually be quite high. I was fortunate enough to learn from a real-life experience about just how high these stakes can be. I mentioned earlier on in the podcast that there was a situation once that I observed where professors were not utilising the optical character recognition scanner when they were scanning in content to be placed in the LMS. And, that was actually found out as a result of an Office of Civil Rights complaint here in the US. One of our sister campuses received a complaint about that very specific thing. The person who was, um, the learner actually had - they had just experienced a transition into becoming blind and they were asking for alternate formats of the content. And what ended up happening is the said, “Well, we’re going to have to send that textbook out and get it made into braille.” And what ended up happening is that textbook didn't even come back until after the course was over. So it was not a good experience for that particular person, and obviously, their entire trajectory of what they were going to go into for their career was completely dismantled because of that particular situation. Had the team of professors that were designing those courses realized we should be using the optical character recognition scanner, which, I will admit was in the library, and there was only one. Now it's a lot better because with AI, things are getting built into regular scanning that you might have, like within Adobe and there's optical character recognition built in. So it's less of a barrier for the instructors as well. But essentially, you know, is if you have properly tagged documents and you have things that can be converted into an alternate format, it can be as easy as utilising Brickfield Premium within your LMS. And it's literally a click that the student does to transform it into the format that they want or need instead of waiting for that to be hand-delivered from a specific institution that had to convert it into braille. It can be quite high stakes.

Shalimar: 30:34

Yeah, that sounds high stakes. Make or break careers or education pathways, it sounds like. I really want to dig in to the accessibility conversations that we're just not having in education that we absolutely should be like, what's the frontier here? Where do we need to start really looking and having the hard convos?

Carli: 30:56

So this is something that I talk about frequently with people who come to me and say, “I'm worried about this accessibility thing, I'm just hearing about it. We've got lots of content out there, Carli ,how do we even consider going about doing this?” And one thing that I know for sure, at least in the US, is that accessibility is - has not been traditionally talked about in various educational pathways to get to roles like Jun and I are currently in. So for example, doing my instructional technology, you know, college career, accessibility was a blip. It was mentioned in like one college course, it was very minor. Now coming up in getting a credential in a K-12 kind of field, accessibility wasn't actually mentioned but special education was. And a lot of what was mentioned in the special education field was providing one-on-one services for a lot of students, which absolutely is needed. And I remember distinctly having this experience early on in my teaching career, where I had more students that needed to be part of the special ed program. And we were at capacity. And so we were challenged in that regard, and I remember what would happen is that this one particular special education teacher that we had was providing a lot of one-on-one reading support to my students, where they would come and pull them out of my classroom and actually provide them reading support of the textbook. And I remember thinking, and gosh, this is probably like 2012, I just remember thinking, we have audio books now. Like, the technology is out there where this particularly - this very well trained person could be providing higher and more targeted services than reading the text to my student. And I remember thinking, what exactly is missing here? And so when I actually became a pre-service educator myself, I've taught educational technology courses for pre-service educators. I remember looking at the outcomes for the courses and realising accessibility isn't even mentioned here either. And so I brought it in. And so what I definitely see happening right now, and this is one of my concerns that I do have with rapid code development with AI is that accessibility does require people to pause, step back, and look at it from a different perspective before they put it out there into the world. And potentially that is going to get missed and it's going to get missed at a higher pace than it was before. Given that it was already being missed. So fundamentally, I think that accessibility needs to be possibly its own - it needs to be baked into a lot of traditional education pathways, but it also needs to be it’s own specific focus and specialisation within a lot of these fields. I don't know if you agree with me, Jun, about any of that.

Jun: 34:01

Yeah, I totally agree, basically. I think it's also important for everyone. Learning content designers, learning designers to know the value of accessibility because people with disabilities, they are also part of the market. If we are excluding people with disabilities from accessing our courses, we will be introducing barriers to them from achieving their goals of becoming more independent, becoming more productive members of the society. We are also are missing out on opportunities from gaining revenue from their business as well. So it's essential, it's very essential to think about accessibility when designing courses.

Carli: 34:51

And Jun, actually, you mentioned something that piqued my interest here that I just wanted to talk about a little bit. So there's something dubbed the “Click-Away Pound.” Basically the money that gets lost because people leave. And in the disability space, when they did a survey about this in 2019, this number has grown to 17.1 billion pounds of lost revenue because people by and large, are going to click away from a website that they can't actually interact with. 69 percent of users simply just click away rather than tell somebody that they're having a barrier. Obviously, there's a market share here that needs to be considered as well, and ensuring everybody has the opportunity to interact with your content benefits you financially, too.

Shalimar: 35:39

Absolutely. Here at Moodle, we are a society of ardent learners, like lifelong learners, right? That we all share kind of a trait of possessing joyful curiosity and everything that we approach. And I feel like that diversity, you know, diversity, oftentimes we think about like kind of the hot button diversity things out there, right? Like someone's, you know, sexual orientation, gender identity, race. And we so often overlook disability in that conversation. And diverse perspectives necessitate that we make these spaces inclusive for folks with disabilities. So good points. Okay, now we are almost out of time. So I have one final question before we wrap up. There are educators listening to this right now thinking “I want to do better, but I genuinely don’t know where to start.” So A) I want to know what you would say to those educators, and B) I want to know if you know of any resources that you wish everybody who is an educator or course designer already had bookmarked.

Carli: 36:47

Speaking my language, Shalimar, because the one thing that I love most about Moodle is that we are fans of giving information to people and letting it be out there for free. So that is something that I just wanted to mention. So first of all, we already have some accessibility trainings for free on the Moodle Academy. There's perspectives from people who design courses and then there’s perspectives from the developer world, too. So, those free opportunities being out there on the Moodle Academy. And then I would also say, if you’re ready to take it a step further and you really do want to get into the nuts and bolts of how exactly do we design accessible content and I already have a course designed and I want to know what I could adjust to make this better and then come up with a plan of how am I going to eat the elephant one bite at a time If I'm doing reactive accessibility. Like I had mentioned, the Moodle Services team, we do have a course review with an accessibility focus where you'll get to hang out with me and we’ll actually talk about your course and go over it. And it's a safe place to learn and be honest about how sometimes accessibility can feel overwhelming. And you need a guide in your pocket, or a Learning Designer in your pocket, as I call it, to help you through that process. And finally, I do want to just take a moment and also mention a lot of content isn't actually built in Moodle. It's brought into Moodle. So the thing that I just want to also mention is whatever you are building your content on, a particular tool, a Google search for that particularly tool, Microsoft Word, for example, and accessibility, you are going to have a wealth of training opportunities at your fingertips, and many of them well-designed from the actual third-party organisations that you might be utilising. Because accessibility is important to them too, and they have features built right in to allow you to check accessibility as you go. And so does Moodle. I do want to mention that too. That's the other thing I want to mention is not just the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit, but right within your editor, you've got an accessibility checker that you could be clicking as you build as well. That's going to flag your accessibility concerns along your journey, as well.

Jun: 39:04

For me, I believe there's like a similarity between this and accessible Moodle development. So speaking from experience, my advice for teachers starting with accessibility is to start small. Take that first step by understanding accessibility mean and who what benefits from it. And the answer basically is everyone, not just people with disabilities. And then focus on one or two high impact areas first, such as ensuring your course content is properly structured with headings or images have alt text, or maybe even ensuring that videos have captions and transcripts. And finally, I think it's a mindset thing for me to always remember that accessibility is an ongoing journey and not just a one time project. So it doesn't really end, especially for ensuring that Moodle LMS and our Moodle products are accessible as they can be. It's an ongoing journey.

Shalimar: 40:09

Yeah. To get back to something we said at the beginning - it's not a checkbox, it's a practice. It's a practice. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much, both of you for joining us for this episode of the podcast. For listeners out there, we will see you next month with another exciting topic and hopefully a little bit of Dan.

Carli: 40:29

Thank you.

Shalimar: 40:30 

Thank you.

Jun: 40:32

Thanks, Shalimar!