• A History of Distance Learning and Moodle at the Carroll Center
• General Techniques for Improving the Accessibility and Usability of a Web Application
• Applying those techniques to Moodle
• Live Demo of Moodle
• Moodle 2.0
• Questions and Answers

• Simplify your interface
• Reduce verbosity
• Avoid Feature/Module bloat or overly complicated Modules
• Offer Theme options (User Customizations)
• Enforce accessible/semantic content creation
• Offer options for diverse learners
• Promote interaction and communication

Where to start

• Configuration
• Theme
• Modules
• Staffing and Support
• Content Creation

• Allow students to edit posted content
• Enable Forums and use them liberally
• Disable the Rich-text/WYSIWYG Editor
• Uncheck "Use Default Section name" for more meaningful links in navigation block
• Disable AJAX and Javascript (Currently not very effective)
• Limit navigation block to display only categories and courses.

• Enable Comments (Block Level)
• Enable Site Messaging
• Enable RSS Feeds
• Disable the Dock
• Enable 3rd party file repositories
• Limit Quiz Question types (many of the 11 currently offered pose accessibility issues)

Moodle 1.9

• Keep things as simple and clean as possible.
• Do not use tables for page layout.
• Include your skip links in the Header

Moodle 2.0

There are many more opportunities to improve the accessibility of your site at the theme level in Moodle 2.0. We will go over those later in the presentation.

Moodle 1.9

• Over 120 Modules designed to improve accessibility
• Many are of poor quality and specific to certain releases

Moodle 2.0

• Much Fewer Modules currently available
• Future Modules should be more stable and work with future releases

• Make instructors regularly available
• Encourage instructors to participate in forum discussions
• Encourage instructors to engage students in ways that augment the learning process

• Training
• Videos
• Quizes
• Content Creation (Text areas)
  Finding Alternatives to Rich-text/WYSIWYG Editor

Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

• Cleaner and Leaner
  • Improved navigation and menus
    • (although not necessarily more accessible navigation)
  • More intuitive resource and activity labels
  • Improved content management
    • (although not necessarily more accessible content management)
  • Comments (on just about anything)

• More Powerful Theme Engine
• Filters
• Renderers

• Clearer and more consistent CSS classes and IDs throughout all pages in Moodle
• More control over page layout with the introduction of layout files (templates) describing overall layout HTML for many different types of pages in Moodle. (previously limited to header, footer and CSS)
• Ability to build Customizable options into themes

• Auto-Linking (Activites, Glossary Terms)
• Multimedia
• HTML Tidy
• Algebra Notation
• TeX Notation
• Word Censorship

Example of Multimedia Filter: [youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=WnhPRVvkU34[youtube]

• Renderers produce the smaller "parts" of an HTML page. Not all "parts" currently use renderers, but Moodle has plans to them for all components.
• At current count there are 26 components that can be modified with Renderers (Idnetified by doing a recursive search for 'renderer.php')

• onchange() in dropdown menus
  • Currently only an issue in Internet Explorer
• Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Javascript Library
• Collapsible Menus

• Improve the use of the Screenreader and the AJAX/Javascript User settings
• Universal search and search within course
• More Renderers and Filters
• A more formal committement to accessibility in Moodle core

• Moodle.org - http://docs.moodle.org
• "Universal Instructional Design Principals for Moodle" Tanya Elias - Athabasca University, Canada
• "Moodle 2.0 - First Look" Mary Cooch - Packt Publishing
• More on Renderers
• More on Filters 2.0

This presentation is available for download or online viewing in a number of formats at either of the links below:

• http://j.mp/csun2011
• http://media.carrolltech.org/csun2011/

Questions can be emailed to webmaster@carroll.org

Twitter

• Mark Sadecki @cptvitamin
• Brian Charlson @briancharlson