Hi everyone!

We’ve got a great group of campers signed up for THATCamp Accessibility. Some session proposals are starting to come in – if you’ve got an idea of what it is you’d like to talk about or explore, please post it, no matter how nebulous! I’m hoping that there will be a session on getting started with Accessibility and Digital Technology. As one of your hosts, it has been an enormous learning curve for me personally to consider all of the various issues that come with trying to make an event fully accessible. Already, I realize just how un-accessible much of my teaching has been. Do I make pdfs that are readable by screen readers? Why don’t I record my lectures? The READ Institute has been developing a crowd-sourcing approach to screen-captioning that I hope to see demonstrated on Saturday the 27th too.

Tomorrow evening, we’ll close the registration for physical attendance of THATCamp – we have badges to make, rooms to set up, food to order, webcams and microphones to test. If you can’t make it to Carleton on the day, don’t despair! On Monday, I’ll be posting instructions on how to use our fully accessible conferencing system (provided for us courtesy of Citizens with Disabilities Ontario, to whom we are enormously grateful).  On Saturday, if you follow the instructions, you can beam into one of our four ‘rooms’ to follow along, participate, and contribute to THATCamp!

What’s the difference between an ‘accessible’ conference system and say, a combination of a Google+ hangout or live blogging/tweeting etc (as THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy is trying out)? Our system is designed to work with screen readers etc – it allows for real-time sharing of documents within that kind of environment. It will also keep an audio recording of each session (from which we hope to extract a transcript using our crowdsourcing platform, eventually). On Saturday morning, we’ll try to develop our schedule with contributions both from people on the floor and in the aether. Will it work? Well, whether it does or not, we’ll certainly learn an awful lot about how to design and run these sorts of blended events, opening up participation well beyond our walls.

Won’t you join us?

Shawn

Tom Pokinko has designed a fully accessible pdf poster promoting THATCamp Accessibility. Most pdfs that you might come across are filled with hidden elements that can trip up a screen reader device. Tom took our promotional materials, and redesigned everything so that they can be read by a screen reader without let or hinderance! Thank you Tom!

THAT Camp Accessibility Poster Accessible PDF

THAT Camp Poster for Print

I was interviewed by the Live 88.5 Startup radio morning show last week; it aired yesterday morning. Here’s the clip. Enjoy!

October 2 Unconference

Citizens With Disabilities Ontario Logo

We are pleased to announce that we are partnering with Citizens With Disabilites – Ontario to provide the accessible online conferencing system on October 27th. CWDO “actively promotes the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of persons with disabilities through community development, social action, and member support and referral.  [Their] primary activity is public education and awareness about the social and physical barriers that prevent the full inclusion of persons with disabilities in Ontario.”

We are enormously grateful to CWDO for making their system available. The ‘IDEAL Conference‘ system “provides the most accessible conferencing and collaboration experience available, anywhere in the world.  No new hardware is needed. All you need is a PC with a soundcard, headset, and a high-speed connection to the Internet; and you can hold fully accessible, 508 compliant online conferences from your desktop, from anywhere in the world, right now!”

Details about how to access the system will be provided to those who have indicated in their registration that they wish to attend online, closer to the date.

In the interests of making this event as accessible as possible, and to give everyone who wants to the chance to participate, we’re going to keep the registration open until one week before the day. The registration period is open until the 20th, and we hope to have you with us on the 27th!