Village e-Learning Consultancy

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07717 341 622

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info@village-e-learning.co.uk           

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David has recently been honoured by becoming a TechDis Accredited Trainer. This allows us to provide training in the use of TechDis resources and techniques - something TechDis themselves don't always have the capacity to do. The idea is that those institutions who require training from TechDis are presented with a list of private trainers from who to choose and negotiate terms and content with. We are one of those trainers - please drop us a line.

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The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (SENDA: Part 4 of the Disability discrimination Act - DDA) places obligations on all educational establishments:

Education Providers' Responsibilities 
In addition to not treating a disabled person 'less favourably' for a reason relating to their disability (by, for instance, marking a student down in an exam because they are dyslexic), institutions are required to make 'reasonable adjustments' if a disabled person is placed at a 'substantial disadvantage'. They have to be: Anticipatory: they have a duty to make reasonable adjustments to avoid discrimination against disabled people in the future and make any appropriate adjustments in advance.

TechDis provides educational institutions with help and advice.

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John Rousell's SimDis web pages can also be found on the TechDis web site.

John's pages provide an interesting and enlightening overview of how people experience various disabilities. They examples are not meant to be an exact representation, but are designed to help those of us who design leaning materials to understand how our design might help or hinder many users - often those we hadn't thought of as disabled. 

 SimDis

 

TechDis
Access News

National Star
 

 Two FREE colour wheels for web accessibility

 Colour Wheels

back TechDis operates on a UK-wide basis and works together with the Education Departments, Funding Councils, key agencies and appropriate intermediaries, to ensure that Universities, Colleges of Further Education and Specialist Colleges are supported fully, and to ensure that all staff have access to relevant and timely advice and appropriate resources, with regard to technology and disability issues.
http://www.techdis.ac.uk 

Useful help

User Style Sheet Wizard - http://www.techdis.ac.uk/getstylesheetwizard 
The Style Sheet Wizard enables users to create a style sheet which can be used to override the presentation of many HTML-based web pages. They can be extremely powerful in enforcing the way in which the user desires a web page to be presented. You can set options of text font, size and colour, the font colour of hyperlinks etc. The wizard provides a user-friendly way of writing the code for a user style sheet. 

User Preferences Toolbar - http://www.techdis.ac.uk/gettoolbar 
The TechDis User Preferences Toolbar has been designed to provide students and staff with a simple way of imposing their accessibility preferences onto potentially any web page. The toolbar also offers a handy zoom function that magnifies the page. The colour and font changes do not persist from page to page but the toolbar does provide the user with a greater sense of control as they can choose when (and when not) to use their preferred presentation style. 

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool - http://www.techdis.ac.uk/getwebaccesstool  

The TechDis Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool is a self-evaluation tool that has been designed to provide website developers with a simple and pragmatic approach to conducting an internal or self-evaluation of a web page. This tool is suitable for use with institutional websites, personal academic homepages and other information sites.
back

back The National Star College is an independent specialist college working with learners who have physical disabilities and associated learning difficulties 
http://www.natstar.ac.uk/ 

Useful help

Accessibility - http://www.natstar.ac.uk/Accessibility_2.asp     
The National Star Accessibility pages are offered to help users get the most out of the National Star web site - but everyone can gain an insight to facilities offered by Microsoft software which make usability that little bit easier - or personal. Well done National Star.
     
  http://www.engsc.ac.uk/er/dis/pda.asp What about PDAs?  

 

back Colour wheels
Once, long ago, monitors could display only a restricted number of colours without dithering or other colour discrepancies. The traditional solution to this problem was to use a restricted colour palette known as the Netscape 216 colours, browser-safe colours or the web-safe colours. In hexadecimal form, the web-safe colours are composed of three pairs of identical hexadecimal digits selected from 00, 33, 66, 99, cc, and ff; for example, #000000 is black, and #cc0000 is red.
Time passed, as it so frequently does, and new hardware supported thousands or millions of colours. People grew tired of the old 216 colours. They wanted more earth tones, more variety. The web-smart colours are those 4096 colours composed of any three pairs of identical hexadeximal digits (0-9 and a-f), such as #dd1188.
The unsafe colours are the full set of 16,777,216 hexadecimal colours, featuring any colour between #000000 and #ffffff, such as #5a832d.
(from http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/index.php#about)                  [feedback form]

Use colour wheels in conjunction with cascading style sheets (.css)
For more information see http://www.techdis.ac.uk/getstylesheetwizard 


Useful help		  
http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html
  http://www.gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php  
  Many thanks to both authors for offering these sites free for use by others.  

back Various News items
The items posted here will all be made (usually) without comment and are listed for the reader's interest
BBC news item - T.V. for the hearing impaired
 		 http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_6613000/6613097.stm
IPTV for deaf people takes off