Online Portfolios

I’m not yet super informed on electronic portfolios, but I had a few thoughts that I wanted to throw out and hopefully get some feedback. If you’re at all new to portfolios you may be asking yourself, “So how exactly is an online portfolio different from a regular old website?” My impression is that in some ways they are not different at all- but there are (or at least can be) some key differences. A good primer is this article titled The Electronic Portfolio Boom: What’s it All About?

Briefly, my understanding is that a website is generally more flexible and gives the portfolio developer more control over layout (not always a good thing in the hands of an amateur). Online portfolios generally have a set framework for content, occasionally a couple of templates to choose from and some even allow students to correlate work they’ve done with a set of learning standards.

One way of setting up an online portfolio that has been discussed is to use an open source blog or other CMS piece of software. Here is an example of a ePortfolio about portfolios done using WordPress, a great article from Stopdesign and some interesting thoughts from the ERADC, ePortfolios and weblogs: one vision for ePortfolio development.

As far as using a specific portfolio software, I’d love to hear what options people know of. One to check out is the Open Source Portfolio Initiative a well developed effort of a lot of universities that seems to be fairly full featured.

All of those resources noted, I think there are big questions to consider about sustainability and effectiveness of portfolios for any group before too much time is invested in developing any kind of comprehensive long-term system.

Lets get it on

Ok, if we do this we have to be civilized about it. No politics, no pushing your guy, don�t even say who you are for. Now, I want people to do some usability testing on http://www.georgewbush.com and www.johnkerry.com, then come back here and post your thoughts and results. As the moderator, I�m reserving the right to pull posts that are not about usability or accessibility. Have fun.

Monkey see, monkey….

Does anybody know anything about the accessibility of online survey products like Surveymonkey.com and Zoomerang.com? I’ve looked at a sample survey on Surveymonkey and could not even tell if it was a true HTML form, let alone if it was accessible. For giggles, I sent it to a visually impaired friend and asked her what she thougt of it. To my surpise she liked it alot. So dispite not being standards based, it still seems accessible. Would you use it for a small audience that may include some people with disabilities?

New Beginings

Hi friends, welcome back to Curb Cut. I’d like to thank Christopher for all the wonderful work he has done on this site and wish him the best of luck as he moves onward and upward. That said, he still has his login to the site, and we hope he will post as often as he can.

Those of you with a great attention to detail will notice the site has changed ever so slightly. As I will now, hopefully, be the main content provider, the site’s interest will shift more toward universal design for the web, but will still include distance learning. Check this space on Tuesdays and Thursdays (for now) for links and discussion on the above topics as well as a opportunities to take part in a few projects I would like to see done by our community for our community. Thanks again. -jc

Future Curb Cut Posts

I’m still around and thought I would do a dump of all the links I had in my bookmarks folder that were intended for future publication on curbcut. Here they are are semi-organized, unfiltered and uncommented upon, straight from my bookmarks.html file. There are some gems in here, but you may have to dig to find them. On the other hand, if you’re thinking of starting your own blog- some of these may be a good place to start…

Conferences

• 2003 Conference Proceedings
• 20th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning
• Best Practices in e-Learning Conference
• TXDLA 2004 Conference

GoogleStuff

• dmiessler.com – study – google

future

• am design
• Weblogger.ch: Cat�gorie Accessibilit�
• Accessible Rich Media: a Reframing the Future project
• SmackTheMouse : Universal web design, Best Practice, Usability, Accessibility
• Web Accessibility

ConferenceTools

• Groupware Tools

articles

• GUUUI – Accessibility humanized
• http://www.tss.uoguelph.ca/uid/LDelearn.pdf
• Using Distance Education Technologies to Overcome Physical Disabilities
• User-Friendly Materials and Alternate Formats
• ITD Journal
• Easi Equal Access to Software and Information
• Accessibility & learning technology
• e-JIST – Vol 2 No 1 Article 1
• Adaptive Technology Resource Centre – Library
• Educational Technology Review Issue 2

Other Sites

• Network For Inclusive Distance Education
• SNOW – Courseware Accessibility
• Accessible Web-based Distance Education: Principles and Best Practices
• IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications
• Welcome to AccessIT
• Accessible Distance Education Resources on the Web
• Distance Education Access Guidelines
• Providing Access to Students with Disabilities in Online Distance-PPT
• Paving the Way
• Office Web Publishing Accessibility Tool : Home
• IRRODL: XXI. 100 Collaborative Products and their Uses
• The LearningOnline Network with CAPA

The Future of Curb Cut… (and anyone looking for a job?)

You’ve likely noticed there hasn’t been much happening around here lately, here’s why. I recently accepted a position working in the area of spirituality and disability- instead of focusing on accessible distance education, I’m turning my focus to accessible religion. If any of your are interested in the topic, let me know, but be aware that I may tell you more than you really want to know =)

The good news is, Curb Cut will live on through other staff at the Institute for Community Inclusion including (hopefully) my future replacement. Along those lines, if you any of you are interested in working for an incredible organization that really places accessibility at the top of their priority list, let us know– it’s a great place to work, I’ll post the official job description when it is ready.

I suppose a long and lengthy goodbye would be inappropriate since most of you likely don’t really care who writes to the blog as long as there is something written, but thanks for stopping by, it has been a pleasure.

*You’ve also likely noticed that comments have been turned off for the time being, we’ll let you know if that changes in the future. I’ll leave them on this post unless/until comment spam becomes to big of a problem.

WebCT Accessibility Learning Module

A learning module titled WebCT, Accessibility, Usability and the Disabled Student from Evergreen Valley College. Comprehensive overview of barriers, solutions and alternatives available to ensure your content is accessible. Great resource. (via Teaching and Developing Online)

PDF vs. HTML (take two)

There were a couple of good comments on my post regarding the differences in accessibility PDF and HTML and I wanted to follow up with some more thoughts on the issue. In the earlier post I referenced Nielsen’s anti-PDF article and a rebuttal to that article from McDaniels. While I may be ill-qualified and it may be somewhat ridiculous to rebut a rebuttal, I’d like to take issue with some of the points made in McDaniels rebuttal.

Here are some of the points made by Mr. McDaniels that I consider to be misleading along with my own thoughts:

If a web author has supporting materials like .DOC and .PPT files, it is easy to covert these to PDF rather than attempt to re-author the content for HTML.

Is it not just as easy to convert a Word or PowerPoint file to HTML as to PDF? Why would you need to re-author the content for HTML but not for PDF?

The content and flow of a PDF is the responsibility of the author not the PDF file format. I can employ the same web writing guidelines you recommend into a PDF file.

This is true, but the nature and functionality of Acrobat lends itself much more to designing documents to look like printed text, not a browser. While you can mimic the style of web content using PDF documents, the majority of users don’t- it takes too much time and is an unfamiliar use of the PDF format. Why try to mimic a format when you can use the real thing?

PDF’s can be displayed Full-screen in a browser to hide the Adobe reader interface, and they can be embedded in HTML as well.

First of all, my guess is that a majority of users are unaware of how to eliminate the Adobe interace that shows up in the browser- and if it is hidden many users are confused with how to interact with the document. How do you navigate through the document? How do you print? How do you zoom? If you are going to use PDF’s, it makes sense to keep the interface there- but doing so adds a entire second set of user controls for the user to worry about. If you want to print a PDF doc from a browser, do you use the browser print button or the Adobe Print button? Furthermore, when you click on a PDF link on some platforms/browsers it doesn’t display in the browser unless you have a specific 3rd party plugin. Instead it downloads it to your computer and you have to then go find it to be able to open it.

PDF file size is determined by the author. Images can be optimized automatically to produce fast loading files, and documents can be optimized for fast web viewing to allow page-at-a-time downloading of long documents. I’ve seen plenty of HTML pages that reference 1MB images.

Here the comparison is being made between good PDF design to bad HTML design. True, images can be optimized for both formats, but my experience is that when the same content is converted into both PDF and HTML format, the HTML is generally going to be a smaller file size. See
this case study.

I can build clickable buttons and links into a PDF. I can even mimic a website’s navigation bar at the top of a PDF to make things easier for the viewer.

Again, yes you can mimic website navigation using PDF- but why not just use the format that you are trying to mimic?

Lest I be misunderstood, I wholeheartedly that there are unique situations where PDF is a more appropriate forma, but I feel that those situations are rare. I have no way to test or validate this, but my assumption is that is someone is faced with the choice on a website of viewing the same content in either HTML or PDF format, most people are going to click on the links to view the HTML. Given a choice, most people prefer to view content in an HTML format. Anyone using any type of technology can access HTML- no plugins or 3rd party software required.

All that said, don’t take my word for it- lots of peoples have different opinions on the matter with some accompanying issues:
Which format should you choose?
How Do You Like Your Documentation
Search Engines and PDF

ILRU Webcast: Making the GRADE: Improving Access to E-Learning

This is late notice, but it looks to be an informative webcast tomorrow on Improving Access to E-Learning from a couple of fellows who appear to know what they’re talking about. The presentation is happening tomorrow, June 9 at 3pm Eastern time and you can submit questions beforehand. It looks like they will be talking about their excellent curriculum that that have made available for free at www.accesselearning.net.

Accessible Search Engine

Without a doubt, my favorite online learning tool is Google where I can generally find answers to just about whatever real world problem I happen to be facing at any given time. I’m not sure how accessible Google and other major search engines are (or aren’t) but I just came across YouSearched which bills itself as The Accessible Search. I would doubt that the quality of search results is as high as the big players, but some of the features may be nice for certain situations.