VI apps

Here are some more fun apps for students who are visually impaired 

Name	Description
MusicDrawFree	MusicDrawFree is a great tool for practicing music and cause and effect.
Draw Music Monadpad	Draw pictures and create sounds on this unique musical instrument.
Easy Calc Talking free	A talking calculator, with large buttons
Talking Clock	Speaks out the time to you depending on the mode you set
Anny eReader	Just download your book from your computer or internet and enjoy.

17 days of Christmas - let it snow!

A few days ago we got a bit of snow, and so I wanted to share some super snowy resources with you. Cuddle up with a cup of hot chocolate and play some of these fun games on your computer!  

Stickers for all seasons Choose the winter season and have fun placing stickers on the winter scene

Snowflake workshop - Create a cute snowflake in the snowflake workshop!

Make a flake - Make your own snowflake with the scissors and paper.

Build your own snowman Dress up the snowman

Winter resources - many great winter resources

Winter madlibs - printable witner mad libs 

100 snowballs - 100 snowballs count the snowballs to 100

Make a snowman - Create a fun snowman by adding in buttons, scarves, hats, mittens, and a face!

Alfy’s Snow Day.Here’s a “talking book” about Alfy during the winter months.  

Snowman Drag the pieces to build a snowman in this fun kindergarten and preschool game.  

Text snowflake creator - Just like wordle, puts your text, words, and phrases into a snowflake design!

For more Christmas fun please visit here

 

19 days of Chrismas - ecards

This is the time of year where we send out oodles of cards and notes full of warm thoughts to our family and friends. This year, why not have your class send an e-card to a loved one or friend. This is a great way to spread holiday cheer! These e cards are also very cute, interactive, and motivating for students to create! I highly recommend the elf yourself!

Here are some cheery Christmas e-card creation sites:

• Elf yourself- Create an elf inspired e card that you star in!  
• Gingerbread Cookie Card - send a gingerbread man that you created as a Christmas e card.  
• Northpole mailbox - send an animated postcard from the North Pole  
• Holiday sweater - create your own holiday sweater! Take tacky to a new level!  
• Christmas Activity Center - Play Christmas games, get gift ideas, and send e-cards to friends and family at the Christmas Activity Center! Plus, laugh it up with Christmas riddles and solve holiday Sudoku puzzles!
• jib jab- who can forget jib jab! Make a Christmas e-card starring yourself! **some adult content** Hallmark - Hallmark has some free e cards to send a family member of friend.  
• Blue Mountain - A great place to find cute Christmas e-cards 
• Ecardia - Found this one on my diigo finds! Great ecard maker.
• Christmas card maker - Just as it says - very interactive card maker.

For more Christmas fun and games please visit: Wednesdays with Sam

20 days of Christmas - switch games

For this post I am going to show you some great Christmas themed switch games to play on the computer. 

• Switchabilities - Here is a list of eight great Christmas games to play on the computer.  
• Christmas presents - Guess what is hiding inside the present, click on it to find out!
• Card Maker Card types - presently include Birthdays, Easter, Halloween and Christmas.
• Christmas singing sheep - click on the sheep to hear them sing  
• Press to Reveal! - Christmas - Press the switch the reveal the Christmas character

Weally Wonderful Websites V7.0 | The Spectronics Blog

Weally Wonderful Websites V7.0 | The Spectronics Blog

Check out this blog post to learn about a document you can download with many great sites and tools for students with special needs!

All abilities playground

All abilities playground

This is a great space for students who use the computer via many different modalities can learn. There are two playgrounds with the same games, one playground is the mouse and keyboard playground the other is the scanning playground. Each playground offers several different virtual online games to play on the interactive whiteboard or computer. Thank you to Patrick Black who shared this site on Diigo!

ATIA 2011 from a distance

I am unable to attend too many conferences this year, so instead of attending the conferences in person I attend them via Twitter and any online sessions. I was  unable to attend ATIA this year, but here are some resources that I obtains through the Twitter hashtag #ATIA11. If you have any more notes or session notes you would like to share please add a comment at the bottom of the page.

• App Smackdown - Apps for AT and Augcomm
• Read the words - Text to speech online
• Tap it - an accessible smart board for individuals with limited mobility. I have seen this in action and it is truly amazing!
• Tactile graphics - production and design of tactile graphics
• Dot pub - convert a webpage to an ebook
• ATIA notes - Google doc folder of notes from ATIA
• ATIA notes 2 - Google doc folder of notes from ATIA
• SET BC - special education technology in British Columbia resoruces
• Atomic Learning - Education training for K12, higher ed, global education, and assistive tech!

Why Close Caption?

Why close caption?

•  First of all it is ADA compliant
• Able to associate transcripts with a webinar or video conference
• Can use 3play media - open source resource - offers FREE trial
• transcribes text
• captioning services
• ensures accessibility to materials
•  Not only is this meeting accessibilyt needs, but also addresses needs for english as a second language learners

Session 2 at Accessibility Summit - Web Accessibility

The second session offered by Accessibility Summit 2011, was about website accessibility. The presenter was Jared W. Smith (@Jared_w_smith). Check out his site at webaim.org.

Here are the notes about this session:

- Accessibility is process that is continuous - always can do more
- If your site is accessible, your not being innovative or updating your site enough!
- Provide a good experience for your users and readers of your site
- Accessible site certification - http://webaim.org/services/certification/
- WCAG 2.0 - principles, guidelines (ex. keyboard accessible), success criteria
- compliance does not equal accessibility - use as a set of guidelines
- Your site can be fully compliant with the guideline, but can still be functionally inaccessible
- WCAG 2.0 - great guidelines for web accessibility - http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag

Rule 1 - Equivalent alternative text
- can’t measure equivalence with a formula or tool
- does not mean exactly equal, does mean about the same or similar text

Rule 2 - Bypass Blocks
- bypass blocks of content that are replicated on several or multiple web pages
- test this out by: navigate with keyboard or listen to it in a screen reader
- "Skip to main content" links are useful and helpful, because browsers have yet to provide better keyboard navigation for users or readers who are sighted
- use common sense when using a text and background (use sensible contrast with colors)


Solutions to help with web accessibility:
- Learn about AT
- Learn about individuals with disabilities who utilize the web
- Use but do not rely on automated tools - WAVE - http://wave.webaim.org/
- Focus on the user’s experience
- Plan for progress
- become an accessibility champion - advocate for accessibility
- use common sense and guidelines
- prioritize the failures or the needs of improvement - what has the most impact on the user?
- Web pages need to be readable and functional when text is re-sized to 200%
- Images of text - text is used to give information rather than images.
- Test your site with a screen reader to avoid “screen reader freak out”

Accessibility Summit 2011
Session 1 - Color for the Colorblind

I attended the Accessibility Summit 2011 at Penn State University. The first session was presented by David Berman (follow on Twitter @DavidBerman) He presented about colorblindness and designing interfaces and websites. To learn more about the Accessibility summit go here, or follow it on twitter #a11ysummit. Here are my notes on the presentation by David Berman:

- Colorblind = life or death (traffic lights example - new test lights - two rectangular stop lights and one round green light )
- Most colorblind can see colors. But what they see isn't the same as what the non-colorblind see (depends on type).
- 10% of men have a color deficiency.

- Accessibility is about individuals with disabilities and also about the digital divide
- digital haves and have not’s
- many people have their first Internet experience on a cell phone!

- 4 reasons why accessibility is important:
- large percentage of users
- large labor pool
- it's the right thing to do
- legality compliance

- History of AT - designing for extremes (eg. hearing aids) helps everyone (ie end up in the development of the radio)

- Innovation for disability solution for the census and revolutionizes all of us!

- Disabilities can be divided into 4 groups
- permanent - blind birth
- temporary - broken arm
- acquired - age, tbi
- societal - left handed

- Impaired senses:
- visual
- mobility
- hearing
- language/communication - learning language, access to language, literacy,
- cognitive
- social

- There is a solution for these impaired senses - AT!

- Read regular - type face created for individuals who have dyslexia

- Rotating a d to a b, changes the whole meaning of the letter d. What an incentive to design better typefaces

- email was created as AT for a hearing deficit - a tech to type messages back and forth - how cool

- Nouse - scans head movements and eye blinks! - in 2 years a part of the pad and tablet technologies!

- Ideal accessibility web site : everyone, anytime, any connection speed

- WCAG 2.0 conformity levels ranging from A to AAA- most sites are AA compliant. Also section 508 compliant - in order to ensure that your site is accessible for individuals who have disabilities.

- We need to plan for accessibility

- When creating a site look out for:
Don’t rely on one sense to relay information to readers
Avoid poor contrast effects and colors (background and text)
snook.ca - can remedy contrast effects and colors
first steps to accessible PDF’s
provide text to speech (voki, avatars) to read text aloud
provide text to be adapted - larger/smaller text modifications
color background and text modifications available
larger landing zone for website selections (click here)
Use larger landing/click zones for clickable links
davidberman.com/dogoodgooglebook - first 40 pages free!