VLE Guru

Synopsis Sharing a new approach for consistent and accessible Blackboard course menu colour schemes specific to faculties, departments, or subject areas.

I recently attended AbilityNet's TechShare Pro 2020 conference. In this post, I'm going to share a top tip I learned from Microsoft.

Watch the "trailer" recorded live at TLC online

In the spirit of Chris Boon's fantastic thread on the old Blackboard community site, I would like to share with you how our Blackboard looks now that we have spent half a year on the responsive theme. The login page You can see this for yourself at https://blackboard.soton.ac.uk  if you would like the login.jsp file to experiment with, let me know. Login page at full size

Image by Nahled at  www.publicdomainpictures.net I often wish that I captured feedback, especially positive feedback, I receive.  It is something that is nice to look back on, especially in difficult times.  So I'm going to try to start recording feedback on this blog platform.  Here is feedback I have received about my earlier post Blackboard accessibility beyond Ally   Where feedback was in a public forum I include a link, if it was sent privately I have anonymised it. From Dr Jin Tan's blog webncircle.wordpress.com Matthew Deeprose’s presentation about Blackboard Accessibility ( 115 pages !). There are many important highlights. The slides 16, 35, 46, 51, 66, 69, 79, 92 and 113 had called my attention particularly due to my support experience. Definitely useful for us to understand the most common accessibility problem – contrast issues. The Contrast Ratio checking table is helpful, I make a note for my team. Also, I installed th...

Recorded live during the Mobile and Collaborate Hybrid meeting at the Twentieth Annual Durham Blackboard Users Conference. In this presentation I explain aspects of The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 and Directive (EU) 2016/2102 on the Accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies. I put the regulations and the standards we should follow into a global context. I then explain aspects of the WCAG standards and their relevance to the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment, providing examples of how I have customised our Blackboard environment both to meet WCAG standards for colour usage, whilst aligning with an institutional brand. Finally I discuss the latest revision to the ATbar plugin for Blackboard. This has been enhanced so that existing Blackboard functionality related to accessibility is normalised within a congruent interface. The remaining minutes cover questions from...

"Scenes from the Life of Saint Vincent Ferrer"​ After Francesco del Cossa (Carrine Palmieri and Rosa Falcone) Recently I have created and launched what I'm calling an Enhanced Accessibility Toolbar for our Blackboard VLE. Background Back in the summer, I integrated the ATbar produced by University of Southampton's Electronics and Computer Science department's Accessibility Group as part of our summer upgrade and visual refresh.  The Show ATbar icon as it appeared in our Blackboard environment. Screenshot of the ATbar showing all available icons.  Icons include those for changing text, a dictionary, text to speech, and colour overlays. The Blackboard VLE includes "skip to content" and "quick links" features which are a little hidden away. Example of a quick links screen for a course.  This shows page landmarks such as menu areas and outline of content based on heading tags. I wanted to style the links to open ...