3. The wider context: Understanding and engaging with legislation, policies and standards
Details
Requirement: Understanding and engaging with legislation, policies and standards
Statements here should show how relevant legislation, policies, strategies, technical standards, professional/research codes of practice and so on have influenced your work. You are not expected to have expert knowledge of all of these areas, but are expected to be aware of how they relate to your current practice. Relevant legislation is likely to include special educational needs/accessibility, discrimination, copyright and intellectual property, data protection and privacy issues.
The kinds of evidence that would support this would include minutes of meetings with legal advisers, documentation showing how legal issues have influenced work (such as reports or data protection forms), justifications for modifications to a course to reflect new policies or a record of how technical standards have been taken into account during system development.
Description and reflection
I recently undertook a project to improve the accessibility of many of the resources that my team develop and maintain to bring them more in line with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). In previous projects we had used Flash for most of our interactive activities, with plain text-based 'accessible' versions for users with restricted visibility or dexterity. However, we felt that, particularly with issues surrounding Flash and mobile devices, this would be a good opportunity to merge the standard and accessible versions, to improve the user experience and to meet accessibility guidelines.
The project involved developing a new set of templates which mimic the core features of the Flash activities such as matching and drag-and-drop exercises using HTML5 and JavaScript. After developing the templates, the first resources I converted were those in Prepare for Success, which is a resource we have produced for international students.
Prepare for Success is a UKCISA-funded website, currently in the seventh phase since its inception in 2008. The site aims to prepare international students from all over the world for studying at a UK university or FE institution. I have been the technical lead on the project since the beginning, taking responsibility for the website (except for a brief outsourcing period in 2009) and the structure throughout.
Because of the broad user base of the website (and our other resources), I needed to ensure compatibility with a wide range of browsers, from Internet Explorer 6 (and browsers of a similar age) upwards, as well as touchscreen devices. This proved to be a major challenge, and I had to learn about website touch events and how to apply them to web pages. The activities also required keyboard functionality (for those who could not use a mouse or touchscreen). Although I was able to achieve this, it was a complex task and I had to make adaptations for older browsers as well. For example, all mainstream browsers except Internet Explorer 8 and below support HTML5, so for those browsers users have to see Flash videos and audios (if they have Flash installed) or otherwise they get a Windows Media Player or QuickTime Player. I felt this was the best compromise.
As part of this testing process, we enlisted the help of a PhD student who himself is partially sighted, and is researching accessibility. His feedback was invaluable and alerted me to a number of minor changes which were needed to provide a better user experience.
I was very pleased with the improvements to the site, both from the perspective of increased usability and the reduction in maintenance that the changes have indirectly brought. As with any website, there is still scope for improvement, and the next phase will include the addition of a blog. This will present new challenges as I learn more detail about how to set up and customise Wordpress on a server.
Evidence
The converted resources are available at https://www.prepareforsuccess.org.uk and have undergone extensive usability testing. The new version received positive feedback in accessibility testing, and I made some further modifications to some of the code in response to some of the feedback.