Accessibility Research Centre

ARC has been awarded a £50.000 grant to help transform the lives of disabled learners and their teachers. The Widget Design Authoring Toolkit (WIDGaT) project follows on from the successful JISC WIDE project and aims to explore, design, develop and evaluate an authoring toolkit that will support the design, development and sharing of widgets by those directly involved in the teaching and support o of disabled students. The project builds on our established Community of Practice in order to specify, design, develop and trial the WIDGaT authoring toolkit that will enable teachers or students to develop and share bespoke widgets.

Funding was secured through the JISC Learning and Teaching Innovation scheme and the one year WIDGaT project will run from 1 June 2011.

For more information on the project:http://arc.tees.ac.uk/widgat

The ARC team, supported by the JISC Distributed Learning Environments Programme, are continuing to develop the accessibilty widgets designed by the Widgets for Inclusive Distributed Environments project. Check out the widgets on the wiki: http://arc.tees.ac.uk/wide or sign up for the RSS feed to be alerted as new widgets appear.

Miltiades presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems (ICIS 2010), which was held in Xiamen, China. The paper's details are: Papadopoulos, M. & Pearson, E. (2010). Improving the Editing Process of Automatically Produced Lecture Transcripts Based on Natural Language Analysis. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems (ICIS 2010), Xiamen, China.

A great day at the Learning Services Conference at Chorley. Two successful Accessibility Simulations workshops with great and valuable feedback. Thanks to everyone who participated!

The first workshop for the WIDE project was held at TechDis in York on Friday. It was a great success with lots of fantastic learning designs produced. There is still time to book for one of our remaining workshops at Portland College, Mansfield on Friday 22nd October or Teesside University on Friday 5th November. For more details and to book see our Wiki at http://arc.tees.ac.uk/WIDE

ARC are delighted and proud to announce that Voula Gkatzidou has successfully defended her PhD thesis today, entitled "A Transformation,augmentation and substitution model that supports the adaptation of learning objects".

Widgets for Inclusive Distributed Environments (WIDE) Workshop Date & Location 15th October 2010, at JISC TechDis, York 22nd October 2010, at Portland College, Mansfield 5th November, at Teesside University Go to http://arc.tees.ac.uk/workshop/index.php to register !

We have had a paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems (ICIS 2010), which will be held in Xiamen, China, 29-31 October. The paper's details are: Papadopoulos, M. & Pearson, E. (2010). Improving the Editing Process of Automatically Produced Lecture Transcripts Based on Natural Language Analysis. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems (ICIS 2010), Xiamen, China.

Widgets for Inclusive Distributed Environments (WIDE) aims to produce up to 50 high quality widgets, similar to iPhone applications, which will support disabled students through their learning journey. Funding was secured through the JISC Distributed Learning Environments scheme and WIDE was one of only three projects that was successful in the funding application process. The £30,000 grant will provide bursaries for two researchers who will spend six months defining, designing, developing and evaluating digital resources. WIDE will bring together groups of staff who are involved in the teaching and support of disabled students in further and higher education. In a series of brainstorming sessions and workshops those teachers will put forward their own ideas for how the small WIDE applications can help and support disabled students. Researchers will then design and develop a series of high quality widgets which will be created for specific learning needs, with the aim of producing up to 50 digital applications which can be distributed to the education sector. Each widget will include descriptions of the user scenario on which it was based, together with a summary of its use in practice. The six-month WIDE project will run from 1 July to 31 December.