This year, under the Innovation 3 scheme for Independent Specialist Colleges, Northern Counties College was awarded funding to develop their own social network.

The aim of the project is to create a social networking site that learners can access independently and which caters for a large range of abilities enabling access for all learners.  This would allow the creation of a ‘safe’ social network that learners can enjoy knowing that it will be administrated and restricted to only those who have permission to join.

The aims of the project are to:-

1. Give some of the learners a chance to experience owning a project. This would in turn improve communication and decision making skills. It will give the learners’ a means of contacting and keeping in touch with friends when leaving College using ILT safely. It will encourage learners to improve their own ICT skills and to continue learning outside of the classroom. This in turn will help to improve social interaction.

2. Facilitate a safe environment for staff and learners to converse.

3. Give the college opportunities to develop ILT strategies in order to be able to give learners the best possible opportunities.

4. Show case good practice within the local ISP’s and allow learners with LLDD to make friends with similar young adults and share experiences.

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More details about the Beyond Online Basics event

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Whilst working at the college I became very interested in blind sports and, as a result, virtual games. I remember seeing Drive http://www.game-accessibility.com/index.php?pagefile=visual at a conference in 2002 and was really impressed with this audio and text based game. There are some really good resources on the website from a European perspective and which relate to a range of disabilities.

I was therefore very excited to learn about the recently funded JISC project – Blind interactive simulation cricket user training (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/bisct.aspx ). “The project will construct a virtual practice and training environment for sports people within HE programmes who are blind or have visual impairments using an existing 3D virtual sound application combined with Wii technology.” The key thing for me is its transferrrability to other blind sports in a variety of curriculum areas and which explores both physics and coaching aspects. The project is a joint venture between Nottingham Trent and London Met Universities.

I include some further suggested useful links below. I intend to collate these further, in terms of both UK and international projects for a range of disabilities. Any contributions gratefully received.

http://www.vifit.org/ VI Fit is a current project at the University of Nevada, Reno, and helps children who are blind become more physically active and healthy through video games. Based on Wii – this game provides audio and vibrotactile cues that indicate when to serve and when to return the ball. You can play this game against the computer or against a friend using two Wii remotes.

Computer games for people with visual impairments http://www.tsbvi.edu/technology/games.htm

AudioGames.net is a community portal for audio games:

http://www.audiogames.net/page.php?pagefile=links

http://www.bscgames.com/bsc_dart.aspBlind software games specialize = in creating accessible computer games for the blind or visually impaired. For example Blind darts In crazy darts you hear a dart panning at a random speed from left to right or from right to left. You use the spacebar to shoot the dart. The closer the dart is to the center when you shoot at it, the more points you get. You shoot at a total of ten darts and then you are told your score and asked if you would like to play again. Sound simple? Well, the maximum attainable score is 134560 and no one has earned it yet!

The GRAB project has allowed the development of a new Haptic & Audio Virtual Environment to allow blind and visually impaired persons to have access to the three-dimensional graphic computer world through the senses of touch and hearing. http://www.grab-eu.com/id14.htm

TIM http://inova.snv.jussieu.fr/tim/publis/aaate01/aaate01-arch.html is about 10 years old as a project and its main objective was to offer to visually impaired children of various levels of psychomotor development the possibility to play computer games in an autonomous way.

Chile Video Gaming for Blind Learners School Integration in Science Classes http://www.springerlink.com/content/v4831r286102356m/ This study looks at the use of the videogame and its impact on the integration of blind learners into mainstream schools was also evaluated, through the participation of both teachers and learners.

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St Elizabeth’s College (http://www.stelizabeths.org.uk/ ISC based in Hertfordshire. The College “offers young people between the ages of 18 and 25 with a range of special needs, including epilepsy, the opportunity to develop the skills needed to move towards adulthood and an independent, more fulfilled lifestyle.”

St Elizabeth’s were awarded Innovation 3 funding to enable learners to have greater ownership of their learning and be able to communicate their achievements and needs.

The objectives of the project are:

• to enable College Learners to record and communicate their achievements more effectively through alternative formats.
• to develop ILT strategies to improve the quality of learning and teaching.
• to provide the opportunity for learners to develop their IT and multi-media skills through a range of project activities.

The project will link with In-Folio to enable learners to produce and access a record of their life at College identifying and recording their lives and experience, giving learners a sense of their own life and place in the world and enabling them to explain who they are and what they can do.

A key part of the project will be the use of In-Folio (http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=2_3_13 ). The College has recently registered with the Rix Centre to access In-Folio which will allow learners to store their own images, video clips along with other materials and enable College tutors to upload material to individual learners’ areas within In-Folio.

The project will link with In-Folio to enable learners to produce and access a record of their life at College identifying and recording their lives and experience, giving learners a sense of their own life and place in the world and enabling them to explain who they are and what they can do.

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The Kindle device will also be a new version and will be available with or without 3G. At the moment there isn’t a huge amount of information about it, but there do look to have been some improvements on previous versions and some interesting features from an accessibility point of view (although these are not necessarily new features).

Recent blog posts have looked at Apple’s iPad in quite a bit of detail and there are some similarities between the two devices in terms of the e-book functionality:

• Both will allow users to download books directly ontp the device on the go over either wifi or 3G and can synchronise across devices which works very well. The Kindle has apps for the iPad and iPhone, Android operating system (which I hope to explore more fully in the near future) and Mac/PC as well as the device itself so there is greater choice there. This means that users can carry a large number of documents around with them on one small, portable device, and the mobile phone versions could make them even more portable (although there are downsides to reading on a mobile phone screen and you probably wouldn’t want to do it for very long) – this portability is one of the advantages of e-book readers in general for users who have difficulty carrying several heavier books around with them.
• Both devices allow users to instantly look up dictionary definitions of unfamiliar words and add highlights and annotations. In the case of the Kindle (and Kindle apps for other devices) these annotations can be shared, and users can also access notes made by other readers. This could be really useful for group work, although I don’t think it’s possible to restrict sharing to specific people so all shared annotations would be public.
• Both devices have text-to-speech built in. There are some restrictions on this, particularly with the Kindle as Amazon were forced to restrict its availability therefore users can only access text-to-speech if individual publishers allow it. It was recently suggested that roughly half of the bestselling titles have text-to-speech enabled – usefully this information is given when you look at a book on the Amazon website so you are at least forewarned. I had a look through the current top ten downloads and only two titles had text-to-speech switched off. The menus are also text-to-speech enabled in this version, whereas in previous versions this hasn’t been an option.

I don’t want to make too much of a direct comparison as the two devices have very different functions, and it’s perhaps more useful to directly compare dedicated e-book readers (as has been done by the RNIB). I have tried to round up some of the Kindle’s features as detailed on the Amazon site:

• It has been made smaller and lighter, with a 6″ e-ink screen. Amazon claim that the screen contrast has been improved so it will be interesting to see it in person and compare it to some of the other e-ink screens.
• It is quite a low-cost option, with the wifi version currently listed at £109.
• As with other e-book readers the battery life is very long; Amazon state up to a month (with the wifi switched off).
• There is a larger catalogue of books available through Amazon – the downside is that they use a proprietary format rather than e-pub so can’t be accessed on other e-book readers, although through the Kindle app there are other devices that e-books can be read on.
• The internal storage is quite large (4GB, enough for approximately 3500 books), however there doesn’t appear to be any capacity to expand it.
• Users can transfer their own documents to it in a variety of formats, again reducing the number of documents you need to carry with you. If they are in PDF format they can also be annotated and highlighted.
• The physical buttons, including qwerty keyboard, is potentially easier for many users than a touch screen.

In terms of accessibility the kindle does seem to have the edge over some of the other e-book readers, particularly with the text-to-speech option. Obviously with an e-ink screen there aren’t a huge number of changes that can be made but there are eight magnification levels and also a choice of three fonts (with one being sans serif), which suggests the appearance is more customisable than many of the alternatives.

I’m hoping to get a more hands-on opportunity with this when it is launched.

Other useful links:

In e-reader accessibility race, new Kindle, iPad in front from Gear and Gadgets

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