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Category: Assignment 1 – Midterm Review – Module 1&2 Blog Posts and Comments

Blog 2: Design Principles for Effective and Accessible Multimedia

2024-02-10 / / 0 Comments

WAVE Accessibility Report

When I ran my WAVE accessibility report on my blog posts I was happy to see that I only had two contrast errors. I honestly was having a bit of difficulty seeing the text in the colour that I had chosen previously. When writing my second blog post I decided to darken the colour a bit to increase the contrast which really helped, and I assume contributed to my low contrast error score. I am surprised that I got a contrast error on the text that I have in grey. To me, the contrast looks sufficient, but I am not thinking like someone who has worse vision needs than my own. Going forward I am going to change this text colour to a darker grey or even black and keep in mind that those who access my blog posts may have worse vision than I do.

My Experience with Text to Speech

I have used text to speech before for projects in high school. Unfortunately, I did not find it useful as the projects were presentations in my French class and the pronunciation on the application I used was horrible. While the text to speech allowed me to practice certain phrases or words, I couldn’t get a good idea of how the French should be pronounced. Most of the time, the speaking voice was saying the French words with a half French half American accent, so I had better luck understanding the pronunciation from my teacher. I can see how text to speech would really help people with other topics or if I found an accurate French voice. I tend to have issues processing information auditorily so this would not be my chosen learning tool if I didn’t have to know how to pronounce something.

Definitions and Experiences with Inclusive Design

To me, inclusive design means designing media or multimedia with the awareness that learners have varying ranges of needs and accommodating to these needs. I personally have ADHD and with the advancements in graphic design with clear labels, easy to navigate tools, and attention-grabbing elements I have never had an easier time learning. Things like subtitles which may have been intended for those with hearing issues also help me with my auditory processing issues. Of course, I can also see how certain applications such as TikTok or Instagram with an endless scrolling design can also take advantage of those of us with poor executive function and low attention spans. For the most part, I think these shorter video platforms can be extremely effective learning tools for those of us with varying needs but self-regulation and staying on topic can be a huge barrier to effective learning.

My Infographic

I used contrast and differing colour to help my learner navigate through my infographic. This follows the signalling and coherence principles. I did focus on alignment by aligning all elements on the left or right side of the text box, with all text boxes alternating on which side they sit on. I kept proximity in mind by having the elements that I chose to have on the side of text boxes be representative of their respective topic. I followed the signalling principle by aligning the introduction text box to the middle of the infographic. I optimized colour to allow for easy transitioning between topics with high contrast between text colour and background colour.

The template that I chose really helped me design how I could allow for an easy transition between the four principles. The only issue that I found with this template was that the colour contrast was not very high and that the chosen elements were a bit too generic for my topic. The template allowed me to see the potential of what my infographic could look like, while Canva allowed me to easily change and edit what I needed to to allow for a more accessible infographic.

Blog Post 1 – Theories of Multimedia Learning & Screencast

2024-01-28 / / 1 Comment

My Screencast on Google Calendar!

Google Calendar is such a useful tool for those of us with busy schedules. When creating my screencast it was important to me to use conversational language as according to the personalization principle. I slowly built concepts by showing how to first create a one-time event, and then showing how to create a repeated event. This encompasses the segmenting and pre-training principles. After learning about the image principle, I decided to opt out on using my dashcam to keep listeners engaged on the screen (and honestly to help myself stay on topic). All together I was able to show a simple guide for students on some of the ways I use Google Calendar to manage my time with the help of Screencastify.

Intuitive and Surprising Parts of Multimedia Learning

The most intuitive principles of Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning included the redundancy, coherence, and segmenting principle. I think that these were intuitive to me because I believe many people including myself try to follow these principles in everyday conversations. For example, when talking to a friend about something that occurred the other day, I will avoid unnecessary information to keep them focused on the story. This correlates with the coherence principle. The segmenting principle can be seen when I explain something I am learning in class to my parents who have never learnt the topic before. I will start with a basic introduction of the topic that my parents may already be familiar with and add a little more as I go.

The principles that surprised me the most were the modality and image principles. I am not very familiar with multimedia learning and how people learn most effectively, so this was interesting to learn. It makes sense that we learn best with just a slide rather than a slide and speaker image as watching the speaker can be distracting. I wonder if this principle best applies to those who are neurotypical, as it implies that the image of a speaker would be a distraction rather than an aid. This may not be the same for those with auditory processing issues or neurodivergence who could use the speaker image to stay engaged.

The Audience of My Screencast

For my screencast on using Google Calendar, I imagined the audience to be busy university students just like me. This was particularly simple as I could think of all the ways that I personally use Google Calendar and use it in my teaching. I was able to understand the needs of other students and how Google Calendar can be a useful tool to organize, plan, and structure your time. This impacted my design as I was able to recall when I was learning how to use google calendar and what helped me get around all the new features. I used the principle of segmenting to slowly introduce the calendar as even though Google Calendar is pretty straightforward to use, it can be confusing when a bunch of new information is thrown at you. Additionally I used the coherence principle to avoid mentioning areas of Google Calendar that either wouldn’t be useful to a student or would be irrelevant to just an introduction of the calendar.

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