2.2 Giving control to learners
It may sound like a complicated process, but there are several ways of giving control to learners that involve little extra work to develop.
Allow choice of formats
It is standard accessibility practice to provide transcripts for audio or audio-visual materials, to provide captions for video materials, and to provide alternative text for images. These alternative formats are used by a wide range of people, not only those who have reported a disability, so these format options should be available as standard (Fidaldo & Thormann, 2017). Similarly, some learners may prefer to receive feedback as an audio mp3 rather than written text. This audio feedback can be quicker to produce than text-based feedback.
Allow a choice of display characteristics
Many digital materials – including web pages, documents and slideshow presentations – can be easily altered by users to suit their needs in terms of font, font size, colour and contrast. Make it clear to learners how they can personalise study materials. One way of doing this is to provide links to guidance pages on the internet that describe how to use built-in web browser features to achieve these changes.