Upcoming Workshops and Courses

Make Your Content Usable by (Almost) Everyone: An Introduction to Accessibility

(A Half-Day Workshop)

Saturday, 5 June 2:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT-4)

Instructor: Char James-Tanny

Accessibility means making things available to everyone. We’re familiar with this to some extent, thanks to curb cuts. But we can also make our content accessible by following several guidelines. During this workshop, we’ll use the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to learn several techniques for making our content more accessible. (Even though WCAG includes “Web”, the principles, guidelines, and success criteria lend themselves to documentation, even if it’s not online.)

The Power of Storytelling in Business and Life

(A Half-Day Workshop)

Sunday 6 June, 2:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT-4)

Instructor: Alan Hoffler

Storytelling is known as the Silver Bullet of communication. Storytelling can apply to most any situation, takes relatively little preparation, and is used by the masters of the stage and the pen in just about every forum imaginable. You’ll find ways to immediately put this weapon in your toolbox and WOW your audiences and readers, and have them ready to listen to your pitch, platform, paper, or presentation.

Whether you’re a hesitant speaker or a communicator who wants to be GREAT, this session will teach you a valuable and easy-to-learn technique to captivate your audience. In addition to learning about the Silver Bullet of Storytelling, you will practice and apply it to your message, whether it’s a technical presentation at work, a networking event, a sales/persuasion situation, or your online content marketing plan.

Come learn the one communication skill you can’t live without!

Making Accessible Media: Audio Description Fundamentals

(Asynchronous course) | 7 June to 12 July 2021 (Mondays)

Instructor: Brett Oppegaard

Note: Watch the recordings of the class sessions at a time convenient for you and complete the assignment by the time determined by the instructor.

If you aren’t making your media accessible (on your websites, mobile apps, brochures, signs, exhibits, etc.), you are excluding people— a lot of people. In the U.S., for example, there are about 20 million Americans who are blind or visually impaired. An efficient and effective solution is Audio Description, which is recommended by the American Council of the Blind and many similar associations around the world. Audio Description is the remediation of visual media into audible media, primarily for the inclusion of people who are blind or visually impaired. This translation process is the focus of this Making Accessible Media course.

This six-session asynchronous and online course will teach you about Audio Description as a field of study, as a collection of related genres (such as portrait description, artifact description, map description, etc.), and help you to be trained and self-sufficient on the open-access, online, and award-winning UniDescription toolkit, which will allow you to immediately and anytime thereafter create and share your Audio Description in accessible formats, including text, HTML, and machine-voiced Mp3.

The course will have five weekly checkpoints with the instructor, in which you write Audio Description about a provided piece of visual media, and then get feedback on your description from your instructor and participating classmates.

Intended audience: Content creators working in digital media of all types, who would like to make their content more accessible, especially for people who are blind or visually impaired.