Background

Unionlearn provides support and advice on lifelong learning and workforce development across England and plays a key role in meeting the Government's Skills Strategy. It will focus on literacy and numeracy skills, and also aims to encourage greater employer support for training and strengthen union membership. The project is a partnership between the Department for Education and Skills and TUC, and the Government. 'TUC Tutors' is an online community for UK Trade Union education practitioners from unionlearn with TUC Education.

Our brief

To produce a series of interactive online tutorials based on existing training course resources, which act as refreshers or teasers for both learners and tutors. The tutorials needed to be fully accessible and include closed captions for the hearing impaired and text to speech features for visually impaired users.

Our approach

We intially identified exactly what the TUC team were hoping to achieve from the tutorials and paid particular attention to their prospective audience. We then provided a solution that would allow them to create the tutorials themselves further down the line. We very quickly identified that Adobe Captivate would be the ideal package to use to build the tutorials because of its intuitive interface, which we felt the client would have no problems mastering.

The first step was to break down the existing training course printed materials into their component parts and reconstruct them in a linear fashion. Attention was given to ensuring that the tutorials were interactive and therefore engaging, rather than a presentation that would simply play from start to finish.

Consideration was also given to the pace of the tutorials ensuring that they presented the information at a speed that could be both absorbed and retained. Most importantly the tutorials were built in such a fashion that the client could later emulate themselves.

The strength of this approach means that the tutorials are available online, which a wider audience can now benefit from, and furthermore review again as and when they wish. The flexibility of the solution adopted means that the tutorials now lend themselves to be easily updated as necessary, whereas doing this to the printed materials can of course incur substantial expense.

Standards

The following default standards have been utilised:

• Closed captions for the hearing impaired
• Text to speech features for visually impaired users
• XHTML 1.0.
• CSS version 2.0.
• W3C Level Double-A conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. (WAI-AA WCAG 2.0.)
• Designed to a minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels
• Cross platform compatible with the following major operating systems:
  • Windows®
  • Macintosh®
• Operates in the following major web browsers:
  • Internet Explorer – Versions 8 and 7
  • Mozilla Firefox – Versions 3 and 2
  • Safari – Versions 3 and 2