I have been working for the past 2 years preparing and launching courses on disability-inclusivity in educational planning for my professional work at the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO). Throughout this project, the course team and myself have been building a knowledge base of best practices and notable tools in accessible course design. The foundation of this strategy is to abide by all of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) guidelines. You can check them out here if you are interested in learning more for your own individual practise. One notable element we incorporate in all of our online courses of the WCAG guidelines is to provide alternative formats to all content. So for instance, if there is video component, we are sure to supply a written script, audio file and associated Powerpoint Materials (where applicable).

To go further, we integrated a very useful tool called the ReadSpeaker application throughout our Moodle LMS in order to offer text-to speech functionality to ALL of our online course content. Adding a text-to-speech function to educational materials has proved beneficial, not only to students with visual impairments or individual learning needs, but to all students.

The ReadSpeaker application has many features (which are outlined below), but mainly it functions to convert text-to-speech like a screenreader would. This offers all students an opportunity to better understand information and to observe course content in an alternative audio format.

Using the readspeaker you can:

• Listen to text on webpages

• Highlight text to read along as the application reads aloud

• Personalize reading spead and text size and colour

• Translate text

• Use a dictionary

Navigate to the Demo page to see a brief demonstration of this tool in our online course.