February 2019

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, we’re trying out different accessibility tools for our presentation at the IACEA conference next week. In my call out on social media, I received suggestions for color contrast checkers. We tested our Google Slides using Grackle Docs and WebAIM Color Contrast Checker and realized we had to change dozens […]

As I mentioned yesterday, Jeff and I are preparing two conference presentations on accessibility for the IACEA conference next week and the COABE conference in April. I’ve immersed myself in the topic for the past several months, and today was no exception. From our early days at the Literacenter in 2017, we’ve sketched out many

I’m on a perpetual quest for resources to help me improve my writing. Back in 2006 on this very blog, I linked to Cutts, M. (1995). The plain English guide. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. A week ago, I wrote a blog post about how I didn’t find benefit in Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct

While this post has NOTHING to do with instructional design, we can loosely affiliate it with education – namely, mine! For many years, I have purchased “paperwhite” bulbs for family and friends at Christmas. The bulbs grow into flowers within about 6 weeks after the holidays and become the first glimmer of spring during the

I love when I post about my process and request input from others … and get responses! Following my post yesterday about Tidy HTML, I received a tip from Matthew Schmidt on Twitter sharing his solution to use Atom editor with plugins like atom-beautify and tidy-html5. Thank you, Matthew! Downloading now …  

If you ever have to do any editing to a webpage or learning management system, you’ve probably found you need to take a peek “under the hood” at the HTML code. I do nearly every day, but I know next to nothing beyond the handful of edits I do when I need to embed a

Here are a couple of thoughtful posts related to instructional design: Amy Lomellini shared with us her experiment to try tools that offer an accessible webinar and recording. If you’re on LinkedIn, she’d like to hear your suggestions to streamline the process. Nice job, but it shouldn’t be this hard! Enilda Romero-Hall shared with us the

I attended today’s Confab hosted by the Chicago Literacy Alliance at the Literacenter, the coworking space we share with other organizations with missions to support literacy. This winter, the Confabs explored the theme of Equity Issues associated with literacy with a final focus on Diversity or “providing students with opportunities to understand and empathize with experiences

I found out tonight that my mom’s close friend, Mary Jean Goeres, died this week. Mary Jean and her husband raised their kids at the same time my parents were raising their “first” kids, and then they traveled with my mom and dad through the 1990s and early 2000s. This picture includes my mom and dad