Creating Accessible Online Resources

Author

University of Bath

Why Use Bookdown Clavertondown or Quarto?

Bookdown is a well established online book authoring platform which enabled accessible content to be generated, principally mathematics which renders using MathJax. As well as generating a .html webpage Bookdown also generates .pdf and .epub documents for offline browsing and allows the webage to be altered for browsing preferences. Bookdown mainly uses Markdown in authoring. This is an example of Bookdown output.

A beginners guide to making lecture notes in Bookdown - by Vicky Scowcroft

Clavertondown was generated locally at the University of Bath to overcome some of the limitations of Bookdown and allow extra functionality requested by staff. It also adds additional ‘alternate versions’ including large print .pdf and .docx versions. Like Bookdown Clavertondown mainly uses Markdown in authoring. This is an example of ClavertonDown output

Quarto is relatively new to the online book family but allows dynamic content with a number of languages (including Python, R and Julia) and allows a broader range of outputs than Bookdown. Quarto can use Markdown but also has a WISIWIG version when writing. This document is an example of Quarto output.

Fundamentally all are used to generate online books which can be hosted on VLEs or outward facing webpages and deliver content in an accessible style.

The Away Day

The Away Day is aimed at both beginners, introducing them to the systems and their benefits (and weaknesses) as well as established users who just want to get some ideas of different things they could do in their books or different ways of doing things.

The day will be split into two sessions. The morning session will be short case studies of people sharing things they do from first principles of starting to use these systems to hints and tips of what people are actually doing.

Morning Session - Case Studies already identified

  • An introduction to Clavertondown
  • Hosting resources on GitHub
  • Hosting resources on a VLE (Moodle)
  • Writing maths
  • Desmos - Adding interactivity when using Bookdown or Clavertondown
  • Incorporating iframes: videos, H5P, forms
  • Conditional visibility of text

Afternoon Session

The afternoon session will principally be hands on, putting into action some of what has inspired you in the morning but also getting to network and chat with other users.

SignUp

You can sign up here

For further details please contact:

Dr Fiona Dickinson or Technology Enhanced Learning

Resources

A selection of resources generated during the day will be shared here for later reference or if you cannot attend.