Hello -- I'm going to do my best to catch up and participate ... please
bear with me!

LESSON ONE

INTRODUCTION
My name is Sharon McCarragher.

This is my SECOND attempt at taking the Barrier-free e-Learning course
with Norm and Dick ... I keep being swamped with other activities and
can't seem to keep up with the two-lessons a week goal.  Sigh.  But I'm
very grateful for the second chance, and for the wonderful conversations
that I've had the privilege of "eavesdropping" on!

I work for an organization called dot.edu (pronounced "dot E D U"),
which is part of the University of Wisconsin System.  We are primarily
the entity that provides the infrastructure for e-learning on certain
platforms (Blackboard and Prometheus) for the University of Wisconsin's
27 campuses, statewide.  The exciting part of working for dot.edu is
that we are not LIMITED to this primary function.  The scope of our
services and our customer base has grown well beyond this initial
"mission."

We now provide some level of support for e-learning in almost every
kind of educational institution: PK-12s, technical colleges, public and
private, both inside Wisconsin and outside its borders.

Our services include everything to do with e-learning: hardware,
hosting, training (especially train-the-trainer), and consulting in
Instructional Systems Design. Over a year ago, we realized the need for
a coordinating service to help maximize Accessibility resources across
institutions.  I'm finally in a position to begin gathering the
information and making the networking connections that I hope will make
that possible.

On a personal note, I am the mother of two amazing young women, aged 16
and 19.  Amy is a junior in high school, thinking of going into the
field of psychology and/or something sports-related.  Shannon is in her
second year of college; she had originally been absolutely certain she
wanted to be a 5-year-old kindergarten teacher (not 4-year-olds, not
first grade ... 5-year-olds! Only!) and travel and pursue her love of
photography in the summers.  I have persuaded her to consider teaching
later in life, after she has pursued some dreams and gotten some life
experiences.  Now she's talking to the Science departments of her
university, considering some kind of Biology major, because she wants to
be involved in making the world a better place.

In truth, I am guilty of heavily influencing this dream, since I made
her aware of the work of one of my heroes, William McDonough, who does
amazing things in environmental design, etc.  In a nutshell, McDonough's
one of the founders of what has been hailed "The Next Industrial
Revolution," based on principles like "waste equals food" (rather than
"waste equals landfill") and "cradle to cradle" cycles (rather than
"cradle to grave").  If you're interested in learning more, his bio is
at  http://www.mcdonough.com/bio.htm

I do apologize, though.  His website was difficult for me to navigate
in Opera, so I'm not sure just how accessible it will be.

Back to personal info about me -- I live in the Milwaukee Wisconsin
metropolitan area, where I know Norm lived for a while.  I had the
absolutely delightful experience of meeting both Norm and Dick in
Atlanta at Educause.  I can't describe how tickled I was to discover it
was THEM, since they are two more of my heros!  They urged me to attend
the "Accessing Higher Ground" conference in Boulder Colorado earlier
this month, and I'm SO glad I did!  I learned SO much, and I can't tell
you how inspiring it was to actually meet the people who are making such
a difference in this field.  No matter how overwhelmed I get, I know I'm
part of a movement made up of outstanding people working together to
make the world a better place.  I guess I'm still just a 1970's idealist
still hoping to make a difference!

POWER POINT IDEAS
Since my job isn't really to TEACH techniques, but to connect people
and resources, I believe a brief awareness-raising introduction to the
scope of the issues, as well as tying in motivational factors
(institutional policy, regulations, anecdotal information) will be part
of my presentation.  Most of my job, though, will be finding the right
people to listen to, ask the right questions, and persuade to share
their expertise!


LESSON TWO

KEYBOARD NAVIGATION
This is HARD!  It took me a while to figure out how to scroll, and I
got stuck many times.  One question that occurred to me was "how do I
highlight text to copy and paste?"  I have a habit of extracting only
the text I want from a page, and pasting it into a word-processing
document to save or print it.

I also experimented with turning off images in Opera, and again, it's
amazing to me how absolutely oblivious some websites are!  One local
news site ( http://www.themilwaukeechannel.com/ ) uses the ALT-tag boxes
to store the URL and all kinds of other coded information -- that must
sound AWFUL on a screen reader!


I'm going to send this out now, just to get myself in the game here!

Thank you all for "listening"!

Sharon



Sharon McCarragher
Accessibility & Training
UWS dot.edu
Cunningham Hall G17
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI  53201-0413
(414) 229-5066
fax (414) 229-3158