Digiknow sessions for Hilary 2020: Accessibility, clarity and learning productivity

Digiknow courses for Hilary 2020 focus on creating documents that are accessible to as many people as possible.

Formatting documents for readability and accessibility

Book for: 30 Jan 2020, 12:30-13:30 – Banbury Road

This session will help you create documents that are more readable for everyone and more accessible for people with special needs. We will look at principles of readable formatting and how they can be achieved with every day tools without much additional effort. These techniques will apply to print, PDFs and web documents. If you want, you can bring in some documents you created and see how you could easily reformat them.

• Different strategies for reading
• Three principles of readability
• Choosing the appropriate formatting for readability
• Structuring your document for readability and navigation
• Providing other guides to increase document readability and navigation
• Making the most out of Word to produce readable PDFs

Creating mind maps, flowcharts and infographics with everyday tools

Book for: 17 Feb 2020, 12:30-13:30 – Banbury Road

Graphical displays of complex information are very effective and can enhance understanding of difficult subjects. They are also an essential tool for including more kinds of people in your audience. And not least, they can help content creators organise their thinking about the subject. Many people worry that they need to learn to use a complicated graphics editor or pay a graphic designer. But that’s not true. This session will show you how you can create powerful graphics with the tools you already use.

• Why are mindmaps and flowcharts useful for comprehension
• How can mindmaps be used to plan your document as well as summarise it
• How to use Xmind (free mindmapping tool) to create a graphical outline for a document
• How to use outlining in Microsoft Word with Headings and navigation
• How to create flowchart from a Word outline using PowerPoint’s SmartArt
• How to create infographics and interactive maps using Excel

Tech tools to write clear and simple English for web and print

Book for: 2 March 2020, 12:30-13:30 – Banbury Road

Do you want to simplify your writing without sounding too simple? This session will introduce key principles of simple language and tools that can help you achieve this. You will learn how to structure your document, how to shorten sentences and how to avoid constructions that make understanding more difficult. You will also learn how to check and interpret the readability score of your document. You can also bring your own documents to simplify.

• What makes for plain, easy to understand language
• Myths about simple language and readability
• How to measure readability and interpret the scores
• Tools and strategies for supporting writing simple language

Reading, writing and study skills: Technology you should know

Book for: 12 March 2020, 12:30-13:30 – Banbury Road

This session will present easily accessible technologies that can help students be more productive while studying. These tech tips and strategies will be helpful to all who feel they are struggling to keep up with all their reading or find it hard to produce academic writing on time. It will also suggest approaches and tools to organising academic work. It will focus on easily accessible free or cheap tech tools that can save time and improve the quality of their work. Most of these tools and strategies will be useful for anyone wishing to improve their productivity.

• Tools and strategies to improve reading speed
• Tools for reading on the go by converting text to audio
• Outliners to improve the organisation of writing
• Distraction free editors to improve writing focus
• Tools and strategies for organising your studies

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