A Visual Disaster For Determining Homework

Honestly, I think it is really well organized and not hard to follow. I clicked on several of the homework assignments and didn’t see what he was having problems with. He had partially filled in notes that I would think would make it easier for a student.

I teach college and it looks like what my more organized colleagues do. I am old-fashioned (and not tech sophisticated) and rely on overheads and a syllabus.

Beth

It’s terrible. Hard to read and…no, it’s almost impossible for me to read it. I was going to say it was cluttered with that stupid background, but cluttered doesn’t do it justice.

John

I have serious visual problems and I find the background annoying but I can read it. I didn’t have time to find the notes you were discussing. The whole thing is in shorthand with several jargon words, so students have to have had the in-class intro to follow it. I would ask the teacher to remove or fade out the background; individual portraits would be more meaningful anyway. And then ask for some coaching for your son on how to use this to determine his homework.

The background makes this web page almost impossible for me to read. However, I think the content is well organized and the links to study guides to print and fill in is excellent. If your teen is having trouble following what needs to be done, I recommend a chat with the teacher for some additional instruction. This is much above and beyond anything my middle school son has received for homework guidance.

My web design teacher would have flunked it because of the background, and the tiny little font. Artistically & visually it *is* nasty - but probably not for the guy that designed it.

Good design is harder than it looks. (Ahem, look at Reed Martin’s website as an example - and it’s improved!) I’d be inclined to cut and paste the text into a Word document so I could work with it.

There are typos in there (“Define you quality.”) This sort of tells me the teacher doesn’t quite grasp how much difference “little” things like a clear assignment make, especially to students with LDs. It usually takes an advocate to do those “little” things (like translate the website into something readable). Fortunately, most teachers really do think these things are little and don’t mind; unfortunately, if/when they make a big difference, they often assume that the advocate/parent/friend is “helping” more than they are, so it’s important to be very open and careful.

Suggestions for reading: hit “select all” under edit (Or press control-A). It selects the text and gives it a black background. That way you can still click on the links.

OR: go to “Tools,” and “Internet Options” and click on “advanced.” Under “Multimedia,” unclick the “show pictures” box. (you’ll have to ‘refresh’ the page.)

The page will show up on white background.

CHanging the “view text size” didn’t work, which tells me the guy probably *did* the page in Microsoft Word or something, and told it “make it a web page.”

I would give anything for my son’s teachers to post homework with links on the internet so that he can access the information. They have the capability, they just don’t do it.
Have a conversation with the social studies teacher about the importance of visual design. That’s a whole new content area - visual literacy and visual design - that is getting much more attention. The teacher may not be aware of the difficulties that some students have trying to follow the web site.
Educating him/her will make a difference.

One other suggestion is to open it in Firefox as your browser. I was able to go to View>change text size using this browser and enlarge the text so that it was easily readable. Interesting that it didn’t work in Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately people don’t always create “accessible” web pages, which is always going to make life harder for people with various disabilities. Without going into an entire rant on the topic there are things you can do which will make it easier to view this, and many other webpages. Instead of repeating them all here, have a look at the BBC section on accessibility - it talks a lot about what settings you can change in your browser so that pages are easier to view:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/

If you want to go further than that you could look at using a screen reader - something that reads out the text on a page. Browsaloud is one you might want to investigate - you’ll then need to ask the school to make sure browsaloud works (they have to pay a little bit of money to get their entire site registered but it’s not much in the grand scheme of things). Anyway you can try it out on some other browsalound enabled websites - ours is (www.mencap.org.uk), the BBC’s is (www.bbc.co.uk), etc.

Good luck and sorry you’ve come up against this, but it is one of the difficulties and one of the advantages of the web that anyone can publish anything. That means you’ve got to take control of how you see it…

As far as I know I don’t have any type of LD and I had a very difficult time with it. It was hard to pay attention to what you were reading for the background. It’s too “busy”.