All people need basic skills to use the Web. A significant part of my effort to teach them to people with cognitive disabilities, via the Web itself, is to implement instructional-design techniques. This post is about my first experiment.
For people of all abilities, examples of basic Web skills are:
- opening a Web site / using Web addresses;
- navigating by clicking links and using the back button;
- performing simple searches with a search engine.
Teaching such a skill includes:
- defining it distinctly;
- performing a task analysis;
- operationalizing the required behaviors to acquire the skill;
- reinforcing those behaviors.
For people with cognitive disabilities, an additional basic Web skill is enlarging the text/font size of a Web site. Thus to learn how best to teach such a seemingly-simple skill, I am continuing my effort to create related instructions.
Guiding me is Janet S. Twyman, Ph.D., BCBA, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at The University of Massachusetts Medical School (Shriver Center), where I work. Dr. Twyman is an expert in instructional design.
Notes: Future blog posts will provide details on each step we take in this experiment. This post is the first in a series about Teaching Web Page (Text) Enlargement. Next up: “Teaching People How To Enlarge Web Pages: Task Definition“.