GROW WITH THE IOG
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WHAT IS DYSLEXIA? Dyslexia is a hidden disability thought to affect around 10 per cent of the population; 4 per cent severely. It is the most common of the specific learning difficulties. Dyslexia is usually hereditary. A student with dyslexia may mix up letters within words and words within sentences while reading. They may also have difficulty with spelling words correctly while writing; letter reversals are common. Source: British Dyslexia Association www.bdadyslexia.org.uk
DIGITAL RESOURCES
IMPROVED ACCESS TO TRAINING MATERIALS The IOG is developing access to training courses by including audio resources and enhancing the range of dyslexia-friendly PDFs
T By Chris Gray IOG learning programme architect
KEEP IN TOUCH
www.iog.org
50 THE GROUNDSMAN July 2019
he IOG’s quest for continual improvement is reflected in the availability of audio descriptions and explanations for its training and education courses. We have so far completed most of the modules for the Level 3 Technical Diploma in Turf Surface Management qualification and have recently started on improving the availability of material for the Level 2 Technical Certificate in Turf Surface Maintenance. Once these are completed, we will then focus on our higher-level qualifications, with the cycle of continuous improvement evolving and developing over time. For the audio soundtracks, the use of digital conversion software does, however, result in a ‘voice’ that isn’t as smooth as a natural human recording – but the result is still clear and readily understandable. The next move will be to investigate the use of even more naturalsounding speech. One added benefit of having www.facebook.com/theIOG
“Users can download and replay recordings on a range of devices” audio versions (mp3 files), is that users can also download and replay the recordings on a range of devices – including mobile phones – at their leisure. We have also addressed the needs of those with dyslexia, creating text in Word using the special OpenDyslexia font, then creating new PDFs. We have followed the style guide produced by the British Dyslexia Association: font size 14; 1.5 paragraph spacing; and Corn (RGB 255-248220) as the page colour background.
Institute of Groundsmanship
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Visit www.iog/org/training for more information twitter.com/the_iog