The new Atto Language button for Moodle

By Chris Nelson, Learning Systems team, The Open University.

Accessibility is great, but it can also be difficult when producing content. I recently found this out when helping colleagues produce some Languages quizzes just before Christmas. After creating the content, you then had to switch the editor to HTML mode and add in the relevant <Lang> opening and closing HTML tags. Obviously it is important to do this, but it was a lot of work to do, and then check.

But I’m jumping ahead — for those not aware of Atto, it is a lightweight HTML content editor, and (usually) the default editor for Moodle. It’s pretty ubiquitous across the Moodle tools, from forums to quizzes, regardless of the role the user is in.

Essentially the idea was so that you would select a word or sentence fragment, then press the button and choose the language from the drop-down.

This would apply the <span lang=“xxx”>…</span> tags around the selected text for you.

Initial User Acceptance Testing (UAT) here at The Open University has been overwhelmingly positive: “This saves so much time and makes production much easier” is my favourite remark so far.

The button has now been internally released (early March 2019) for Open University staff/tutors, with further expected tweaks to follow (more detail on that later). We’re planning to make the function available to the Moodle community once we’ve finished our initial pilot and made further refinements based on our ‘real-world’ testing.

So I am somewhat puzzled as to why this feature hasn’t been identified previously. Maybe because mixed-language content is usually rather specific to Languages and Classics (where Greek and Latin might be used). Maybe such content authors are used to working around gaps in functionality without really noticing it. And then the embedded routine becomes ‘the way to do it’, and that system gap is seen, but not observed, as a requirement.

I guess the moral of the story is: if you have an issue where there is a simple technological solution to it, let your friendly local development manager know! We love to hear feedback and are quite happy to make system improvements that benefit staff and students.

I’ll be piloting the button with staff for a few months (we added in role restriction capabilities), but I hope to make it available to all OU users from September 2019. We’re in the process of refining the tag order and adding in support for Arabic (which also requires the text direction tag as it runs right-to-left). In the longer-term we’d like to make the exact languages displayed configurable, but that depends on feedback. We’re also conscious that our Atto HTML is getting quite crowded — it’s a vital and ubiquitous part of Moodle, so we are about to review the current OU layout. This’ll probably lead to a reshuffle of the current buttons, thinking about the layout of basic and advanced functions etc., and will also help us identify some further Atto improvements in the mid- to long-term.

At the end of the day, good technology should help us help other people, no matter whether it’s a single button or a huge online learning management system like Moodle.

I hope that this small contribution is successful at helping others, be it Moodle Quiz authors creating a new French quiz, a tutor answering a question in a Spanish Languages course forum, or a student learning German while relying on screenreading software.

Thanks for reading!

Chris Nelson.

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