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Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Tag: Ally

Lady sitting on a chair at a table with a laptop opened with her face in her hands looking worried

PDFs: Particularly Dependable Format? Pretty Dull, but Functional? Or Profoundly Dreadful Files!

January 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Introduction

PDFs aren’t something I’d normally spend much time thinking about (I much prefer swimming or learning the guitar in my free time). The format barely existed when I was doing my undergraduate degree, so when I came to my Masters 20 years later, I was thrilled that there was this simple way to get all my reading material on my computer or iPad. OK, it was mildly exasperating that it was fiddly to highlight or copy text for my notes, but it was a small price to pay for how readily available all the information was.

However, a recent meeting with the European Ally User Group has given me a whole new perspective on PDFs. It raised various questions about how useful they are, from both an accessibility and a study skills perspective.

The problem with PDFs

In the best-case scenario, an accessible PDF can be created from a Word document by including things like alt text to describe images and using appropriately styled headings. A screen reader should be able to cope with a PDF generated in this way.

But even in this best-case scenario, PDFs are not ideally suited to online academic reading and research. Students will struggle to annotate, highlight, or copy-and-paste parts of the text without downloading extra apps. Regarding accessibility, PDFs do not address needs for changing fonts or colours. And most PDFs are designed to be printed on A4 rather than viewed on a screen – the size doesn’t change automatically to suit the device and browser, so the user will have to rely on zooming and scrolling horizontally as well as vertically. 

What about the worst-case scenario? This would be where a page has been scanned to produce a PDF. As well as exacerbating the issues described above, screen readers may not be able to get any useful information since the text will just be an image, rather than readable characters.

There is some help available: students can use Blackboard Ally to transform PDF files to a format that suits their needs. However, this isn’t 100% reliable as I found in some experiments with older, scanned PDFs. For example, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a PDF with what appeared to be a shadow effect on a title resulted in double letters, changing Week 1 to WWeeeekk 11. There were also some unfortunate effects from tables – where a cell spanned two rows, it shifted all the data in the first row into a column to the right. But anyone using a screen reader would already be having issues with these documents anyway. So wouldn’t it be nice if students didn’t have to rely on this kind of fix – if the file was already conveniently available in a form that would work for all users?

Solutions

Let’s start with the bare minimum – avoiding the worst-case scenario and making sure that PDFs are nicely structured for screen readers. When creating your own PDFs from Word, follow these general accessibility principles:

  • add alt text to images (right-click an image and select ‘alt text’)
  • avoid tables unless they are necessary (and don’t merge cells)
  • use styles for formatting headings and text to improve page navigation and give structure to the document (proper use of styles will change your life, I promise – see this Quick styles video for how to use them if you don’t already)
  • in Word, click on ‘check accessibility’ from the Review pane for additional recommendations
  • use ‘save as PDF’ or ‘export to PDF’ rather than ‘print to PDF’ to preserve the document structure and any hyperlinks (ensuring you’ve selected ‘Document structure tags for accessibility’ under Options) 
  • if you have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can also run an accessibility check with this, which will give helpful suggestions for fixing any issues

If you’re using a scanned file, have a look for an online text version. If you can’t find one, as a last resort you may be able to use optical character recognition to update scanned PDFs. Unfortunately, this will not work for mathematical notation – formulae are notoriously difficult to make accessible.

But can we do better than that? Well, why not move away from PDFs entirely? A potentially really accessible alternative (for your own content, at least) is to consider putting it in a Moodle page or book rather than locking it inside a PDF. This will have the bonus for you that you’ll be able to edit it easily whenever necessary – and if another lecturer takes over a module from you, they’ll be able to easily update this content. You can also use the selection of lovely formatting styles in the page content editor under the teardrop icon 💧 to improve the page appearance while maintaining accessibility.

Final thoughts

Throughout the Ally webinar that I mentioned at the start of this blog post, participants were sharing their institutions’ PDF policies and recommendations in the chat. These included promoting the use of ePubs, converting all PDFs to HTML, providing both PDF and HTML alternatives, or recommending linking to accessible Google docs instead. The general feeling was very much one of PDFs being on their way out – and no one sounded sad to see them go. Would you miss them?

If you’re interested in accessibility in Moodle, contact Tom Cripps (tom.cripps@port.ac.uk) for more information and support.

Credit Image: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/young-troubled-woman-using-laptop-at-home-3755755/

A one colour background with a computer in the front. On the computer are various brightly coloured graphs

Creating accessible documents – some tips

July 20, 2020 / / 0 Comments

In recent weeks, several members of staff have asked for some simple tips on accessibility of learning content. Well, for text-based material on Moodle, the best advice I can give authors is: look at the Ally report that appears next to your document – the report RAG rates your document against accessibility criteria and, where problems exist, states what they are and explains how to fix them. (Accessibility of video and audio content is something different, and will be the subject of a later post.)

If you are creating a document from scratch, however, it is best to avoid accessibility pitfalls rather than fix them later. Refer to creating accessible documents in the eLearning-tools site to find out what are the do’s and don’ts. We know what the commonest problems are at UoP: the Ally institutional report tells us! So, when writing, take note of the following five tips.

1. Ensure there is sufficient contrast between text and background

Text with poor contrast can be difficult for anyone to read, but it might be impossible to read for people with certain visual impairments. Putting red text on a green background, for example, is a really bad idea. Don’t do it! For more information, see the relevant part of the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.

2. Add a description to images and graphs

Adding a rich text description to images – often known as “alt text”, “alternative text” or “alternative descriptions” – improves comprehension for all students and is a requirement for students with visual impairments. (Adding alt text also helps students with poor network connections: text might be transmitted when images aren’t.) If you don’t know how to add alt text, check out the help in Ally.

3. If you use tables, give them headers

Tables can be a great way to organise complex information – but use them for data, not for visual layouts. And in order for students to best navigate a table, particularly if they are using a screen reader, add appropriate headers. Again, Ally provides guidance on how to do this. (If you have never used a screen reader before, try doing so on a Word document that contains a table. If that table is not properly structured, you will soon hear how confusing a table can be. In some cases, a screen reader can provide incorrect information because of the way a table has been set up.)

4. Use styles to structure your document 

Headings help all students to navigate and comprehend texts; headings are essential for screen readers. So when using Word, for example, use Word’s built-in styles for headings, sections, subsections and so on. If you don’t like how the style appears visually, change the formatting of the style. (If a piece of text has the “Normal” style applied, it doesn’t help to highlight the text and make it 20pt bold: it is still “Normal” text. If the text is a heading, apply a heading style rather than a direct visual format.)

5. Give your document a title

A PDF title is used as the document title for a PDF window or tab. A title makes it easier for a student to navigate to the PDF and to understand the purpose of the file. It is easy to fix the problem of a missing document title at the PDF level –  use Acrobat Pro. But the problem doesn’t arise if you add a document title in your word processor. (In Word, for example, select the Summary tab from File > Properties and then add a short, descriptive sentence in the Title field.) 

And that’s it! If you follow these tips, your document will be more accessible than the majority of documents on our Moodle (or on the VLEs of most other institutions – these are the commonest accessibility errors people make). 

Image Credit: Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay

All New Grackle accessibility extension for Google Docs & Slides

Grackle for accessible Google Docs and Slides

July 8, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I was chatting to an academic the other day. We were talking about the new tool in Moodle for automatically checking the accessibility of documents and providing alternative formats on-the-fly. It’s called Blackboard Ally and it’ll even give you step-by-step guidance on how to fix any accessibility issues (hint: click the meter icon for advice and guidance).

A screenshot of a Moodle site displaying the Blackboard Ally plugin and the accessibility icon next to a resource. The accessibility score is high

But wait they said, that’s fine for documents, Powerpoints and PDFs but I use Google Docs all the time, how can I improve those?

Ah, I said, you’ll need to use a bit of Grackle on that. It’s not for grouting your bathroom, it’s for fixing your Google Docs, so everyone can read them more easily.

Grackle comes in two flavours Grackle for Google Docs and Grackle for Google Slides. You just add the extensions to your Google Chrome browser and then launch Grackle from the add-ons menu as you’re creating your Google Slides or Documents.

A screenshot from Google Docs showing how to launch Grackle from the Add-ons, Grackle Slides, Launch menu item

Grackle produces a checklist of common accessibility problems and highlights any of these issues in your documents. It’s usually very straight-forward to fix them.

The most common issues are images without alternative text (descriptive titles of the images), poor contrast between text and background colours and lack of document structure / headings. These are easily fixed and Grackle will show you exactly where these problems appear in your documents.

A screenshot from Google Slides showing the Grackle accessibility advice panel.

Take a look at this website to find out more about the handy features of Grackle.

Disclaimer: Parts of this conversation may have been embellished for entertainment value…

Image Credits: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Jason Leung 

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