Tel Tales

Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Category: Accessibility (Page 1 of 2)

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/

Screengrab of new Moodle 4.0 interface

The road to Moodle 4.0

September 1, 2022 / / 2 Comments

The Technology Enhanced Learning team, probably to a fault, doesn’t usually talk much about our in-house development of Moodle. A new version appears around the same time each year, bringing with it improvements either in performance, security or interface, or sometimes all of those. We also understand that these updates can occasionally be unwelcome, especially if things that worked before are now different for seemingly no reason. Those changes can be frustrating, to say the least.

What I’d like to do here is lift the lid a little on the Moodle development process, to highlight some of the work that goes into these yearly updates at the University, and also explain some of the choices we have had to make this year in order to improve the experience for as many of Moodle’s users as possible.

TEL’s input into Moodle

Moodle comes as a complete off-the-shelf system. It’s a working system from the moment it’s installed, containing many useful features and a serviceable visual appearance. Why, then, does the University need to do anything to Moodle before it gets used for learning?

The work we do to the off-the-shelf version of Moodle can broadly be categorised into three areas:

    • Reliability – Ensuring the system is available for use by students and staff at all times, with as little disruption as possible. This involves working with IS on the database solution and making sure we can respond quickly to surveillance of various systems in order to prevent system downtime (this is especially beneficial around exam time).
    • Usability – Ensuring the system meets all the legal and ethical requirements placed on the University. We want to provide a system that is accessible and usable to all. This means we include features such as a branded visual theme, provide various developments around accessibility, and tweak the interface based on feedback from users in the prior year.
    • Suitability – Installing plugins and developing bespoke features that are either
      • Expected (where similar features have existed on the VLE in the past and removing them would cause an unreasonable burden on staff);
      • Desired (new features or services that will enhance existing teaching or perhaps provide new opportunities); or
      • Required (perhaps because a feature has become integral to teaching or is a requirement of a course, school, or professional body).

The development timeline

The TEL team first started discussing Moodle 4.0 slightly before the software was initially scheduled to be released, in December 2021.

Unfortunately, the initial, stable, version of Moodle 4.0 was not released until 9 May 2022. As you can imagine this delay was far from ideal. Whilst we could start some development on early code, the platform changed often – and sometimes drastically – so we held off as long as we could. This five-month delay was enough for us to question whether we would have to stay on the last version of Moodle for another year.

Normally a May–August development window would not worry us too much, but Moodle 4.0 had changed enough from the previous version that we wanted to look at our own theme, plugins and all the extras that we had added to Moodle over the years and give it all a review and refresh. We knew all of this would take time, so we were keen to get going as soon as we reasonably could.

We made the choice to develop a new theme, removing any technical debt from previous years. We also decided to review all plugins/extra features that we have added over the years: we wanted to know whether the requirement for them still existed, and in some cases whether a better solution existed. After all, if Moodle itself was getting an overhaul it seemed timely for us to review our own work!

Additions by TEL for the UoP Moodle 4.0 release

After several discussions we identified what we needed to develop over the standard Moodle release in the 4.0 upgrade. These developments included:

1. New branded visual theme

To make the most of the new interface in Moodle 4.0 we needed a new theme. The theme is what you see when you log in to Moodle – and for many people this is what they think of when they think of Moodle.

This was to be a brand new start. Rather than starting with the old theme and undoing things we did not want, useful features in the old theme would be brought over to the new theme. Many of the other features listed below also required development in the theme to support them: the feedback and accessibility tools are good examples of this.

2. Improved tabbed site navigation

We identified that some of our help and support pages could be improved, and they were less visible than they should be, so we decided to overhaul them. The first part of this work was to put our existing support resources in their own tab and then create more directed support, depending on whether the user was a student or a member of staff.

Moodle users will also notice that links to useful resources are now also on a page of their own, rather than being available via a dropdown. We made this change because we felt it was necessary to provide some context around the links – previously, it was not always obvious what resources the links were sending users to. We hope this new layout will encourage users to explore some of the great resources we have available.

In addition to these tabs, we are also working on an additional feature that gives users insight into their use of Moodle. The “My Activity” tab will give facts, figures and insight into a user’s own data, so they can more easily see how they engage with the platform. This feature is currently still being developed but should be ready around the start of term.

3. Direct in-Moodle user support/feedback feature

We identified the need to implement a way for users to view contextualised help, report problems or make suggestions from within Moodle itself.

Such a feature would help us in three ways:

    • First, to make it easier for users to access self-help while using Moodle through a bank of context-sensitive frequently asked questions. Many queries in Moodle are similar, so if users can find answers to their questions immediately then it will improve their experience (as well as reducing the burden on us, where we repeatedly provide the same information).
    • Second, to gather information directly from users at the time of the problem occurring. This allows users to log issues in a more frictionless way and also allows problems to be identified and resolved in a more timely manner.
    • Third, a solution such as this allows us to automatically take the context of the user (name, role, department etc) and the page they were on (url), and submit it with the support ticket and their description of the issue. This will help to reduce the amount of time that our support helpdesk has to spend gathering that contextual information around a problem, reduce the usual to-and-fro with end users, and allow tickets to be investigated and resolved much more efficiently.

After analysing the problem, we developed a system whereby a user can click the help button from anywhere in Moodle, fill in a few simple details, and have a Servicedesk ticket logged and assigned to the correct team within seconds. Furthermore, all of the details of where the user was and what they were doing at the time are logged and included in the ticket. There will no longer be uncertainty about which module is not working or which page resource is missing crucial links.

4. Develop Moodle for personalised learning

The Dashboard is an area that, up until Moodle 4.0, was primarily for the display of enrolled modules and courses. Moodle 4.0 introduces a separate courses page, which frees up a lot of room on the dashboard to provide more information and insight into the content and resources a user has available to them. The focus of the dashboard is now on personalised learning, offering insights that aim to improve a student’s engagement – for example, showing a student a list of resources they haven’t viewed that are currently popular with others in their cohort. We have introduced or developed several other widgets that aim to achieve a similar level of personalisation, and intend to introduce more as the year progresses.

We have developed and integrated a new user bookmarking system. This allows any user to simply “star” any resource or page in Moodle, where it will be added to their personal bookmarks list, accessible from almost anywhere in the system. We hope users will employ this feature both as a way to keep track of useful pages in the long term, and also highlight resources they wish to look at later in the short term.

This year we are providing space to add system notices to the dashboard, and have made it easier for our student survey links to be added (in past years this was a process that involved some manual work; it is now a form on the site admin section in Moodle). Students will be able to see links to the SITS ‘Student View’ system to view their timetable and other personal information.

These features combine to increase the usefulness of the space to users. We have also changed the layout from a single column to an adjustable grid, which should allow more flexibility when users choose what items they want to see on this page.

5. Enhanced accessibility tools

The existing off-the-shelf accessibility tools were now several years old and we identified the need to improve the offering. After looking at the Moodle plugins available for these types of tools it became clear that the best experience for users would be if we developed something in-house, as these types of tools benefit from being closely tied in with the Moodle theme. We have therefore been able to create and add the following features this year:

    • Three colour schemes: a light, dark and a dark high contrast theme
    • The ability to remove problematic motion from the interface
    • The ability to revert to non-brand fonts if required
    • The ability to force underline all links in the course content
    • The ability to alter the interface for more accessible controls (affix the in course menu to the top of the screen when scrolling).

These features are all created specifically for the University of Portsmouth Moodle and they work because of the custom theme we have produced. The way these have been developed will also allow for easy expansion and improvement of these features based on any feedback we receive during the course of the next year.

6. Moodle Baseline tabbed block

Moodle Baseline has continued to provide a standard for all Moodle modules and, following the introduction of the in-course or secondary menu in Moodle 4.0, we decided that this would be the best place to house the Moodle Baseline options. Users will now find reading lists, assessment information and the rest of the content from the tabbed block in this secondary menu. Moving the information to separate tabs allows the course content to come first, with administrative information still easily available, but not taking up screen space all the time.

7. Module level accessibility statements

In 2018 the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations were introduced. As part of this legislation we were charged with providing a site-wide accessibility statement to communicate which areas of our website are fully accessible, which areas need work and, most importantly, what work we were doing to improve the areas that did not meet the standards set.

Supporting this statement in a virtual learning environment, which contains largely user-generated content, has proven to be extremely difficult for all universities. Although we provide advice and training, we have a challenge in publicly stating that all of our content meets any specific standard and, without checking every site every day, we simply are not in a position to know whether we are meeting specific standards.

This is where the module level statements come in: this year, in addition to the platform-level statement, we have provided an accessibility statement for each module, editable from within the module settings by those who are producing the content itself. This will allow content producers to communicate which areas of their content are accessible, which aren’t, and how users can gain accessible versions of any content that they are unable to access.

It is important to note that in the 2022–23 academic year there is no expectation that these statements will be modified by staff. If staff do want to modify the statement then they can certainly do so, and we would encourage them to make the statements as useful as possible for users.

8. Add the ability for TEL to show user notices to Moodle users

When the pandemic hit in 2020, we found we lacked ways to easily communicate more than a few words to Moodle users via Moodle itself. The implementation of a more robust notification system was essential. We now have the ability to post notices:

    • On the front page (login page) of Moodle (x1)
    • On the dashboard (x2)
    • In an ‘emergency’ news banner notification either only on the dashboard or site wide (an option that is most often used if Turnitin or other assessment platforms experience an outage that affects submissions)

9. Updated and revised rollover mechanism

Many of you will be familiar with the rollover mechanism. This is a bespoke development by the TEL team to allow administrators to rollover modules for the new academic year with the click of a button. This feature had to be updated to take into account the changes from last year to this year, including changes in course formats and the offering of a different set of options for non-standard modules.

The rollover mechanism now includes a new “Quick roll” feature, which allows Online Course Developers to roll-over large numbers of modules in a single batch, with minimal manual input required. Not only is it quicker than before, but by interfacing more closely with SITS the mechanism also ensures data is more accurate, meaning fewer enrolment queries at the start of term.

That’s not all!

I have not mentioned every addition – we have made many little adjustments, from adding header images to the top of course pages to ensuring Moodle communicates with our student systems correctly. This means the Moodle you see and use has been created for you as much as possible.

Inevitably, some people will be unhappy with how Moodle now behaves or how certain things have been implemented: Moodle has to work for everyone, which in turn means it is probably no one’s perfect system. Nevertheless, although we shall concentrate on bug fixes for the next few weeks, development of all of these features will be ongoing and you can expect to see new functionality throughout the year. Please keep feeding back to us on your experience of Moodle. We can – and do – make changes based on your feedback.

Various device's PC, tablet and mobile, plus another mobile being held in a hand. All have the same image Username, Password and Sign In. The other hand is positioned to touch Sign In button

Digital Accessibility in Teaching and Learning – What is it?

March 15, 2021 / / 0 Comments

‘Digital Accessibility’ or ‘Accessibility’ is a heated topic at the moment. Public sector bodies like us have the obligation by law to comply with Accessibility Regulations 2018 with a series of deadlines to meet. It is also an important part of our University Vision 2030 and Strategy 2025 where it says we should ‘respect and celebrate diversity and equal opportunity through an inclusive culture’. 

But what does ‘Digital Accessibility’ mean and how does it apply to us in teaching and learning? 

Before we look into that, let’s first find out what is ‘Accessibility’. 

What is ‘Accessibility’?

Accessibility is about removing disability. 

What is disability? Disability happens when there’s a barrier between people and their environment. It is commonly seen as a condition or a problem of the body or mind (impairment) that requires medical treatment. However, UK Equality Act 2010 recognised and acknowledged that disability, or barriers, can be caused not just by the impairment(s) but also by the way society is organised. This is defined in the social model of disability. According to the social model of disability, these barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets, or they can be caused by people’s attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can’t do certain things [3]. For many people with impairment(s), the main barrier they experience does not stem directly from their bodies, but rather from their unwelcome reception in the world, in terms of how physical structures, institutional norms, and social attitudes exclude and/or denigrate them. [4]

This is where ‘Accessibility’ plays a part. 

Accessibility is about finding and dismantling these social barriers, creating an environment that adapts to the needs, ideally as early as possible in the process. For example: accessible toilets, lifts, wheelchair ramps, braille on printed materials, even simple things like left-handed scissors etc. When barriers are removed, disabled people can be independent, autonomous and equal in society.

Accessibility supports and celebrates inclusion; it should be ok to be different, with impairment(s) or not. It is about ending exclusion and oppression so that people with impairment(s) are not required to change who they are in order to be entitled to the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. 

What is ‘Digital Accessibility’? 

Digital accessibility is ‘Accessibility’ in digital media. 

It is about making digital products like websites, mobile apps and other digital tools and technologies accessible to everyone. It is the ability for all users to have an equal opportunity to access and benefit from the same services or digital products, regardless of any impairment(s) they may have. 

So, what is ‘Digital Accessibility’ in Teaching and Learning? 

Digital accessibility in teaching and learning is ‘Accessibility’ in digital teaching and learning products – the courses’ contents and activities, and the service we offer to our students.

It means all students are given access to all teaching materials and the ability to participate in all teaching and learning activities, regardless of any impairment(s) they may have. 

Taking digital accessibility on board in teaching and learning is very much about understanding that, if we’re creating inaccessible learning materials or activities, then effectively we’re responsible for creating barriers. These kinds of resources often lack structure, written and designed with a set of assumptions. It is about having the realisation when we create resources that fail to accommodate a certain group of students, effectively we have disabled them.

What ‘Digital Accessibility’ is not.

Now we know what digital accessibility is and its role in teaching and learning, let’s have a look at what it is not.

Misconception 1: digital accessibility is just about disability.

It’s not. Digital accessibility in essence is about inclusiveness and universality. 

It’s about having good design and making resources that can be used by as many people as possible.

I believe every student, in fact, everyone was once in one or more of the situations below; maybe even more than once:

  • In different cultural environments e.g. in a foreign country 
  • In a noisy environment or a public place where you can’t hear properly
  • Using many different devices e.g. desktop computers, mobile phones, tablets etc
  • Are temporarily or situationally impaired e.g. from injuries or with caring responsibilities
  • Have age-related cognitive decline.

In these situations, everyone can benefit from the flexibility brought by materials and activities designed with digital accessibility in mind. In fact, many of us use elements of them without particularly thinking about them. We might think that only disabled students use assistive technology, but, in fact, we are walking around with a kind of assistive device in our pockets all the time – our mobile phones. Have we not used and enjoyed its built-in accessibility functions like voice over, browser enlarge, colour changes, speech recognition, screen reader etc ever? When digital accessibility is put in place, everyone benefits including ourselves; inevitably everyone grows old and will eventually be impaired by age. So, essentially, we are just helping ourselves.

This video from the Web Accessibility Initiative shows a variety of ways that content produced to be accessible is beneficial for all users regardless of their ability or disability.

Misconception 2: digital accessibility is not my problem. 

Yes, it is. Digital accessibility is everyone’s responsibility. 

We’re all in this together. As mentioned before, it is required by law and it is the University’s Vision. More importantly, as an educational institution, we are responsible. We are the teachers and role models, what you do makes a difference. We can change and have the responsibility to lead the change in society’s perceptions and practice. We can create a society that accepts and celebrates that everyone is unique, recognises and encourages the strength and talents of people with impairment(s).

The whole purpose of providing education is to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society; to impact and change lives. Digital accessibility helps us fulfil that purpose. It provides us with an opportunity for education to reach everyone who needs it, in a way that can benefit as many people as possible. It gives us an opportunity to improve our teaching and learning materials to fulfil their purpose of existence. It is our responsibility to make that change. 

Misconception 3: digital accessibility is hard. 

No, it’s very easy. All you need is empathy and consideration. 

What you do at the start makes it easier at the end. Follow these good practices when designing and adding your content. When you start doing it, you will realise that most of them are really just common sense! Information should be consistent and easy to find, easy to read, and easy to navigate; documents need good structure and colour contrast; images and graphs are described well; videos have captions or transcriptions etc, just to name a few. It is all a matter of common sense. eLearning Tools website has all the support and information you need to create this kind of accessible content.

Remember that when you design and create your content with digital accessibility in mind, you will not only create better learning materials, you will have content that can be more easily reused and repurposed – saving a lot of time in the future!

References

  1. Codeacademy: What is Digital Accessibility
  2. Equality and Human Rights Commission: UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
  3. Social model of disability
  4. Rethinking disability: the social model of disability and chronic disease

Credit Image:Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Designers should always keep their users in mind

From compliance to culture

January 18, 2021 / / 1 Comment

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) provides clear legal requirements for universities in terms of making learning accessible for all students. In turn, most universities have begun a journey towards compliance with PSBAR. This is a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily; at least, not by itself.

Alistair McNaught, a leading champion of accessibility and inclusion for the HE sector, argues that we need to move from an approach based on compliance to one of culture change, a culture in which we minimise barriers to learning and maximise the benefits of different learning technologies. As educators we need to ask: who is consuming our resources, what are their needs, and how can we most effectively meet those needs?

The need for us to shift from a compliance-based approach to one of developing a culture of accessibility maturity is clear when you compare a university virtual learning environment (VLE) with the other types of website covered by PSBAR.

A typical public sector body – a local council, for example – will often run a website that has content that rarely changes, is primarily text-based, and is under the control of a small team of web experts. A university VLE, on the other hand, typically has thousands of academics with a range of skill sets uploading a bewildering variety of content and pointing to third-party tools on a daily basis. A compliance-only approach for universities is thus extremely challenging. In the worst case, a compliance-only approach could lead to unintended consequences that are entirely counter-productive (and there are anecdotal accounts of this happening): an institution could choose to be “compliant” with PSBAR by dispensing with digital diversity and reverting to paper handouts. If they did this it wouldn’t matter if the handouts were poor-quality, smudged, third-generation photocopies – because the accessibility standards don’t apply to printouts. This “compliant” approach would be bad for all students but it would hugely disadvantage disabled students – which is, of course, the opposite of what PSBAR hopes to achieve.

McNaught visited UoP a few years ago when he worked for Jisc as their Accessibility Subject Matter Expert. He played the role of a “mystery shopper”, acting as a disabled student who was trying to access the University VLE, website, and other online systems. He is now an independent consultant and has recently posted some thought-provoking articles about accessibility maturity in an educational context. Throughout 2020 he worked with the charity AbilityNet to build on and update the old TechDis Accessibility Maturity Model. Together they have developed two versions of a maturity model: an institutional model and a course/module model. For anyone interested in issues of digital accessibility and inclusion, it is worth following McNaught’s upcoming series of blog posts.

At the close of 2020, McNaught also published a couple of related posts (part 1 and part 2) that provided an explicit example of how PSBAR can lead to unintended consequences. The example involves something with which UoP and many other universities have been grappling since we all increased the amount of video being produced: captioning.

At face value, the legislation requires us to provide 100% accurate captions for deaf people. A risk-averse institution that lacks the budget to create “compliant content” might remove videos from the VLE. This unintended consequence would have a negative impact on all students, including disabled students. McNaught argues that an approach rooted in accessibility maturity would take into account context, and would provide a roadmap for improving video accessibility.

For example, many courses provide most of their content as text. Alongside this, some tutors provide a video version of the content. If the video explanation provides no more information than a text alternative, then the video does not require captions. It’s only if a video introduces new information, not explicit in the text, that the issue of captioning arises. So that’s one lesson: depending upon the context, videos can be an alternative format.

Here is another example of where context is important, and where the guiding principle must be a pedagogic purpose. Imagine a video of a debate. The video might be used for different teaching purposes: to examine rhetorical devices, to study non-verbal communication, to illustrate legal arguments, to highlight technical recording considerations … there are many possible uses. And the best accessibility solution for each use case might well be different! Captioning might not be the best solution. Thus if you provide a caption and then tick the box marked “compliant video” you might nevertheless have created a barrier, not a solution, to learning needs.

Or consider a video of a long-winded, rambling, needlessly prolix interview: a summary consisting of a few bullet points might well be a better solution – for all students – than captions.

Context is important. As McNaught writes: “digital accessibility is about culture change … we need to steer a path between legalism and realism, a path that raises awareness without raising hackles and that encourages skills rather than excuses”. Steering that path won’t be easy – but the destination makes the effort worthwhile.

Credit image: Photo by fauxels from Pexels

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

A back view of a man and woman holding hands floating in the sky

A Dreamer in TEL

June 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Hello, I’m Abigail Lee. Many of you know me as an online course developer (OCD) in the Faculty of Technology. I am still an OCD in Technology, but now, also an OCD in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), working part-time in both departments. Yes, it’s crazy and it’s mad. I am mad. Lots of consideration went through my mind before accepting this job: family, health and also being very comfortable with my ‘part-time’ life. However, when I found out that this job is about accessibility, I jumped right in. 

I am a dreamer. I believe dreams can come true. Helping students by giving them the best learning experience and the environment we can offer to inspire them; giving them this little extra helping hand for them to grow and, to realise their dreams is my passion. Accessibility is all about that. It is not just a standard. It is a way for us to realise Inclusive Learning, a way to give everyone the same opportunity to chase their dreams and realise them. Everyone means everyone. It doesn’t matter what ability or disability you have, what background you are from, who you are, where you live, how little time you have; everyone. As long as you have the heart to learn, desire to chase your dreams, you can.

I attended the Sticky RoadShow workshop in June 2018. From the workshop, I have a deeper understanding of the kind of challenges our disabled students face every day just to be ‘normal’, just to access information that many have taken for granted. We often overlook their needs and their struggle because they are the ‘minority’. However, according to the new Government data, “there are now 13.9 million disabled people in the UK. That means disabled people now make up 22% of the UK population – more than one in five.” So, in fact, for every five of us, there is at least one who is disabled. In addition, we have hidden disabilities that are often overlooked or ignored and older people with changing abilities due to ageing. We have to acknowledge this issue, remove barriers and help to solve it by making information accessible. Now that the Accessibility Regulation is in force, there is even more reason to do so.

Moreover, in many cases, improving accessibility benefits all students, not only our disabled students. Students who are carers, students who are working full time, students who are geographically restricted, students with English as a second language, even those who just prefer different ways of learning are benefited. The list is endless, as you will see from some of the examples below:

  • Example 1: A digital copy of a document instead of a scanned one benefits disabled students by being accessible through screen readers. But, that’s not the only group that is benefited by it. In fact, it has made the resources more usable to all students. It made the document easier to read, students can search through the document, find specific content, copy and paste sections of the document, and so on. All these are useful to any student in their learning.
  • Example 2: A good structured document supports screen readers and helps visually impairment students. And, it makes the document more user-friendly to all students. Its additional structure makes it easier to navigate, to work through and process the content. Thus, improve the understanding of the information the document is trying to convey and enhance the learning process.
  • Example 3: Video with captioning or transcripts help students with hearing impairments. However, it also benefits all students by allowing them to search through the video and find specific parts for research or revision, to watch video in noisy environments, or to understand difficult jargon or terms etc. This is especially useful for students who are not native speakers.
  • Example 4: Images with quality descriptions not only helps students with visual impairments, it helps clarify the content and purpose of the image to all students. It also makes the image searchable.
  • Example 5: A fully accessible and responsive website not only helps disabled students navigate around the site and adapt the website to their learning needs, it also benefits any students who just prefer different styles of learning. On top of that, it is mobile-friendly. That means it is easy for all students to consume content anywhere, on any platform – which promotes distance learning and flexible learning. An accessible website also means alternative formats are provided. These alternative formats benefit all students; audio alternative format can be used during a commute or on a run, alternative translated version can help students who are not native speakers and so on.

          I can go on forever but I think you’ve got the point.A photo of a woman taken at sunset, so that the image is a silhouette against the orange and grey of the sky

“ For people without disabilities, technology makes things easier.

  For people with disabilities, technology makes things possible. “

(Radabaugh, 1988)

This is an old quote but it sums up my work and what I dream to archive in TEL perfectly – using technology to make things better, easier, and possible; to enhance accessibility and benefits all. 

It is our University’s vision to become the UK’s TOP Modern University and one of the TOP 100 Young University in the world by 2030. A modern university is an accessible university. A young university should be accessible. This is our dream. I am new to TEL and there is still a lot to learn but hopefully, I can play a small part in contributing to make our dream come true. 

Credit Image: Photo by mohammed alherz on Unsplash

Credit Image: Photo by Isabella Mariana from Pexels

Graphic to illustrate blog post

NEW Add-on for Grackle – Now Available for all UoP Students and Staff

November 28, 2019 / / 0 Comments

You’ll be pleased to hear that Grackle – an accessibility checker for Google Docs, Slides and Sheets – is now easily available for you to use when creating documents so that everyone can enjoy your content.

Grackle is simple to use – login to your UoP Google account, select the Google document that you want to check for accessibility issues. Once you have your document open, select Add-ons from the toolbar and then Grackle > Launch from the drop-down menu.

Screenshot displaying 'Add-on' location

Grackle’s accessibility checker panel will then appear on the right-hand side of your screen and  produces a checklist of common accessibility problems and highlights any of these issues in your documents. 

The example below illustrates where Grackle has identified missing Alt text. However, the add-on offers so many more useful tips to improve the accessibility of your documents.

Grackle checklist screenshot

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

boy singing on microphone with pop filter

Accessibility: Investigating Automatic Media Transcription

November 4, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Background

Accessibility is now an important aspect of digital learning. We need to take accessibility seriously both to satisfy the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and the requirements recently brought into law. Of course, digital learning often encompasses a wide variety of resources in a range of media. The challenge of bringing all these resources in line with regulations is considerable, both on a technical and organisational level. Fortunately technology can help to ease the burden, with a number of integrations available to help examine and fix content-related accessibility issues.

One particularly large challenge, and one that is particularly helped by the use of technology, is video. While it is possible to watch and transcribe a video manually, when faced with a library of nearly 8000 hours of video, the challenge becomes insurmountable! This is where technology can step in: it can automate the process and reduce the number of person-hours required.

For quite some time, YouTube has been able to automatically caption videos. In the past, however, the transcriptions produced by the algorithms have often been the subject of ridicule for the sometimes bizarre and hilarious interpretations. Thankfully things have moved on considerably, with increasingly advanced AI and machine learning helping to increase the reliability of computer transcription.

For the majority of our video content, we rely upon a home-spun system composed of a Wowza Streaming Media server and a custom-built front-end to manage content and metadata. While this system has the facility to allow subtitles to be added, it does not feature any way to automate the process of creating transcriptions. For this reason, we are currently investigating our options, with a view to either hosting our video content elsewhere or improving our current provision by implementing auto-transcription facilities.

The contenders

We have been investigating a few services to judge the accuracy of the transcription. We have tried each service with the same videos to see how accurately they can transcribe a variety of media content. Below are some details of three services we are currently examining.

Mozilla Deepspeech

An open-source option that can be run on-premises, Deepspeech requires a certain amount of technical skill in deploying and managing Linux servers. Being open-source and community driven, the more effort you put in, the better the output will be. It allows you to train your own neural network to increase the accuracy of transcriptions, so theoretically it would be possible to improve your transcription accuracy, although it may require a large investment of time and effort. As we are simply testing the out-of-box abilities, we have used the default models provided by the developers.

Google Speech to Text Engine

This is an API made available through the Google Cloud Platform. The service itself is used by YouTube to provide auto-transcriptions of uploaded videos. While using it through YouTube is free at the point of upload, utilising the API in your own projects can cause costs to rack up quickly (and remember that we have 8000 hours of video sitting on our servers, waiting to be transcribed). The pricing options are transparent, however, so we can easily calculate the cost of transcribing all of our existing content.

Amazon Transcribe

This cloud service is utilized by Amazon’s virtual assistant “Alexa” and works in a similar way to Google’s offering, with transcription charged based upon the number of seconds of content transcribed. The service is used by the content capture service Echo 360 to transcribe material. By our rough calculations, transcribing our 8000 hours of content through Amazon would be a little cheaper than through Google. 

The results

Here are some example transcriptions of one short piece of video content. 

Mozilla Deepspeech

so wee al seend apisode of the dragon tf dend where the ontroprenel holks in with a really great idea good looking numbers the dragons e recing out their hands and then one of the dragons pipes up let see your contract and os soddenly ontrepenelox exposed because they thought they had a contra they don’t what they have iser some verbal understanding your colercial contracts are really important to you business mey should be kept clear concise so the point to add value when seeking in bestment wor in ed if you come to sellin a business also commercial contracts areningportant to the void conslote because both sides of the contract should now wot their obligations are a more their rights are

Google Speech to Text (through youtube)

so we’ve all seen episodes of the Dragons Den where the entrepreneur walks in with a really great idea good-looking numbers the Dragons are eating out their hands and then one of the Dragons pipes up let’s see your contract and all the sudden the entrepreneur looks exposed because they thought they had a contract they don’t what they have is a some verbal understanding your commercial contracts are really important to your business they should be kept clear concise to the point to add value when seeking investment or indeed if you come to sell the business also commercial contracts are really important to avoid conflict because both sides of the contract should know what their obligations are and what their rights are

Amazon Transcribe

So we’ve all seen episodes of the Dragon’s Den, where the entrepreneur walks in with a really great idea, good looking numbers that dragons reaching out their hands. And then one of the dragons pipes up. Let’s see your contract over something. The entrepreneur let’s exposed because they thought they had a contract. They don’t. What they have is a some verbal understanding your commercial contracts of really important to your business. They should be kept clear, concise to the point. Add value when seeking investment, or indeed, if you come to sell the business. Also, commercial contracts are really important to avoid conflict because both sides of the contract should know what their obligations are, what their rights on.

Conclusion

As you can see from the output above, while the Mozilla software makes a good guess at a lot of the content, it also gets confused in other parts, inventing new words along the way and joining others together to form a rather useless text that does not represent what has been said at all well. I’m sure its abilities will improve as more time is spent by the community training the neural network. However, Google and Amazon clearly have the upper hand – which is not surprising, given their extensive user base and resources. 

While Amazon Transcribe makes a very good attempt, even adding punctuation where it predicts it should appear, it is not 100% accurate in this case. Some words are mis-interpreted and others are missing. However, in the main, the words that are confused are not essential to the understanding of the video.

Google Speech to Text makes the best attempt at transcribing the video, getting all words 100% correct, and even adding capital letters for proper nouns that it clearly recognises. There are options to insert punctuation when using the API, but this feature is not available in the YouTube conversion process.

From this (preliminary and admittedly small) test, it seems you get what you pay for: the most expensive service is the most accurate and the cheapest is the least accurate. Also, the headline cost of using Google Speech to Text on 8000 hours of video is not necessarily accurate. We need to remember that not all of this content is actively used: this is an accumulation of 8 years of content, and it’s possible that only a small fraction of it is still actually being watched. We now need to spend some time interrogating our video statistics to determine how much of the old content really needs to be transcribed. 

The best value compromise, if we choose to continue to host video ourselves, may be to transcribe all future videos and any that have been watched at some point in the last year. In addition, it should be possible to provide an ‘on-demand’ service, whereby videos are flagged by users as requiring a transcription at the click of a button. Once flagged, the video is queued for transcription and a few minutes later a transcription is made available and the user alerted.

Video title: Warner Goodman Commercial Contracts.
Copyright: Lynda Povey ( Enterprise Adviser) nest, The University of Portsmouth.

Image Credit: Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

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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