X Close

Digital Education team blog

Home

Ideas and reflections from UCL's Digital Education team

Menu

Archive for the 'Accessibility' Category

UCL Moodle theme update – Thursday 14th March

By Eliot Hoving, on 8 March 2024

The Digital Learning Environment team have made a number of changes to the UCL Moodle theme to improve the functionality, speed and accessibility of UCL Moodle for students and staff.

The planned update is scheduled for Thursday 14th March between midnight and 4am. There will be a small outage of 15 minutes during this time. The period is a very low usage period so should have minimal impact on students and staff.

A highlight of the key improvements are outlined below.

Course search

Each course now includes a content search in the course index menu (left hand menu on course pages). Students and staff can search by content name or activity type.

 

Left hand activity menus

Book, Lesson and Quiz menus no longer show on the right side of page where they can easily be hidden by students and lost. Instead they now appear on the left hand side which should improve the readability of the navigation menu.

Footer search

The search for courses and for UCL Moodle content (known in Moodle terminology as Global search) has been moved to the footer and is now available on every page.

Course breadcrumb improvements

The course breadcrumb will now appear fixed on the top of course pages and includes the course icon for easier navigation.

Additional changes:

  • Course index menu (left hand menu on course pages) set to closed by default to avoid distracting students.
  • Notifications redesign with links to view source of notification, images, and persistence of notifications (i.e. not disappearing once read).
  • Messaging UI improvements.
  • Footer user menu.
  • Course section indentation on large screen to create visual hierarchy.
  • Colour changes to course section toggles, expand / collapse all sections button, to create better emphasis.
  • Back to top on all pages.
  • Large tables (e.g. grading) fill full available screen width.
  • Site admin links (those found most used in survey) moved to user menu.

Feedback or questions?

Please get in touch with the DLE team to provide feedback at digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

The Moodle Flexible course format is being phased out from July 25th

By Eliot Hoving, on 14 February 2024

Why is this change being made?  

The Flexible format plugin has reached end of life and is no longer supported by its maintainer. The plugin has multiple usability and accessibility bugs. The planned upgrade to Moodle 4.4 over the summer will further impact both the function and look of the plugin making the format unusable. 

What do staff need to do? 

Staff using the Flexible format should manually change their course format by the 25th July so they can ensure their course is correctly updated and so they can communicate guidance or notice to students on the course.  Note. originally the phase out date was listed as the 19th July but this has been extended.  It will now take place during the upgrade to Moodle 4.4.

 

After the 25th July, Flexible format will no longer be available and courses in this format will be automatically converted to the Topics format (now called “Custom Sections” in Moodle 4.4) to ensure that the course continues to function for students and staff. This includes course from the current academic year and those from previous years. 

You can view which course format you are using by going to your course page and clicking settings. 

Course page showing the settings option.

 

Under Course format you will see the format in use. 

Editing course format menu

Research by the Moodle UX team suggests many staff switched to the Flexible format for its visual appeal and to avoid accessibility issues in the Grid format. Recent updates to the Grid format have significantly improved its accessibility and in this respect it is now preferable to Flexible format.  Staff may be tempted to switch back to the Grid format. However, further research by the Moodle UX team shows that using images for each topic/week is not effective unless you take considerable time to design your images. In most cases, images take up space without providing meaningful information to students, or worse they are confusing to students. Staff can continue to use Grid format, however Moodle UX research shows using the Topics format (now called “Custom Sections” in Moodle 4.4) is a better approach for academic courses. 

Before (Flexible format) 

Flexible course format

 

After (Topics/Custom sections format) 

Topics course format

Changing course format will remove any section images, so staff should save these images prior to changing formats if they wish to re-use them.  

Staff can experiment with how their course looks in another course format using the 4-demo environment. 

The recommended steps for staff to complete would be to

  1. Test out new course format in the 4-demo environment.
  2. Save any section images you want to re-use on your live Moodle course (optional).
  3. Notify your students with a Moodle announcement.
  4. Change your course format from Flexible Format to the format of your choice.
  5. Re-add any section images (optional).
  6. Do a quality check.

Courses from previous academic years and snapshot should be left to automatically switch over to Topics.

Questions?  

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with the Digital Education team. 

Transcripts and closed captions in Lecturecast (ASR)

By Silvia Giannitrapani, on 20 September 2022

From 20th September 2022, media transcripts will be automatically applied to the closed captions track if they meet the 90% confidence score threshold.

We have activated automatic transcription and closed captions by default in Lecturecast as an additional supporting tool to provide fully accessible videos for our students as part of UCL’s digital strategy.

Aside from being an aid to viewers with auditory impairment, transcripts and captions can be extremely useful as a study tool.  Students often search large amounts of text using keywords to pinpoint passages of interest; Lecturecast transcripts, which are searchable and synchronised with the recording, allow similar searches of video presentations.

Lecturecast has built-in ASR (automatic speech recognition) to produce recording transcripts. Transcripts are automatically created for any media uploaded to Lecturecast and are available to viewers once a recording’s audio file has been processed.

Closed Captions use the same ASR file as the transcript but are not available if they do not meet the 90% confidence score threshold or until the ASR file has been ‘applied’ to a recording (until then the CC button in the player will be inactive).

Closed captions will NOT be automatically applied to:

  • New recordings with a confidence score lower than 90%
  • New Zoom videos automatically transferred to Lecturecast
  • Older recordings made prior to the 20th September 2022.

Closed captions can still be manually applied using the ‘apply to CC’ button in the transcript editor after review/corrections are made.

See below an example of what a transcribed lecture with closed captions would look like:

Lecturecast player with both transcripts and closed captions showing

Lecturecast player with both transcripts and closed captions showing

 

Further information and detailed instructions are available on the ‘Transcripts and closed captions in Lecturecast (ASR)’ mini guide.

Please contact lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk with any questions.

 

DigitalWhiteboards: the good, the bad and the ugly

By Samantha Ahern, on 23 August 2021

Digital Whiteboards can be a very useful addition to your digital pedagogy toolkit. However, they come with a number of considerations. The most important of these is accessibility. For this reason UCL does not have any institution-wide licences for any digital whiteboards featured.. It was felt that there were too many accessibility concerns.

If you are going to use these types of tools you need to have a good understanding of your audience and know that it will not disadvantage any of the participants. If there is a risk of potential disadvantage an equitable alternative should be used instead. For more information about alternatives see the Digital Education blog post: Alternatives for Digital Walls like Padlet

The video below (run time: 32mins) provides an overview of 5 digital whiteboards, their key features and key considerations for use:

Apps

The above video explored the browser versions of the digital whiteboards. There are apps available for some of the digital whiteboards. However, these have yet to be explored.

  • Miro and Mural
    • Mobile and tablet (iOS and Android)
    • Desktop (Mac and Windows)
    • Interactive displays
  • Mural and ConceptBoard
    • MS Teams

Accessibility Considerations

Many of the digital whiteboards present a number of challenges for users. The key areas for consideration are outlined below.

See also the central UCL guidance on Creating Accessible Content.

Structure

Due to the vastness of the digital whiteboards, they can be difficult to navigate and it is very easy to become disorientated whilst using them. It is important to carefully structure the board whether you are using it to share information or for collaborative tasks.

  • Make use of templates where appropriate
  • Use section tools to segment the board for different activity or group zones
  • Reduce the busy-ness

Colour and backgrounds

In many of the boards it is possible to change background colours and images, and use a variety of different coloured notes.

  • Avoid using colour alone to depict meaning
  • Is there a strong contrast between text and it’s background colour?
  • If using a background image, can added items clearly be seen?

Text

Much the same as any document containing text, consider the size and style of the font being used. Avoid use of italics and block capitals. Where required use bold text for emphasis.

Presenting

Where available make use of presentation mode, this will enable both yourself and your participants to focus on the specific sections of interest throughout the presentation.

Once more: Accessible documents from LaTeX

By Jim R Tyson, on 7 March 2021

This is blog outlines some changes to the advice I gave previously on how to produce accessible documents using LaTeX. The changes concern the production of PDFs for use digitally, and conversion from LaTeX to HTML.

ISD general guidance on producing accessible materials on its Accessibility Fundamentals pages still holds.

In that previous blog entry, I included as an aim to ‘get as close as possible to producing ‘tagged PDF’ or PDF/UA documents using LaTeX’. This is not currently doable. I replace it with the aim to ‘get as close as possible to producing reasonable accessible documents using LaTeX’. Given the long standing difficulties meeting accessibility requirements from LaTeX source in PDF the advice must be to produce HTML documents when accessibility is required.

In particular, I do not now recommend using the LaTeX package accessibility.sty to create tagged documents. Development of the package has been halted and the author no longer supports its use. If you are interested in the effort to produce tagged PDF from LaTeX source, then you should read this article from the TeX Usergroup newsletter, Tugboat. The author of the package mentioned in the article himself believes it is not yet ready for use in production. But, he writes, “with the tagpdf package it is already possible for adventurous users with a bit of knowledge in TEX programming to tag quite large documents”. I am not adventurous or knowledgeable enough to rise to that challenge.

With respect to mathematical content, I had previously recommended Pandoc which can convert to HTML with machine readable mathematical content. I have since looked more closely at this issue and I now prefer to use tex4ht which has some useful features, including the ability to include the LaTeX code for mathematical content in a page. It is also the package recommended by TUG. There is good documentation on the TUG website. However, tex4ht does not produce Microsoft Word documents from LaTeX, and so Pandoc is still the best tool if that is required. And Pandoc does still do the job if you don’t need extra features.

In the light of these and other issues, I have made the switch completely to using RMarkdown. This allows me to mix lightweight mark up, LaTeX mathematical code and HTML in one document. Using HTML to insert graphics allows me to include alt text which is not otherwise possible.

There is still to my knowledge no solution for presentations made with Beamer or similar packages. Whereas I previously suggested using the package pdfcomment to annotate images on slides made with LaTeX, I do not now since I have discovered that the comments are not well understood by screenreader software.

The current situation means that we can do very little to support colleagues with accessibility issues in LaTeX workflows and especially with respect to presentations and providing alternative text for images, beyond the advice we have already provided.

Accessible documents from LaTeX

By Jim R Tyson, on 22 July 2020

Some advice and information in this blog is superceded by this post.

Note: in this piece, many of the specific LaTeX examples are taken from package vignettes or documentation.  All packages mentioned have CTAN links.

ISD has published good general guidance on producing accessible materials on its Accessibility Fundamentals pages, with links to a host of useful resources.

While it is relatively straightforward to follow the guidelines and meet the standards set for users of Microsoft Office and for web developers, it is still not clear to many of us LaTeX (and I include markdown) users what we should and can (and maybe cannot) do.

I want to make a few points about the what, and then outline a few essential hows.

There are three aims here:

  1. get as close as possible to producing ‘tagged PDF’ or PDF/UA documents using LaTeX;
  2. produce HTML from LaTeX for screenreader software;
  3. produce Microsoft Word from LaTeX for consumers who need to modify a document themselves for accessibility purposes.

These aims are met by using the LaTeX package accessibility and the open source document conversion utility pandoc.

The package accessibility is found on this CTAN page.  To produced structured, tagged PDF include

\usepackage[[tagged, highstructure]]{accessibility}

in the document preamble.

I am not adressing using Beamer here: the same general considerations apply and ordinary LaTeX techniques can be used. Beamer cannot currently be used with the accessibility package mentioned above. To add alternative text to a Beamer presentation you can use the package pdfcomment from this CTAN archive page. At the moment, I can offer no good solution for dealing with existing Beamer presentations, but ISD is looking into what might be doable, including working on the compatibility of the accessibility package and Beamer. I am now using markdown to produce html presentations rather than PDF.

Before I get into specifics, I want to emphasize that where possible, we should try to provide people with documents that they can modify to suit their needs and that therefore in many cases a Microsoft Office or HTML document is more usefully accessible than a PDF. Pandoc makes conversion from LaTeX to HTML very simple and you can use LaTeX mathematics in your documents to be converted to HTML with either MathML or Mathjax options.

Text

LaTeX users producing text documents are probably already covering the need for clearly structured text with headings by using the \section{} family of commands. It is worth considering use of the package hyperref.sty so that you can create clickable cross-references in your documents and a clickable table of contents. Screenreader users will find hyperlinked sections and a clickable table of contents very useful.  Hyperref can also take care of the language metadata of your PDF. Programs that access your PDF should be able to determine the language (or main language) of the document.  One way to do this is to include this hyperref command in the preamble:

\usepackage[pdflang={en-GB}]{hyperref}

Using a sans serif font, like computer modern sans serif will help make your document easier to read. LaTeX users who are typesetting mathematics should note that what research has been published has not – to my knowledge – addressed the issue of font choice for mathematics (or logic, or linguistics, chemistry and so on). Just as important is to use a good size for text. I try to use 12pt body text and 14pt and 16pt headers. The code to change font is as follows and should be in your preamble

\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

You can use the package setspace to change linespacing in a document to 1.5, with the command

\onehalfspace

Many readers benefit from slightly wider than normal margins.  The default margins for LaTeX documents are already quite generous leading to a line-scan length that is comfortable for most readers.  If you do wish to change the margins, you should use the package geometry from this CTAN archive. There are a number of ways to use geometry.  You can use it with options in your preamble like this:

\usepackage[margin=1.5in]{geometry}

or

\usepackage[total={6.5in,8.75in},top=1.2in, left=0.9in, includefoot]{geometry}

Or you can use the command \geometry{} in your preamble like this:

\geometry{a4paper, margin=2in}

Use bold \textbf{} for emphasis and avoid italic. If you wish to modify an existing document that uses \emph{} (which we have conscientiously preferred for decades) you can include the following code

\makeatletter
 \DeclareRobustCommand{\em}{%
    \@nomath\em \if b\expandafter\@car\f@series\@nil
    \normalfont \else \bfseries \fi}
\makeatother

in the preamble of your document to change the default appearance of emphasis.

You can use the package xcolor available from this TeX archive page and command \pagecolor{Ivory} (for example) to change the background colour of a PDF for electronic use.

Hyperlinks

Make your hyperlinks clearly distinguishable from text; make them meaningful (don’t use the URL itself or text like ‘click here’; make sure that any colour contrast complies with the guidelines on this WCAG colour contrast guidance page.) If your document is likely to be disseminated in print form, then it is useful to add a short and easily typable URL for print format readers, eg https://tinyurl.com/contrastguidance.

To get a properly presented URL use code like this:

\href{http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd}{ISD home page.}

To control the colours used with hyperlinks you can include something like the following in your preamble after calling the hyperref package:

\hypersetup{
    colorlinks=true,
    linkcolor=blue,
    filecolor=magenta,
    urlcolor=cyan
}

Images and tables

The package accessibility mentioned earlier, provides a LaTeX command \alt{} which can be used to add alternative text in any float environment.  Unfortunately \alt{} from package accessibility cannot be used with the Beamer presenation package.

While good captioning for images and tables will enhance accessibility, where necessary alternative text should describe not just what data is in a table for example EU GDP by Country 2010 to 2018 but what its relevance is : EU GDP by Country 2018 to 2020 showing the trend of reduced growth over time. The reader may choose to skip the data table sometimes if the alternative text is clear enough. Also be sure to use \lable{} and \ref{} to enable screenreader software to quickly locate relevant data or images.

If you use images which are essentially decorative, then use \alt{} to let the screenreader software know that.

Mathematical content

LaTeX source code including mathematical content can produce screenreader friendly HTML via pandoc. The best result with most modern browsers (including Edge, Safari, Chrome and Firefox) is achieved using the MathJax option on conversion. The instructions to do this are on the pandoc demo page. In all examples so far tested (and we will test more, and more fully) the mathematical content was read semantically rather than typographically so that a fraction is read “fraction with denominator X and numerator y” (with some minor variation, ie sometimes reading “ratio” rather than “fraction”).

Links

Matthew Towers has written a useful page about accessibility and pdf files, although it has been overtaken by events with respect to useful LaTeX packages.

The TeX User Group (tug) web page on PDF accessibility and PDF standards.