To support academic and course administration staff with creating accessible content on Moodle, Ally’s AI Alt Text Assistant has been enabled on UCL Moodle.  An ‘Auto-generate description’ option is now available in the Instructor Feedback panel for ‘Images without a description’, providing a suggestion of a possible alternative description. Instructors will remain in control to review these.

The Digital Accessibility Team recently completed testing on the tool and were impressed.  They think that this AI assistant will be beneficial for staff wishing to improve the accessibility of their Moodle courses as it provides a head start on writing image descriptions and will save time as well as improving the overall student experience.

The tool uses the latest Claude Sonnet 3.5 model from AWS Bedrock to tackle more complex images—including STEM diagrams, charts, graphs, images with embedded text, even handwritten notes.

You can review, tweak, or rewrite the suggestions as needed and nothing gets saved or made available to students until you say so. Anthology advise that this is central to their “human-first approach to AI: making sure the content stays accurate and useful.” 

Screen shot of AI Alt Text Assistant being used for the image of a bar chart.

In addition, as part of Anthology’s Trustworthy AI Approach, this feature and underlying service work to maintain user trust and ensure data privacy by not utilizing any data or information for training or regenerating models.

For more details on how to use the tool, please see Anthology’s guidance on adding image descriptions.

Anthology have released several other new Ally features for staff and students and once we have reviewed these and tested them with digital accessibility champions from different subject areas, we will share more information.

The Moodle Accessibility Tool has been restored to UCL Moodle. We were aware that some people missed it and were not comfortable with using free browser extensions, so decided to revisit it for our latest version of Moodle.

To access the tool, simply go to your Moodle profile and choose “Accessibility Tool” from the drop-down menu.

You will then be given options to personalise your colour scheme, font style, text size and readability of UCL Moodle. The readability features also include the option to add more space between lines. Your preferences are saved to your Moodle profile so you don’t have to reset these every time you log in.

Screenshot of Moodle accessibility tool options accessed from your Moodle profile.

To access more information on the Moodle accessibility tool, please access the tool and read the guidance below.

The advantage of using free browser extensions instead of the Moodle accessiblity tool is that your settings will be available across your whole browsing experience and not just for Moodle so it is worth considering these in general. For more advice on browser and other free inbuilt accessibility tools, please see our accessibility statement.

Digital accessibility materials are now available on Getting Started with Moodle!

The Digital Learning Environments and Digital Accessibility teams decided to embed skills in digital accessibility for Moodle as part of Digital Education Support’s training for new staff members who need to design and/or create Moodle courses. Materials include a section which has been added to encourage staff to begin to consider why accessibility matters for course design and creation on Moodle from both a legal and moral standpoint.

As part of this section, we have added 4 interviews with UCL students with lived experience of accessibility challenges with Moodle (with captions/transcripts) and academic case studies from 3 of our accessibility champions.

Screen shot of students being interviewed about their SoRAs and digital accessibility challenges.

More practical advice is embedded in another section on content creation, tools and resources. There is also a handy checklist for creating accessible content, advice for STEM subjects and guidance on using third party tools or external resources.

As digital education specialists, we know a fair amount about the importance of digital accessibility to promote inclusive teaching, learning and assessment already. However, we have learnt a lot ourselves from this project, especially from the inspiring students and staff we interviewed. So please do share with any colleagues you feel would benefit!

Kerry, Ben and Georgia

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.

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. 

Under Course format you will see the format in use. 

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) 

After (Topics/Custom sections 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. 

Questions?  

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

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

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.