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.

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.

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.