You may have heard of texthelp‘s literacy support tool Read&Write but did you know that they also have an education tool called Equatio which helps support the creation of accessible mathematical content online?

Equatio can help you create maths expressions without having to use any code or programming languages. You can easily add formulas and equations to your content through keyboard input, handwriting recognition or voice recording. It is also compatible with LaTeX for more advanced users. In addition, it allows some graphing input.

The Premium version of Equatio with unlimited use for Google, Windows, Mac and LMS can now be installed on UCL machines. Advice and guidance on this will follow in due course but in the meantime, we have created a wiki mini guide on what it is possible to achieve in Moodle with the free version of the Equatio Chrome Extension. This guide will be useful for anyone who would like to dip their toe in to explore what Equatio can do before installing a full version! There is also further information for anyone who is keen to learn more.

 

 

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:

 

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.

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.

The BeeLine Reader alternative format is now available on UCL Moodle for students and staff.

You and your students have almost certainly felt eye-strain from too many hours reading online, or confusion at staring at a wall of internet text and not knowing where to begin.

The BeeLine Reader provides an innovative solution. It works by adding a colour-gradient to text which allows the eye to focus and move along one line to the next. It designed to make reading online quicker and easier on the eyes. Here’s an example.

With the BeeLine Format:

Without: 

_{Example Text: Aerogel by Dr Zoe Laughlin licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0}

I personally found that it took a while to get used to the BeeLine colours, but thereafter I was able to identify key headings and sentences much more effectively.

You can try out the BeeLine Reader on your UCL Moodle course now. Simply locate a Word or PDF document, click the Ally download icon net to the file name and select BeeLine Reader. Ally will convert the document to an HTML file for you to read in your browser with the BeeLine colour gradient.

Due to COVID-19, students are likely to be reading more content online now that they don’t have access to UCL printing services. BeeLine Reader and Ally’s other alternative formats can greatly assist all students, especially those with specific needs, to effectively engage with digital content whilst supporting their health and wellbeing, so please recommend Ally’s alternative formats to your students. You can learn more about Blackboard Ally by reading the staff guide or promote it to students using the student guide.