We are pleased to announce that automatic captioning for MS Teams meetings is now available.

However, it is only available to those using the Desktop App version of Microsoft Teams and captions are only available in English US at present.

The automatic captions need to be enabled at an individual user level during the Teams meeting and are not saved, they are not available in a recording of the meeting.

Note: Captions cannot be activated or recorded when starting a call from a chat.

Meeting control panel

To turn on the automatic captioning whilst is a MS Teams meeting, click on the three dots in the meeting control panel.

Select Turn on Live Captions (preview, English US only). Live captions should now appear.

To turn of the live captions, click on the three dots and select Turn off Live Captions.

As the live captions are automatically generated there will be some inaccuracies. However, you can help improve the accuracy by:

• Speaking clearly, slowly, and directly into the mic. As your distance from the mic increases, captions may become less accurate.
• Avoiding locations with background noise.
• Avoiding having multiple people speaking at the same time.

Things to note:

• If someone is speaking with an accent, captions may be less accurate.
• Obscenities will be starred out.
• Teams may use a meeting’s subject, invitation, participant names, and attachments to improve caption accuracy.

More information about and how to use MS Teams is available in the UCL Teams Support Centre  including more information about live captions, in addition colleagues from the Digital Accessibility Hub have produced a Teams Accessibility Guide – Teams_AccessibilityToolsGuide_v3

References

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/use-live-captions-in-a-teams-meeting-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260

With the need to move teaching online digital accessibility becomes ever more important. Your Moodle course may become the primary means of both being taught and accessing material, and there are therefore multiple considerations that will impact upon how you design your course and its content.

• Are you aware of any reasonable adjustments students have in place? These will need to be continue to met even if the student isn’t currently on campus;
• What tools and technologies are available to your students? Some may be accessing a course from an area with poor internet connectivity and thus unable to access material such as video;
• Where are your students? They may be in different time zones, so you may want to consider use of asynchronous activities using forums, blogs, or wikis.

Developing additional material

Simple steps to make your content more accessible for everyone can be found on the Accessibility Fundamentals page. For more targeted guidance for specific kinds of content review the following sections.

Adding new or amending existing documents

• Review Blackboard Ally assessments of existing documents and amend those rated Red or Poor;
• Documents;
• Slides;
• Visuals and use of colour.

Video and audio, such as pre-recorded lectures

•  Lecturecast and other multimedia;
• Face-to-face sessions;
• Provide outline scripts in addition to the recordings;
• Consider using auto-captioning tools – Powerpoint and Google Slides.

Online seminars or group study sessions

• Lecturecast and other multimedia;
• Face-to-face sessions.

Further support

Full guidance can be found on the UCL Creating accessible content webpages. Face-to-face Digital Accessibility drop-in sessions have been suspended, however we hope to offer remote sessions.

I have heard that Inspiration mind mapping software has been bought by another company and will be continued.

A new Moodle plugin, the Accessibility Tool, will be available on Wednesday 22nd January 2020 for staff and students.

The tool allows students and staff to customise the appearance of the Moodle platform through changing Moodle’s colour scheme, font style, readability and text size. The tool can help reduce eye strain and improve concentration. Changes made using the tool only apply to the user, and only apply to the Moodle platform, not documents uploaded or stored on Moodle.

Green on Black Colour Scheme:

White on Grey Colour Scheme:

Text Size – default

Text Size – Massive text size

How to edit your accessibility preferences?

To customise your preferences, simply:

1. Log onto Moodle
2. Click on your name on the top right of Moodle to open up the user menu.
3. Select Accessibility Tool.

The release of the Accessibility Tool follows on from Digital Education’s efforts to improve the accessibility of Moodle content through training and support and releasing Blackboard Ally. See the Creating accessible content webpage for more detail.

Students and staff can be directed towards this blog post to learn about the Accessibility Tool, or alternatively to the updated Staff guide or Student guide.

If you have any questions please contact Digital Education at digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Blackboard Ally now includes a course accessibility report for every UCL Moodle course.

The course report shows you:

• a course accessibility score,
• a summary of the different types of content on your course, and
• a list of all the issues identified on your course, including an “easy to fix” summary and a “low scoring content” summary.

To view Ally’s report on your course, tutors or course admins simply go to their Moodle course and click Accessibility report under the Navigation block. You can also run the report in the Administration block by clicking Reports and then Accessibility report.

Ally helps you prioritise work and track your progress:

The report allows staff to work through a series of files with low accessibility scores or focus on a single issue that may appear in multiple files.

From the report, staff can view “easy to fix” issues, such as documents that are more easily editable (PowerPoints and Word Documents). Ally considers adding alternative descriptions to images as “easy to fix” because you can add alternative descriptions directly using Ally without the need to download, edit and upload the file. This is a nice time-saver but writing alternative descriptions can be challenging, for advice see our guide on Visuals and use of colour.

The Ally course report will also update over time to allow staff to track their progress.

Ally also flags HTML content on your Moodle course:

HTML content refers to content that is written into Moodle such as text added to a Moodle section, page, book, or label through Moodle’s text editor. Ally can help identify text with insufficient colour contrast and unused formatting that can arise when Moodle content is copied and pasted from Word. However, fixing HTML issues can be challenging so, for now, we suggest staff focus on Ally’s guidance on their documents.

If you have any questions, please see the Blackboard Ally UCL wiki or get in touch with digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

SUBJECT: Inspiration Software, Inc. Closure Notice
For over 36 years Inspiration Software, Inc has been in the business of creating,supporting and selling software tools to advance thinking and  learning skills for learners of all ages.
Over the last few years, the market and technologies needed to serve our
customers have shifted tremendously.

After extensive consideration and with regret, we have decided to stop selling our products and close Inspiration Software. Therefore, as of 25th November, we will no longer be fulfilling orders.

We have notified Student Finance England of our plans to close Inspiration Software and are working with them to ensure there is an orderly exit from the DSA sector for Inspiration 9.

We do have some good news for our customers as our DSA products will continue to be supported and sold by other companies.

• Inspiration® Maps and Kidspiration® Maps will now be a part of
Diagramming Apps, LLC. Inspiration Maps is now a DSA approved product.

• Inspiration 9 IE customers can continue to find curriculum, customer service and tech support through TechEd Marketing at inspiration@techedmarketing.com or 01672 560387.

A dedicated Inspiration 9 support website for users will be launched in November.

For the foreseeable future, existing users of Inspiration 9 for Windows will be able to continue to use it as normal in their studies.

Inspiration 9 for Mac users are likely to face issues if they choose to upgrade their current operating system to Catalina, which doesn’t support 32-bit applications.

If you have any further questions on this matter, please do not hesitate to reach out to Reeza Awoodun (reeza@inspiration.com).

We thank you all for your support in recommending Inspiration 9 over these past years.
Yours sincerely
Mona Westhaver
President & Co-founder
www.inspiration.com