Accessible Teaching and Learning Materials
One of the core values of the University of Manchester’s vision and strategic plan is a commitment to equality, diversity and equal opportunities for all. As such, we are committed to making teaching and learning accessible and inclusive.
Wherever possible, we recommend using accessible and inclusive design principles from the outset when developing your course materials. By designing materials to be accessible to students with severe difficulties (Accessibility-first), we include as many students as possible, whilst still recognising that specialist solutions will be required to extend accessibility in some cases.
The resources below are provided to support you in creating and updating your materials. Should you have any questions about accessibility for digital teaching and learning materials, please contact the Faculty eLearning Team.
Blackboard
Asynchronous Content
- Creating accessible Word documents
- Creating accessible PowerPoints
- Creating accessible PDFs
- Creating accessible videos
- Creating accessible recorded online lectures
- Online teaching tools accessibility comparison
Mathematical Notation
- HTML: MathJax and MathJax Accessibility
- LaTeX: It can be difficult to produce accessible content containing mathematical notation. Often LaTeX is output to PDF, which cannot be read by screenreaders. You may want to consider compiling LaTeX as HTML, using a compiler such as LaTeXML (guidance) or Pandoc (guidance) or lwarp (guidance)
- Blackboard Math Editor (MathType for Blackboard): Accessibility Features
- Microsoft Word
Synchronous Content
- Staff and Student guide: Lipreading with Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (for live/synchronous teaching)
- Zoom: Pinning Multiple Presenter Videos to Provide Video Feed of BSL Interpreters
- Live transcription in Zoom
- MS Teams has inbuilt closed captions, so no individual adjustments are usually needed
- Video Portal – where videos are published on our websites via YouTube and/or the University video portal these should be subtitled, and any automatically generated subtitles should be checked and edited before going live as these, although useful as a starting point, are not perfect and can substitute unhelpful words. You can find further information around this in a February 2021 StaffNet article and on this Subtitles and alternative media for audio/video guidance page.
Testing Content
You can use Blackboard Ally to highlight any issues, but we would also recommend testing using accessibility tools.
- Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool – highlights common accessibility errors on web pages such as low contrast, missing alt text and incorrectly ordered headings
- Microsoft Accessibility Checker
- NVDA screen reader – For Windows PCs only
- Free screen reader simulator from Silktide – works with Google Chrome web browser
Checklist
Further Information
- Working with disabled students at the University of Manchester
- Read the GOV.UK accessibility blog
- AbilityNet resources for creating accessible digital content
- Understanding new accessibility requirements for public sector bodies (GOV.UK)
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- A guide for Higher Education providers: Supporting students with vision impairment during Covid-19 by Thomas Pocklington Trust (TPT), Guide Dogs and LOOK UK
The lwarp package can be used to create accessible HTML from LaTeX.
I also create PDF from Excel, from Mathematica, from handwritten OneNote notebooks. How do I make these accessible?
You seem to assume that automatically generated subtitles only require some minor editing. It is amazing that the computer can recognize some words, but it is a very rare occurrence that a whole sentence is correct, and sometimes even I can’t figure out from the subtitles what I actually said. Producing accurate subtitles would require several hours of work for each 1 hour class.
Thanks for letting us know about lwarp, Gabor, we’ll add it to this page – we are always keen to hear about solutions and processes that are supporting the production of accessible content.
We do recognise that adding subtitles to a video can be an onerous and time-consuming task. The automated subtitles that the video portal provides are a starting point to assist with this. Some, when budget has been available, have used subtitling agencies such as AI-media. Although we realise this is not always an option.