BLE online Accessibility Forum
​9th June 2021

Introduction
Aimed at anyone involved in supporting education (academic staff and support, learning technologists, learning support, librarians, etc), the BLE Accessibility Forum provides an opportunity for Bloomsbury colleagues to exchange good, accessible academic practice. Meetings are conducted in a safe space for attendees to share, but also to seek mutual advice and help.
 
At the session held on 9th June, nearly 60 attendees from across the BLE consortium joined to hear colleagues present what they have done since the accessibility regulations were introduced in 2019 and how academic practice and institutional support has changed. The aim of this meeting was to reflect on the Accessibility agenda from three positions - the national picture, at an Institutional level and diving into two specific projects. As a group, we considered what we now need to do.

Links cited

Presentations


Setting the national scene: Kellie Mote, Subject specialist: strategy (assistive technology), Jisc 
Kellie explained how the pivot to online has proved a profound, disruptive and positive drive to ensuring that accessibility is a top priority across education. The Central Digital and Data Office within the Cabinet Office monitors public sector body accessibility. Cases are enforced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
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Jisc offers legal advice and best practice support to colleges and universities.
Mobile Apps will be included in the regulations from 23rd June for general public, though enrolled students are not included.
Institutional support: Michele Farmer, Digital Accessibility Specialist, UCL 
Michele explained how, after lobbying, her post was created to spearhead an institution-wide initiative to make all their learning content accessible.

Training and guidance across whole departments, to enable staff to make their materials more accessible, and remedy much existing content.  Procurement has been strengthened to champion inclusion and influence suppliers.   

Download Michele's presentation here.​​
Insights from student-run caption correction pilot: Sandra Partington, Senior Educational Technologist, City University London 
Sandra explained how their pilot to improve video captioning led to sustainable improvement; mostly they corrected captions in short screencasts, 15 - 50 minutes, academics created to teach online.  Often solutions were options that could be easily enabled.  A review of all their media players to get ASR running and correctable, given the many issues they can create..   Some staff want to create their own captions.   

They emphasised the value to the learning process - that the caption text can be searched, the highlight follows the speaker, the transcript as a learning tool and more. Kellie from Jisc responded that she loved the capturing of student feedback on transcripts and captions - really important to do!

Download Sandra's presentation here.
Maths accessibility project: Christine Ce, Learning Technologist and Natalie Friend-Dupreez, LSHTM
Christine showed just how challenging maths can be for those on screenreaders - and how staff using editing tools like MathsML, MathJax and MathType can render formulas, equations and symbols into readable content, embedded within documents. Natalie then explained how this worked for exams in combination with resources from NVDA Screen reader.

​Download their presentation here.
Discussion points
  • The effectiveness of Blackboard Ally depends on the function - it's very good at the basics of e.g. highlighting images without alt text and fixing or prompting to fix. However, the conversion to audio feature is really only beneficial if the original document has been formatted carefully for accessibility - otherwise, it can be really rather an annoying experience to listen to. ( e.g. constantly reading out document format additional text such as 'black square bullet point' and paragraph related info, making sentences sound awkward due to lack of full stops, etc.)
  • Feedback from students has been that many have really appreciated transcripts - not only for accessibility reasons. An important argument in favour of prioritising support for ensuring accurate transcriptions.

Suggestions/requests for future meetings
  • Regular updates on “best practice” from Jisc
  • The Microsoft Teams accessibility bot, used by 30,000 people at Imperial College London, recommends features in M365, Edge and Windows 10 that help people change the look and feel of online meetings to meet their needs
  • Examination of Brickfield, an alternative/complementary tool to Blackboard Ally​