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Digital accessibility guide

Explore how to create, design and structure your content to ensure that is is accessible to your students.

Accessible maths

We are currently testing and exploring options for the complex task of making equations more accessible to screen reader users. 

You may have noticed low accessibility scores on your Moodle modules if you are exporting LaTex to PDF. This is because the PDF is "untagged". Tags provide structure by identifying different types of content such as Headings, Tables and Links. Tagged PDFs should be available by default in 2024. You can improve the accessibility of your PDFs using the LaTeX template available from The University of York.

Our initial tests of LaTex outputs from different modules have shown that the HTML format from bookdown has performed the best for accessibility e.g. MA3662 Lecture 2 (city.ac.uk). It is worth considering RMarkdown/bookdown (University of Bath) as an alternative to LaTex as HTML works well with assistive technologies.

If you have handwritten maths notation, we recommend using Mathpix to digitise your notes to machine-readable text. It will export to a variety of formats including LaTeX. Select."Go to Snip Web" from the top bar menu once you log in to upload your notes.  

You can also use Pandoc to convert to another format, such as TeX to HTML. You can then upload the webfolder to display as a HMTL page on Moodle. To do this:

  • Add a File resource on your Moodle module
  • Drag the zipped webfolder into the Select files section
  • Right-click the folder and select Unzip
  • Right-click on the HTML file and select Set main file
  • In the Appearance section select Embed

If you need support improving or testing the accessibility of your materials, or you have discovered any tools and techniques that make the production of accessible maths materials easier, please get in touch via the Digital Accessibility - IT Self-Service Portal (service-now.com).

Moodle module accessibility statement

While you continue to improve the accessibility of your content, you can provide a brief statement highlighting your good practices and let students know what content is not accessible, what is being done about it and who to ask for support/alternative formats. This could be included at the top of your module or in the module handbook. Use Ally to identify any accessibility issues you wish to include. The example below is for a module which has untagged PDFs:


Welcome to our course!

Our good practices help you succeed in your studies. Here’s how:

  • documents use heading styles. Use these to “see the big picture”, or navigate the document. 
  • links have meaningful link text to support speed scanning.
  • text can be read out loud (images contain text descriptions and tables properly structured).
  • captions to videos have been corrected.

Barriers we know about.
PDFs may be untagged, impacting accessibility as headings, lists, tables and alternative text are not identified to assistive technology. We are working on producing alternative accessible formats by XXXX.

Notice anything wrong? 

Please get in touch with XXXX to help us make improvements to the content.

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License