Digital accessibility guide

Feedback from students on what makes a good Moodle page highlighted the importance of clearly labelled content.  Students appreciate modules which are easy to navigate and organised so that resources were easy to find. Some tips:

• Organise your module into meaningful sections with unique names.
• Use descriptive titles and labels to put things in an order with related resources grouped together.
• Use meaningful names for files and activities, such as Reading for Week 1 Topic X instead of File3.
• Display resource or activity descriptions on the module page.
• Use the default font in Moodle. It is readable with enough contrast from the background.
• Use Moodle’s integrated headers.
• Make important information easy to find. Highlight the current section as live and use text styles in the text editor to add emphasis.
• Provide descriptive hyperlinks that can be understood out of context.
• Provide a staff email and phone number on each Moodle module for students to contact if they find content that is not accessible to them.
• Our Digital Accessibility guide provides advice on how to create, design and structure your content to ensure that it is accessible to your students.

Maximise your content and ensure that it is accessible to the greatest number of students. You will need to consider how you write your content and structure your documents to ensure that the content is accessible.

• Write accessible documents and use City St George's PowerPoint and Word templates.
• Add meaningful alternative (alt) text to all images.
• If you use images as teaching resources, you might find the Poet tool useful to learn how to describe your images effectively for students using a screen reader.
• All pre-recorded video and audio content should be uploaded to Kaltura MediaSpace and linked to Moodle so that students can stream the video resources. Add captions/transcripts to audio and video resources.
  • Review captions with Kaltura Reach.
  • Real-time captions in PowerPoint.
• Present content in different formats to cater for individual ways of learning. Anthology Ally features a tool that converts files into alternative formats without any additional actions from staff.
• Include an editable version of the files for students to tailor to their viewing requirements and to take notes during lectures/seminars.

• Emphasise that participation and content are of interest rather than grammar/spelling during online discussions. These can form part of your guidelines for participating in discussions. 
• Provide clear written summary feedback even when a face-to-face feedback discussion takes place. 
• Proactively manage online group discussions; offer clear tasks and outcomes. This can help students understand when and why to make a contribution.  
• For online learning activities, shorter, concretely achievable tasks can be most productive. 
• Communicate deadlines well in advance and clearly describe academic tasks.

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.

All staff can use a Moodle PlaySpace to explore different Moodle structures, features and to test different activities. Most staff have these and they are already available.
•    Log into Moodle and check if you have a PlaySpace by searching for your name in My Modules.
or
•    Request a PlaySpace using the Non-SITS Moodle module request form and choose PlaySpace as the Enrolment type in the form.