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Technology Enhanced Learning Team
  1. Technology Enhanced Learning Team
  2. Enhance Your Teaching
  3. Digital Accessibility

Digital Accessibility

  • Do you teach online using MS Teams? 
  • Do you use QMplus in your teaching? 
  • Do you use MS PowerPoint in your teaching? 
  • Do you use videos / images / audio in your teaching? 

If the answer to any of the above is yes, or if you are not involved in teaching yourself but provide support in developing teaching materials, then you should be aware of digital accessibility principles. This page outlines the wider benefits of considering accessibility when creating digital materials, and provides links to other resources that will assist you in making your teaching materials accessible. 

What is Digital Accessibility?

EU law and the UK Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) states that all the digital content created for teaching must be accessible to students who have any disability or accessibility requirements. These regulations have further strengthened the rules around digital accessibility, i.e. the ability of a website, mobile application or electronic document (e.g. MS Word / PowerPoint / Excel and PDFs) to be easily navigated and understood by a wide range of users, including those users who have visual, auditory, motor or cognitive disabilities. 

It also includes materials provided on QMplus. An accessible content means the one which can be read / accessed / operated by 'assistive' or 'enabling' technologies. The World Wide Web Consortium has developed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for web accessibility. These guidelines explain how to create accessible documents, multimedia and other content. It is based on four principles of digital accessibility, according to which content should be:

  1. Perceivable - e.g. images and videos should be accompanied by text descriptions
  2. Operable - e.g. websites should be designed so that people can engage with it only using a keyboard
  3. Understandable - e.g. text should be organised with headings
  4. Robust - e.g. websites should be designed to work with assistive technologies and other user tools.

How can you make your content accessible?

Creating content

We have created two QMplus areas to help you understand the wider benefits of considering accessibility when creating digital materials. 

  1. Digital Accessibility and Learning Materials - this course introduces you to digital accessibility concepts, tips on creating accessible teaching content, and further information about some of the accessibility features of our systems.
  2. Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit - this course covers information on Brickfield, the accessibility checker that is integrated into QMplus. It is also for those who would like to sign up to synchronous or asynchronous training on accessibility (web, media, document). 

Converting documents

Sensus Access allows students and staff to automatically convert documents into a range of alternate media. You can use the self-service area or the integrated links in QMplus. 

Further guidance

The QM Disability and Dyslexia Services website has very helpful guidance on inclusive teaching and learning practices. 

Captioning

Digital Accessibility legislation of 2018 states that digital content (including live lectures and pre-recorded video content) must be fully accessible to students. However, these media provide several challenges, particularly for hearing-impaired students, such as:

  • the audio being too poor to hear clearly,
  • the quality of the video being insufficient for lip-reading,
  • staff delivering lectures may not always face / enable the camera whilst speaking. 

Hence, captions are required for pre-recorded videos, live lectures and recordings of events. 

QM supports several systems for online teaching and streaming of videos and most of these provide automatic options. However, reports have been made about poor accuracy levels within certain disciplines that include technical vocabulary. 

Existing services and options

QM supports MS Teams to deliver live online lectures. QMplus Media (Kaltura) and Q-Review (Echo360) are primarily used to store / stream pre-recorded videos and recordings of live lectures. These systems all have some level of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) captioning, and they work in most situations. 

Service ASR technology used
Q-Review (Echo360) SpeechMatics
QMplus Media (Kaltura) Verbit
MS Teams MS Speech Translation technology - powered by Azure Cognitive Services

QMplus Media (Kaltura) allows captions to be edited, but users will need to check and edit the captions manually in order to make them accurate. Although time consuming, this will make your videos fit for purpose and useful for all students, particularly those with disabilities. Find out how to edit your QMplus Media captions. 

Students can also use Google Chrome live captioning to help overcome the issues faced with inaccurate captions - this is free of charge. 

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