Free Coursera MOOC - Learn the Basics of Developing an Inclusive & Accessible Course
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Are your course materials accessible? Where would you go to check? Could you easily remediate your files for your current or future students?
Meet Ally, an accessibility tool that automatically scans your Blackboard course content and performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Ally provides you with an overall accessibility report for your entire course as well as tagging individual content items. Use the overall report to quickly identify easy issues to fix or urgent content that needs to be fixed.
Ally automatically generates alternative formats of your course files and makes them available to you and your students. The alternative formats do not affect your original file, but they do allow students to access an HTML version for their phones, an ePub version for their tablets, an MP3 version for audio players, and electronic braille for braille readers.
Improving the accessibility of your course content will not only help ensure students with different abilities can access your materials, but it will also improve the learning experience for students who use mobile devices as well as those who want to engage with the material in a different way.
Learn more about Ally by attending an orientation webinar or reviewing the Ally FAQs.
As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:
The National Center on Accessible Education at CAST, Inc. is sponsoring a free webinar on accessibility.
Free Webinar: Accessibility of Course Materials & Your University
Thursday, May 9, 2019
3:00 - 4:00 pm ET (Find out when the webinar starts in your time zone)
Presenters: Cynthia Curry, AEM Center; Joanne Benica, Director of Disability Services, University of Southern Maine; Eric Moore, UDL and Accessibility Specialist, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Mark Nichols, Senior Director of Universal Design & Accessible Technologies, Virginia Tech
The Quality Indicators for the Provision of Accessible Educational Materials (AEM) can be used by faculty, IT, instructional designers, administrators, and others at higher ed institutions to self-assess and map improvements of course material accessibility. Join a discussion with a panel of higher ed professionals who have experience with many of the Critical Components of the Quality Indicators. To get the most out of the webinar, please review the Quality Indicators and the Higher Education Critical Components.
Unable to attend the webinar? No worries! A recording will be available on the webinar's Event Page approximately one week after the webinar. An announcement will be sent when the recording is available.
Click on this link to Register Now!
]]>With raised awareness and accessibility laws emerging around the world, understanding what inclusive access to the Web means is becoming necessary knowledge for anyone who produces digital content. Much of the current information on Web accessibility requires some technical understanding, and may be difficult to consume for the average person. This course will “interpret” the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), to make it easier to understand for a general audience. You will have an opportunity to experience barriers firsthand, then experience that content with the barriers removed, developing a practical understanding of web accessibility.
Key topics to be covered in this course include:
To support UMBC’s ongoing commitment to a more inclusive campus, DoIT is pleased to introduce a new tool called Ally into Ultra courses to help improve the accessibility of course content in Blackboard.
Ally automatically scans course content and performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Faculty who use Ultra courses will notice color gauges next to course files. Click on the Ally indicator to read detailed feedback about what the accessibility issues are with the file, why they matter, and how to fix them. Ally will not change how anything works in an existing course, and it won’t affect any course files. These Ally indicators are not visible to students.
Improving the accessibility of your course content will not only help ensure students with different abilities can access your materials, but it will also improve the learning experience for students who use mobile devices as well as those who want to engage with the material in a different way. Ally automatically generates alternative formats of your course files, and makes them available to you and your students. The alternative formats do not affect your original file, but they do allow students to access an HTML version for their phone, an ePub version for their tablet, an MP3 version for audio, and electronic braille for braille readers.
Both Instructional Technology staff and the Office of Accessibility & Disability Services (ADS) staff have been trained to support Ally questions. ADS is also available to assist in document remediation and other accessibility questions. Finally, the Ally FAQ collection is available for reference.
As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:
Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
Request a consult with instructional technology staff
Free Coursera MOOC - Learn the Basics of Developing an Inclusive & Accessible Course
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MathML is a markup language used to display equations and other mathematical expressions on the web and in other formats such as ePub and NIMAS. MathML is important for accessibility because it allows equations to be stored as structured text rather than images. Unlike images, structured text can be enlarged with good resolution for low-vision users who need magnification. Blind learners can use screen readers that support MathML to navigate and review the parts of mathematical expressions in the correct order, which is important for understanding complex mathematical expressions. However, writing MathML code is not for the faint of heart!
In this webinar, the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials will show you some ways you can write and use MathML code with little to no coding. They will also demonstrate a number of other math accessibility tools including Desmos, the DIAGRAM Center and more!
Tuesday, January 22, 2019 at 2:00 - 3:00 pm ET
A recording will be posted by the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials about one week after the webinar. An announcement will be sent to let registered participants know when the recording is available.
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