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Scope
This includes content in Moodle, other teaching and learning platforms, materials distributed digitally to students, and lecture recordings. This includes staff-generated content but does not apply to student-created materials. The good practice and policies outlined in the sections above should be the aim, but it is recognised that the quantities of digital content involved in teaching, the pace at which it is created, and the fact that it is generally restricted in audience mean that full compliance might present ‘disproportionate’ workloads to teaching staff.
Summary of Reasonable Adjustments (SORA)
Disabled students with a SORA may require individualised reasonable adjustments to enable their access to digital content that falls outside the scope of this document. Details of the individual adjustments will be outlined in the SORA.
Connected Learning Baseline
The UCL Connected Learning Baseline reflects accepted good practice for accessibility, and teaching staff are being asked to adhere to the baseline, to ensure that their materials are accessible. In particular, staff should provide a brief course-level accessibility statement containing any additional guidance that disabled students may need and indicating who to contact in case of difficulties.
Accessibility checking
Staff should use the Microsoft Office accessibility checker to check the accessibility of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and take action to address inaccessibility.
Accessibility of Moodle content
Each module on Moodle has an automatically generated ‘accessibility report’ that shows current information about which learning resources present accessibility problems. This is visible to module organisers, teachers, and administrators on the specific Moodle course, but not students.
Module organisers should use the Moodle accessibility report to check the accessibility of their Moodle content annually or whenever significant changes are made and take action to address inaccessibility, prioritising in order of severity, and seeking advice from the Digital Accessibility Team about how to correct any difficult resources.
Departments will be provided with annual Moodle accessibility reports for review by Departmental Teaching Committees. Modules of concern should be followed up on and a short report on actions taken provided to Faculty Teaching Committee.
UCL Education Committee will receive a report once a year that summarises the accessibility report information by Faculty and may follow up on any areas of concern.
Moodle Accessibility summary reports will also inform quality assurance processes such as Internal Quality Review (IQR).
Mathematics and programming
Mathematical and technical content can present significant challenges for students with visual impairments. Staff should refer to our guidance and should approach the Digital Accessibility team (digitalaccessibility@ucl.ac.uk) for assistance if required.
Graphics in teaching
Diagrams, photographs, charts, and other visual content are of great benefit to the majority of learners, and especially for those with dyslexia or for whom English is a second language; however, they present problems for those with visual impairments. Good practice is that images and graphics on websites and in online documents should be accompanied by alternative text descriptions explaining what the image/graphic is depicting, for use by visually impaired people who use screen-readers. These text descriptions are referred to as ‘alt-text’ and the creation of meaningful image descriptions for teaching purposes involves specialist subject knowledge in most cases and so cannot always be delegated.
It is recognised that a blanket requirement to produce image descriptions for all graphical content in teaching materials (slides, notes, handbooks, Moodle courses) would present an unreasonable workload burden for academic staff given the very small number of students who use screen readers. Therefore, UCL’s approach to supporting students with visual impairment is to focus ‘image description’ effort on modules where there are known to be screen-reader users, using Student Disability Services data on module selections, and to respond to SORA requirements.
For newly created content staff should ensure that it is ‘accessible first.’
In teaching materials, where there is heavy dependence on images, there should be a text description of the key learning points, for screen-reader users (e.g., alongside the image, as a caption, or as ‘alternative text’).
Images should be of good quality and able to be magnified without degradation - note that images with high resolutions retain image quality when enlarged.
Colour contrast is also important, it can be difficult for some people to see and read. Where possible select images with good colour contrast.
Captioning and transcription
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is available through Zoom and Teams for live online teaching, and for recordings stored in the Lecturecast service. Lecturecast now creates transcripts automatically for any recordings uploaded to the system and these will be available to viewers automatically once a recording’s audio file has been processed.
The accuracy of automated captions in Zoom, Teams and Lecturecast has improved significantly in the last few months. Lecturecast in particular now provides very good captioning and transcription accuracy. The most significant factors affecting ASR accuracy are the technical quality of recording (which is largely due to the quality of mic or headset), and the amount of subject-specific vocabulary used. Staff are under no obligation to correct transcripts. (This doesn't include situations where transcript provision has been agreed through SORAs – in this case accurate transcripts must be provided and the Digital Accessibility team can advise).
Colleagues are encouraged to report any problems with transcription accuracy to digitalaccessibility@ucl.ac.uk for investigation.
Third-party content
Some third-party content sourced externally from services such as YouTube, Vimeo etc. may not have closed captions. Staff are advised to seek out content which does have captions, and if this is not possible, a written summary of the content should be provided as a complement to the resource.
Audio recordings
Audio recordings and podcasts must be accompanied by a transcript for use by deaf/Deaf people, those with hearing loss and those who prefer to process information in written form.
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