Accessibility advice for educators

Materials hosted on Minerva and other virtual learning environments need to comply with web accessibility standards as far as possible, even if you don’t think you currently have any disabled students. You should aim to make improvements to your content over time. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Blackboard Ally is a tool that identifies and helps you fix accessibility issues in content in Minerva. Students can download accessible content in formats that suit their learning needs and preferences, creating an inclusive learning experience. For further information about how to make the most of this tool, read the guide to Blackboard Ally.

It’s not always possible to make all of the content within learning and teaching resources fully accessible for all users. Creating an accessibility statement will ensure transparency for students with accessibility requirements. This guide will help when creating your own accessibility statement.

Learning how to create materials which are accessible from the start will save time in the long run. It is also important to find out how to remediate any issues in materials you’ve already created.

This short video introduces some simple ways in which a PowerPoint presentation can be made accessible.

'How to make your teaching with PowerPoint more accessible' video transcript

(This video was produced by Dr Clare Dowzer, Senior Learning Technologist in the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences.)

For more advice, visit our checklists:

• Microsoft Word accessibility checklist
• Microsoft PowerPoint accessibility checklist
• PDF accessibility checklist

We also have the following PowerPoint templates:

• Accessible PowerPoint template - University of Leeds
• Accessible PowerPoint template - Student Education

For complex images used in learning and teaching materials, there may be pedagogical reasons why a full alt-text description cannot be provided. You therefore won’t always need to add a full description. However, it is still best practice not to leave the alt-text field blank.

See our advice on complex images for more information.

This decision tree for the use of alt-text is also very useful.

Where possible, handwritten notes should be converted into electronic text, not scanned as an image. This can be achieved in different ways, for example automatically using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, manually typed, or by audio-narrating the content and auto-captioning the resulting recording.

For more information visit the guidance on handwritten notes and how to obtain OCR software.

An auto-captioning facility is now provided via all teaching platforms we use at Leeds, but it is important to note that the functionality does not yet provide a fully accessible experience for disabled users. Specific advice for educators is provided to help you use the systems in the most manageable and effective way.

Teaching content including equations and maths notation is typically created in a PDF format which cannot be read by screen reading software. The School of Maths has, therefore, provided guidance on creating accessible maths content.