What is Assistive Technology (AT)?

Assistive Technology (AT) are solutions that help people perform tasks despite an accessibility barrier they face.  This could range from a software that reads your books out loud to you; to a setting your computer that makes text more visible. Some of these solutions take the form of software, other times it is hardware. Any AT we provide to a student must be approved as part of a student’s accommodations by their coordinator. 

Building a new course?

If you are starting your course from scratch, this is a great model to utilize in building your course. 

Research Phase

Do I have the right people on the bus, and in the right seats?

Developing a course takes many groups of people and skill sets. It is highly recommended that you set up a meeting to talk with at least the following people:

Desmos

One of the tools available to students, is a free online program called Desmos (Links to an external site.). It allows the user to create graphs, and then listen to them by either reading out the plots or interpreting changes in tone and pitch.

Creating accessible math is hard. As you heard in a previous video, depending on the type of browser, its version, the type of screen reader and its version, the same equation may be read in multiple ways to the student. 

Below is a video tutorial on how we would recommend you create your math, that would allow our office to provide the student with accessible math.

(P.S I intended on combining the two videos, but ran into issues doing so)

SensusAccess (Links to an external site.) is a free online software that allows you to convert files into a PDF format. Users upload files to the system and it is then converted by the software and emailed back to the user. 

SensusAccess works best to create accessible PDFs when:

Most often, we tend to create our own PDFs from Word or PowerPoint files. Below are a few things to consider regarding accessibility when creating your own PDF.

Make the source file accessible first

Whatever format you are starting with, you need to make that source file is accessible first. If you are starting with a Word or PowerPoint file, be sure you are using the accessibility checker to identify and correct any potential issues.

Preparing to teach a course is a lot of work, and sometimes you might have a book or article in your files that were scanned and saved as PDF's. Unfortunately, if not scanned properly, PDF's are very inaccessible, and create lots of challenges for all students to read and study effectively.

When you come across a scanned PDF, do your best to replace it with a proper accessible digital text document as described below. Scanned PDFs get a low accessibility score indicator in Canvas Ally.

Now that we've created a structure to our document, the next step is to make sure that students can access the content with in that structure.

Resources

Image Description Guidelines (Links to an external site.)

In our introduction to screen readers part 1, we looked at how  a student would navigate your course content. Below is a tutorial on how to set up structure with in your documents to allow a student to easily navigate through them.

To add a heading style

1. Select a text that you want to add a header to.

There are various forms of tactile graphics that our office has produced for students. Below are just a few examples: