Creating accessible teaching materials

All Schools at the University of St Andrews commit to making their modules accessible to all.

This page lists people, resources and training to help you with digital accessibility.

These should be referred to when designing new teaching material and when reviewing existing material.

People

Digital Accessibility Adviser: Ros Walker digital.access@st-andrews.ac.uk

When writing new material and reviewing existing components to courses be aware of these common issues:

Image captioning: All types of images either need to be flagged as 'decorative only’ or need to have a written caption that describes the content of the picture. This can be done in programs like PowerPoint before a PDF version is generated for upload into Moodle courses. Auto generators tend to work best on photos and poorly on data figures, but all captions need to be checked for accuracy.
Contrast: If using coloured text or backgrounds there may not be enough contrast for broad accessibility. When possible, reduce purely decorative use of coloured text in taught materials.
Photographed text: Any documents containing photographed or scanned text cannot be read by digital accessibility aids. Try to replace any documents like this with proper digital copies or links to where the digital copy can be found.
Missing headings: If only visual differences in text are used to denote headings in a document, these cannot be picked up by digital accessibility aids. When possible select a native heading style in the program you are using to make sure headings are properly flagged in your document.
Check your accessibility scores on Moodle: All documents on Moodle have a colour-coded scale to the right of their title rating their digital accessibility. If you click on the scale an accessibility helper will open highlighting problems and advising how to fix them.