Digital Accessibility Interventions for STEM-specific Teaching and Learning

While digital representations and primarily visual learning materials can create barriers for screen readers and learners with other vision impairments, the ability to provide alt text for this type of dynamic learning material is often not feasible for many instructors due to time and capacity constraints. But there are a few additional practices you might consider that can help to improve accessibility for your learners.

We recommend using the university-supported tool Microsoft OneNote to capture handwritten materials. OneNote contains several accessibility features that can be used to make relatively immediate improvements.

• Narrate as you write to auto populate text transcripts for learners: To record your narration, there are a few tools within OneNote you can use: Dictate, Audio, or Transcribe (if working within the desktop app on a PC). Each of these tools allows you to record your lesson with your device’s microphone. The Dictate tool will auto populate text of your recordings directly on the page. The transcribe functionality allows you to record lengthier narration and generate a text transcript in a side panel. The Audio feature allows you to record lengthier sessions, but does require you to download and save the audio file to your device in order to generate a text transcript using an external tool, such as Microsoft Word’s web browser application or Mediasite (see the ASC ODE resource “How to Generate Text Transcripts for Existing Audio-Only Files).

• Use the Math Assistant to quickly convert handwritten equations to text: The web browser version of OneNote provides access to a tool called Math Assistant. You can use this tool to quickly convert handwritten equations to text.  

To do so:

1. Click Draw from the main toolbar.
2. Select the Lasso Select tool.
3. Click within the notebook page and highlight any handwritten formulas you would like to convert.
4. With the Draw menu still open, click the Math Assistant tool. A preview of how the application is interpreting the written text will appear in a preview frame to the right of your screen.
5. Use the Fix it option just below the preview frame to make any necessary corrections and then click the Ink to Math link to finalize and convert your handwriting to text. 

We want to note that while this process gives an opportunity for working with accessibility features that support the generation of accessible equations, this is likely not the most practical or expedient option. We appreciate that speech to text does not always work well in technical disciplines and the conversion tool for handwriting to typed math do not always reliably produce usable conversions. While this may mean that it is faster to type the equations manually, we are hopeful that tools like this and others will update to make these features more robust in the future to meet user expectations.  

As with any field of study, particularly in an online course, the inclusion of images and videos to present and support learning materials are necessary both for pedagogical and engagement purposes. Much like the practice of digital handwriting described above, however, these visual formats can create barriers for some learners in the absence of additional support mechanisms.

As you consider presenting images and video files within your courses, here are a few accessibility strategies and best practices you might consider to improve the overall learning experience.

• Use Desmos to present graphs and other visualizations. Desmos Studio is a Public Benefit Corporation that provides free and open access to various math tools, including a graphing calculator. The visualizations generated by Desmos are designed to be accessible for a variety of learners. See the ASC ODE resources Desmos: An Easy and Powerful Online Tool for Graphing and Visual Representations of Mathematics and Desmos Classroom: A Powerful Free Way to Build interactive and Social Graph-based Assignments.

• Provide alt text and captions for images. When incorporating images that are informative, instructional, or aesthetic, it is important to include alternative attributes that can help various devices identify these content elements. These might include providing alternative text, detailed image captions and/or descriptions that provide context for more complex visuals or marking the image as decorative for images that do not require further contextualization to provide a co-equal learning experience for all students. For more information and guidance, see the ASC ODE resource on Composing Accessible Alt Text.

• Include captions and transcripts for videos. As with images, providing additional attributes such as captions and text transcripts can greatly improve the learning experience and general access to these multimedia materials for a variety of learners. Captions and transcripts may be necessary for those who are deaf or hard of hearing but can also benefit learners who may be working in a noisy environment or ESL learners who may benefit from the support offered via written text. Both Mediasite and Microsoft Stream offer options for automatically generating and downloading both captions and transcripts.

• Turn images and videos into interactive media with text labels and description tags. For more complex graphs, charts, and other data visualizations that contain a variety of text or that depict a wealth of information, consider utilizing an ASC-supported tool like ThingLink. With ThingLink, you can upload an image of your visualization and add clickable, accessible tags that contain textual information (see example below). These text labels and descriptions can then be chunked into smaller segments and directly associated and linked to key points within the image, functioning as a sort of targeted image caption. Likewise, for videos that present similar types of visual depictions, these same types of clickable tags can be added atop the video and set to appear at specified moments within the timeline, serving as an additional support and supplementing the existing video captions that may not otherwise capture all the details of the visualizations presented. For more about ThingLink, see the ASC ODE web resource ThingLink: An Interactive Tool for Instructors and Students.