Case study: Accessible VLE sites in Ultra

Department of Environment and Geography
Laura Chapman

Laura Chapman provides an overview of approaches in the Department of Environment and Geography taken to maximise the accessibility of VLE sites for students.

She describes how the departmental template supports accessibility through consistent module structures, materials and layouts, and by presenting clear expectations on the nature and timings of activities.

She also describes how accessibility information is presented to support students, aiming to make sure that they are aware of the option to download materials in multiple formats using Ally.

Finally, she describes how Ally is used to identify and fix digital accessibility issues to ensure that materials are as accessible for students as possible.

Watch their presentation:

Accessible VLE sites in Ultra (Panopto viewer) (5 mins 21 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi everyone. I'm Laura, I'm from the Department of Environment and Geography, and I'm just gonna talk for a few minutes about how we use VLE Ultra to make sure our VLE sites are accessible to students.

So what we did with Ultra was we created a set template for all of our VLE pages, so they all look exactly the same. Which is obviously useful for the students because then they know what they're going to get. So each page looks like this. And I'll run through a few of these. There's the module information page. A block about assessments, the reading list, that links through the library services, and all of the lecture capture there. And the module material is at the bottom. So if we just start off with the module information, we drop that down we've got lots of information there about welcome to the module. Module staff information. Bit about accessibility, bit about the library and so on.

So if we look at 'welcome to ecological principles'. It starts off with key information about the module and learning outcomes and so on with useful links not just a hyperlink there - It actually tells you what the page is. And what we also have is a statement of teaching approaches so the students know what they're going to get. And a clear module structure as well, highlighting which weeks and actually what date that is. They see what they're going to do every week and how long these sessions are going to last. And that timing was actually noted by our student feedback. So we've added that in. So all of that detail is there so students, If they miss anything, they can just check which week it was, where and what they might have missed, or what's coming up. And then at the bottom, we have an expectation of how they should engage. So that's standard through all of our modules.

And then the accessibility information is really, really useful because again, it has information for the students on how they can use Ultra Ally. So it directs them to the Ally icon at the top of each page. So each page has this icon. And I'll show you how we use that practically in just a moment. I'll just close that section down and just pop to the actual module materials set up again every week. For each week we've got a folder that says what they're doing in that week. We'll ust have a look at week one. We'll just pop into lecture one then. This is actually visible to students even though the folder isn't. And then every week I'll just make the next week's folder visible to students. We go into the module introduction. Again we have a set way that we create these pages, where there's an overview at the top that says what they're going to do. And then there's the resources. So, it could just be slides. But it can also be additional activities for them to do. They go into this section. And then at the bottom we have our reading section. And what I've also got is a link to a library resource and a website that I think is useful for them as well. And then you've got the lecture material here, which if they click on the drop down box just shows up there and we can either read it there or they can click there and download the files. What's also really handy is that if they click on this, on the Ally button that I mentioned, they can download alternative formats. They can do this as a PDF, to read on an e-book, to read on their phones anything like that, and that also has an audio version that they can listen to. So all of those are there and I always make sure I highlight this to the students in the very first lecture.

The other thing that we've got that we've always had is, our little accessibility score icon, which I always call the Speedo because it looks like a speedometer. And that says in this case accessibility score is 99. But there is a bit that contains text within insufficient contrast which would improve it. And if you click on it, it's just taking a little bit to load up here, but it does actually show you which slide it is. There we go. Which slide it is and suggests that it would be better if that text was in a different colour.

So there's lots of things Ultra does that make it useful for us and that also make it more useful for other students as well.