Case study: Making course notes (with mathematical equations) more accessible

Department of Mathematics
Jess Hargreaves

Jess Hargreaves shares her experiences of making module notes with mathematical equations more accessible, with support from student intern Dhavina Thakrar. Jess had taken on leadership of a module and inherited a set of high quality module resources in LaTeX format. The aim was to further enhance the accessibility of these resources.

Dhavina began the process of converting the course notes using the accessible LaTeX template available on the University’s accessible Maths resources, and making additional improvements focusing on structure, formatting, descriptive hyperlinks, alternative text and captions, and appropriate uses of colour and contrast. Informed by resources created by Dhavina on completion of the first half of the materials including a video outlining the process of making lecture notes more accessible with Quarto, Jess continued this process for the remainder of the resources.

Jess provided a ‘before and after’ example of one of the resources, showing the improved structure and formatting with a hyperlinked contents page, improved spacing, and captions for figures, but she also noted that this resulted in much longer documents. To mitigate for any difficulties for students wishing to print the resources, she also made the original documents available for this purpose.

Summarising the process, Jess reported that she had found it relatively straightforward to implement the changes, and she recommended the process and resources to staff using LaTeX. While challenges remained, particularly in an ability to use the template for ALT-text for images, she highlighted that it had led to improved accessibility within the module site in an efficient manner suitable for teaching staff needing to address the challenges of making mathematical content accessible but without a great deal of specialised knowledge in this regard.

Watch their presentation:

Making course notes (with mathematical equations) more accessible (Panopto viewer) (8 mins 41 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Right. So today I'm going to talk to you about the process of trying to make some module notes. Um, I'm from the math department, as we said earlier. So these notes are going to have mathematical equations - how to make these things more accessible. Um, and I have to say, so I'm Jess Hargraves. I'm a lecturer in the maths department, but this absolutely, you'll see as we go through this story that it wouldn't have been possible without a student in the maths department. Uh, Dhavina. Who really, really put the foundation work into this. You'll see more on that later. So, um. So the sort of talk today - doesn't seem to be showing my nice images, but doesn't matter - Uh, we've got three parts, so I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the background and motivation for this work. Then I'll talk to you about the action plan that we came up with. But really, what I wanted to get across today was this idea that I'm just a lecturer in the maths departments. I'm absolutely not an expert on producing course notes or accessibility. So I really wanted an example of somebody doing this. How long did it take you? How easy was it? So that's the message today. It's something from the non-expert. How straightforward did I find it?

So the background and motivation, then, the context is - I'm sure this is quite common - you take over a module, there's some fantastic resources from the previous lecturer. So I really have to say, um, I inherited some brilliant resources that were all following standards for accessibility that we have in our department. So absolutely brilliant. But we wanted to go further than this. Be proactive. Um, like I was saying earlier, this, this idea that if you can be proactive with these things, then you're setting yourself up for the future. So that's the context. As I say, these existed. They were in a certain format. They were already doing what they needed to do, but we wanted to go even further. So as I said earlier, um, Dhavina, uh, a student intern, um, got in touch with the department and says, would anybody like any help with converting your material course materials, making them more accessible? So I absolutely jumped on that opportunity and told Davina a little bit about the module that we had. So actually, on this module, there's course notes, there's module notes and there's also things that go with computer practicals. And she looked at both of them. But today we're focusing on the course notes. So Dhavina knows more about accessibility than me. You'll see my journey a little bit later on.

So came up with a plan that was to take the notes that were already in something we call LaTeX. So it's like a word processor, but that's often used to type mathematics. So the notes were already in LaTeX, as I say, following a lot of the conventions that we need to follow. Um, but Davina's plan was to take that and put that into the LaTeX accessibility template. So something you can do to just make everything more accessible, plus some additional improvements that Dhavina identified with these particular module notes. So Davina, being an expert in accessibility, already knew that these sort of five principles for accessible documents. That is, it should have a structure that includes headings, and lists should be taken care of. The formatting of the document, descriptive hyperlinks, um, alternative text and captions for images and diagrams, and also colour and contrast used appropriately. So Dhavina knew these five things, had those in in the back of her mind, when she was looking through these notes, and came up with our action plan.

As we've already discussed, first thing, put these things into the accessibility template. That's job one. Then once they're in there, we actually want to go through the content that's already been written and try and hit these, uh, these five principles, which most were already being hit. But for this particular module and this particular sets of notes, the structure wasn't excellent. You'll see in a moment that though things had headings, they weren't inbuilt using the sort of subsections and things that you can use within LaTeX. So it was going to be a bit of fixing of that, just tweaking those things. There was a few examples of. Things that were sort of a bullet pointed list, but not as much as a bullet pointed list. So going through and doing that, adding a contents page, tagging the PDF, and then the hope was to add alt text or even captions on images, graphs, tables.

So, um. Yeah. How are we gonna. Where are we gonna find this, like, tech accessibility template? And how are we going to find out how to use it? Well, the accessible maths page, there's a link on the slides and I'll put it in the chat in a moment is very comprehensive. So when I came to do this myself, this is absolutely where I started. It's really useful. And you'll see - you can follow along this and tweak anything that you need to tweak. It's very, very clear. On that site you can find um, and this is this particular screenshot is from LaTeX accessible uh, formats page on that site. And here it is. And like site tells you all about and it's really clear on how to implement those things. Also on this - the accessible maths pages where you can find those five principles. So like I say, Dhavina knew them and could already look at the document and say if we were hitting them. And this is where I found them myself as well. So Dhavina went away, did this over the summer, and did - got through about half of the module notes and then handed it back to me and said, right, Jess, it's your job to do the rest of them. Um, so I had a short video that Dhavina had prepared for me. We had a quick meeting, I had this website, and then it was my job to try and try and do the rest.

So, uh, just to give you an idea of what we were doing. So this is the kind of thing that it looked like before, and I've actually hopefully shared my screen so that I can show you this is, uh, in the PDF and I'll say in those module notes. There you go. This is the first page. So you can see it has got headings. But as I say in the background, they're not actually done in the in the best way that you could. There's uh five pages here. There's some equations. Not loads actually for uh for a maths module and some images as well. So this is how it started off. And this is what it looks like once you've put it into the accessible format. There you go. We've gone up to 13 pages. Maybe we'll discuss this, um, a bit further. This is because we've introduced, um, a contents page with hyperlinks. You can also see the spacing is much greater. So there's no more content here. It's just spaced out more. Um, we can see we've got figures with captions at this point in time and hyperlinks. And there you go. So. Um. Yep. Going back to this then. So as I say, that one that I've just shown you is, uh, a section of the notes that I did myself. So I would say, how long did it take me then? How easy was it? Uh, it was really straightforward. So once you've already got it in LaTeX if you're sort of happy working in LaTeX, it really wasn't that difficult to just use this accessibility package and then start implementing those changes that Dhavina had identified and this is absolutely, totally honest, I timed myself, and the very first time I did this, so when I was also having to go through that website and teach myself this stuff, and it took me around 30 minutes to do that document that I've just shown you from original, to accessible. But the biggest challenge and it's still an ongoing challenge is the figures. Um, this is really difficult. You'll see if you go on that website, there's - you can't have both a caption and alt text. Um, so that's a question that I'm battling with at the moment, which is the best one to have. Um, and then again, if I'm starting to do alt text, as I've said to you already before, I'm no expert. So I feel a little bit like I would need some further instruction on what makes good alt text, but you can see so on the VLE, the original notes, we're getting this red warning for not being very accessibility. And then the version that I've just shown you, uh, is getting that green light, because we have now started to hit all the things we need to hit.