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Accessible VLE sites

Summary

It is a legal requirement that all our digital content is accessible, including your VLE site and any materials or files provided through it. Accessible sites and materials also improve the learning experience for all students and make sites easier to maintain.

Relevant VLE site design principles

  • 3.4 Essential: Site and materials content is accessible.
  • 3.5 Essential: Pre-recorded videos are hosted in a streaming service and captioned accurately.
  • 3.6 Essential: Links and materials titles describe the destination or content.
  • 3.7 Essential: Direct, descriptive links are given to open embedded content (eg. video or Xerte objects) in full screen.

This guide covers key practices to improve the accessibility of your Ultra sites and teaching materials. There are two key areas:

  • Tools & resources

    Appropriately using Ultra and aligned teaching tools to improve accessibility.

  • Content tips

    Good practice to improve accessibility of content within your Ultra site: text, images, links and files.

Tool: Departmental Ultra template

Departmental Ultra templates have been developed to apply the VLE site design principles. Templates contain the following pre-built sections:

  • Module information: key module and departmental information
  • Assessment: to contain all assessment information
  • Reading List: all module readings
  • Replay Lecture Capture (Panopto): the module's lecture capture recordings
  • Module materials sections: in most cases, weekly sections

Module information section, Assessment section, Reading List, Panopto folder, Weekly materials sections

Ultra template structure

Using your template to improve accessibility:

  • Use the pre-built template structure. This gives students a broadly consistent experience across all their module sites and helps them navigate the site and easily locate materials.
  • Update the pre-built Module Information and Assessment pages with your module-specific information. This will ensure your site contains the key details students need.
  • Make sure all departmental pre-built pages are visible to students, particularly the Accessibility Information page.

For more details on using the pre-built template structure and pages, see the Prepare your site for teaching guide.

If any sections or pages are missing from your site, contact us to restore them from your departmental template.

Tool: Reading List

From 2025/26, it is University policy that all module readings must be provided through the Leganto Reading List tool. This supports accessibility by collating all readings in one place and allowing direct access to digital items via the University single-sign-on.

Using your Reading List to improve accessibility:

  • Tag each item as Essential, Recommended or Background to help students prioritise and manage their workload.
  • Aid navigation by using the same structure as your VLE site. In most cases this should be weekly sections.
  • Use the Alternative Format Request (SSP) tag to identify items for the Library staff to convert to digital format for students who can't access printed text.

See the dedicated Reading List Accessibility guide for more detail.

Highlighted features as described in text

Accessible Reading List practice

Tool: Panopto for video content

Panopto is our video streaming tool, primarily to manage Lecture Capture (Replay) recordings.

Any pre-recorded 'at-desk' recordings should also be uploaded to Panopto (or YouTube); do not upload recordings to the VLE site or within slide decks.

Panopto Link item in the Course Content area

Replay Lecture Capture (Panopto) link item

Using Panopto to improve accessibility:

  • Do not hide or remove the Replay Lecture Capture (Panopto) link item in the Course Content area of your site.
  • Ensure pre-recorded videos are accurately captioned. It is not required to correct automatic captions for the current year's lecture captures, but students can request this.
  • If you need to use recordings for multiple cohorts, contact us to set up an Ongoing Panopto folder for your module.

Tool: Accessibility checkers

Using automated tools effectively

Automated checkers may not identify all issues within content, so treat results as a starting point for your accessibility considerations.

Accessibility checkers are available for various tools. These can automatically identify key issues (eg. missing alt text, incorrect heading structure) and guide you on how to fix them.

Showing overall score, content breakdown and quick start points to fix

Ultra Ally accessibility report

Use these checkers to improve accessibility:

Tips: text content

Tip

In the Ultra text editor, we recommend using the default font, text size and colour settings.

Use these tips to make your text-based content easier to navigate for assistive technology users, vision-impaired users and dyslexic and neurodiverse users:

  • Structure text and documents with Heading Styles.
  • Use left-aligned text.
  • Use a legible font and text size.
  • Make sure there is sufficient colour contrast between text and the background.
  • Consider bulleted lists to break up long chunks of text.
  • Use tables only to present data; don't use them for layout.
Heading styles: Title, Heading, sub heading, paragraph
Heading styles in the Ultra text editor

For more detail, see the Block: Content (text editor) section in our Documents guide.

Tips: images & figures

  • Add appropriate ALT text for meaningful images and figures have or other descriptions to allow screenreader users to access the information.
  • Mark any non-meaningful items as decorative.

For more detail, see the Block: Image section in our Documents guide.

  • Use meaningful link text that accurately describes the destination content, eg. how to write better link text.
  • Don’t use generic text like click here or find out more
  • In most cases, don't give just the raw URL (eg. www.link.com)

For more detail, see the Block: Content (text editor) section in our Documents guide.

Tips: uploaded files

  • Use file names that describe the file content without having to open it (eg. Week05_Slides_NavigationTechniques)
  • Make sure any PDF materials are good quality, tagged and have searchable/highlightable text (OCR). If scans of handwritten notes are uploaded, an alternative digital text-based version is also provided.
  • Do not scan and upload published materials. This is not accessible to screenreader or text-to-speech users, and also likely violates copyright.
  • Provide the native file format, for example, lecture slides as a PPT file, not a PDF. Students can use the Ally file converter tool to download the file in a different format if they wish.
  • Avoid presenting materials stored in Google Drive; this prevents the use of the Ally file converter tool and requires students to leave the site. Upload flies (appropriately!) instead.

For more detail, see the Block: File upload section in our Documents guide.